During the ministerial performance briefing, I expected exceptional sophistry (that is what most of the officials of this administration do best) from the Minister of Finance and I got more than I bargained for. She carried out her presentations with cakes. For those who do not know, the only way God can appear to a hungry man is in the form of bread. I bet you know a huge population of Nigeria is routinely hungry. She exceeded expectations as she came with a cake.
During the ministerial performance briefing, I expected exceptional sophistry (that is what most of the officials of this administration do best) from the Minister of Finance and I got more than I bargained for. She carried out her presentations with cakes. For those who do not know, the only way God can appear to a hungry man is in the form of bread. I bet you know a huge population of Nigeria is routinely hungry. She exceeded expectations as she came with a cake.
On sighting the cake, she sure caught my attention, only that all she was saying entered through one ear and went out through the other. I could not help but to keep salivating. Boy, I do love cakes! I do not know about you but I sure bet several other people love cakes too. What a way to catch our attention! You may wonder whatever happened to cardboard, marker, board or even a projector used in presentations. Maybe that is just evidence of how mediocre the Harvard, MIT educated and former World Bank vice president has become. A Yoruba adage says that ‘aguntan to ba ba aja rin, aaje igbe’. This translates to ‘a goat that flocks with dogs will feed on faeces’. I am impressed with her educational qualifications but it is very evident those did not automatically make her deft in her duties and politics.
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I am holding Madam significantly accountable as the coordinating minister of the economy. That position comes with a very huge clout to do whatever necessary to make the economy improve significantly. As I understand, a part of a country’s finance minister’s job includes financial planning, investing money and raising funds. It is both a science and an art. I think she has not mastered the art well enough. If she has, here are some questions for her:
Is all this profligacy in the GEJ administration good for the economy ?
If it is good, how come the prices of staple food items and unemployment are always rising?
If it is bad how come we still keep witnessing them prevalently even after you have been in office for some years now?
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It is her job to say ‘No, no, no!’ whenever any project doesn’t make financial sense and someway somehow put an end to such practices. We sure have a lot of such wasteful projects in this GEJ administration. She is part of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) that awards several outrageous contracts weekly e.g. the N2.2 billion naira banquet hall.
Importation of fuel, national assembly allowances, prevalent contract inflation etc, are other few examples through which public money is wasted. Ever since PDP came into power, the refineries have been in shambles. The abysmal state of our refineries require us to import refined fuel. This importation should never have happened in the first place. How we still keep importing fuel for several years now beggars belief. I am not sure if there is any oil producing country in the world that imports back its own refined petrol.
Madam spent over 3 years in her former stint and is now over another 2 years into her current stint. The PDP which she would boast is a party full of sincere leaders, has been in power for over 14 years at the federal level and in most States too. I believe Madam knows how decimating the importation of fuel is to the economy. How many more years do we need until we can refine enough oil for our own consumption? I understand new refineries can be built from the scratch in less than 2 years. I argue that as the finance minister, the onus is on her to make sure our finances in all ministries, departments and agencies are not wasted. I am not sure she is doing a very good job of that.
Some of madam’s apologists claim that her efforts are being ‘sabotaged’. The only ‘sabotage’ I see here is being perpetuated by her own team (FEC). Or what will one call all these ridiculous expenses and waste of public funds? One question I will like to pose to her is that: why do you keep supporting your saboteurs? At least her silence and inaction appear to endorse malfeasance.
There are also a lot of reasons to doubt her patriotism. Any wonder why she wanted to bail out from her ministerial to the World Bank presidential job? Does madam actually think she will serve Nigeria better as president of the world bank that oversees portfolios of over a hundred countries or as a finance minister with only one country’s portfolio?
She has not till date cleared the air on the allegations about the usage of funds in the excess crude account made by Oby Ezekwesili. A simple statement from her could have settled the noise. One may wonder why she chose to be quiet on that issue and watched only the slanderers (Maku, Okupe et al) respond. It gives a lot of credence to Oby’s allegations. I also understand that madam at least considered being paid in dollars during her first stint as a finance minister. So much for her patriotism! I thought the honour of having to serve your nation in such a high capacity is enough let alone talk of the perks attached to such an office. I wonder what police and military men who die in service to their motherland should demand then or do their wards not deserve to study in universities abroad too? I think they should be paid in gold then.
I bet madam knows that a good economy is made possible only with good institutions and infrastructure. Our institutions, including the law enforcement agents, are nothing to write home about. This does not help the ‘rule of law’ and of course the economy. The issue of corruption in Nigeria is political and can only be corrected from the topmost level of the hierarchy which incidentally is where madam sits. Is this administration demonstrating enough genuine political will to fight the grand scale corruption in the country? Your guess is as good as mine. Power and transportation infrastructure are very key to a good economy. The power sector was recently privatized. That is a good move but until the whole country starts experiencing constant power supply at reasonable rates, the privatization will be as good as useless.
The transportation sector of the country is still in an abysmal state. I want to believe madam knows this. One cannot even efficiently travel from the south of the country to the capital by road. The east-west and the ekiti-kabba-abaji roads are in such a poor state. Some portions of the ekiti-kabba-abaji road are thinner than some Lagos slum roads, yet these are federal roads that are used to convey people, goods and services nationwide. Is it too much to have a dual carriageway network around the whole country? Can madam please tell us when this would be achieved? As an engineer I know it does not take donkey’s years to build roads especially if a country is well endowed with resources.
I expected madam on her second coming as finance minister to have hit the ground rolling very fast considering she has the innermost knowledge of Government already. But to my disappointment, that has not happened. A lot of her apologists will be fast to point out that a lot of time is needed for transformation while leaving out the fact that a lot of these government officials and appointees turn multi-billionaires overnight.
So back to a more pressing matter, what type of cake is it? Is it butter, cheese, chocolate or sponge cake? Can I have a piece of it?
You can engage the writer on twitter via his handle @beeshaiban or email: [email protected]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of SaharaReporters
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