When Funding Security Is Subject to Debate

It is arguable – no amount is too much for security. But, accountability and value for money are equally as important. Olawale Olaleye writes

When the federal government, some days ago sought to withdraw from the Excess Crude Account, the sum of $1 billion from the $2.3bn currently in the account to fight terrorism in the North East part of the country, it was natural that the ensuing debate would assume its own life especially that the opposition was unlikely to buy into it lock, stock and barrel.

Although the National Economic Council at a meeting presided over by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, eventually gave the government the go-ahead to withdraw the money as requested to fight insurgency in the North East, the debate is yet to abate even as you read this.

It was the Edo State Governor, Godwin Obaseki, who disclosed the decision to State House correspondents at the end of the meeting, when he said council members expected that the money would be spent on the purchase of security equipment, procurement of intelligence and logistics, among others.

But the Ekiti State Governor, Mr. Ayodele Fayose, who was the first to fire back, differed vehemently. For him, the alleged request was surreptitious because the money was to be used to fund the election of President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019.

“For posterity sake, I wish to place it on record that I was not among the governors, who approved the withdrawal of almost half of our savings in the Excess Crude Account, which belongs to the three tiers of government to fight an already defeated insurgency.”

On its part, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) too alleged that the government was using the war against terror as a pretext to siphon funds. In a statement by the party’s National Publicity Secretary, Mr. Kola Ologbodiyan, the PDP said government’s criticism against the PDP was an attempt to divert attention from the sleaze going on under the present administration and its moves to use the fight against terrorism as a conduit to siphon public funds for partisan purposes.

The PDP, therefore, challenged the government to address the issues it had raised particularly the withdrawal from the ECA fund rather than making unsubstantiated allegations against the former ruling party.
Sharing their viewpoints, Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has urged President Buhari to “urgently explain to Nigerians why the government decided to withdraw the sum of $1 billion from the Excess Crude Account to fight Boko Haram insurgency in the North East, if his government was to avoid the intense secrecy and lack of accountability and oversight of the spending on Boko Haram that characterised the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan.”

But, in his take, leader of the House of Representatives, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, subtly mitigated the tone of the debate, when he said the excess crude account does not belong to the federal government but the three tiers of government. In a recent statement, he said the National Assembly had no legal authority to query state governments on how they chose to spend their money.

Yet, the context of the debate was better situated by the chairman of the Governors’ Forum and Governor of Zamfara State, AbdulAzeez Yari Abubakar, when he said “You can never spend too much on security, because the safety of lives and property are the most cardinal among all the principles of governance in any democracy.”

Instructively, the debate on the spending on security was itself brought to public space by the Buhari administration, when immediately it came to power, went after the administration before it over alleged misappropriation of funds meant to procure arms for the military in the fight against terrorism.

With the manner it went after the Goodluck Jonathan administration, the arrest and prosecution of certain actors from the opposition as well as the attendant public sentiment that followed, it was the government itself that inadvertently placed accountability in security funds in the public domain, which of course, is commendable.

The onus is therefore on the Buhari government to see this as a challenge in terms of accountability and value for money. It is bad enough that reports from the battlefront had revealed a lot of underhand and alleged corruption in the management of the funds and personnel, a situation that is always contrary to the official reports.

Only recently, some unknown soldier wrote to the president through a public platform, bringing to his knowledge the situation report on the battlefront and how soldiers were being ill-treated in the face of superior firepower. To therefore deploy some whopping $1billion dollars to such a “drain pipe” would be perpetrating the same crime the Buhari administration has been accusing the Jonathan administration of and the implication of that is, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Fayose and the opposition as a whole might have gone on overdrive in their criticism of the request, which ironically is understandable; the point is that whoever comes to equity is expected to do so with clean hands. Granted, no amount is too much on security, the people too must have value for money and that is where accountability becomes inevitable in this case.

The Buhari administration cannot claim to be combating corruption on the one hand and be seen to be encouraging acts of corruption on the other hand. While commending the governors, who speedily granted the request in nation’s interest, government too must act right by making sure every penny deployed to the fight against terrorism counts. It is then the sanctity of security can make clear sense to the average Nigerian on the street.