Emefiele: Scapegoating A Buhari Proxy
DIALOGUE WITH NIGERIA By Akin Osuntokun
“The man is in the hands of the authorities. Something is being done about that. They will sort themselves out.The financial system was rotten. Few people were making away with our money…that is gone now; the man (Emefiele) is in the hands of the authorities,”-President Bola Ahmed Tinubu
The extant grooming of the Nigerian public to focus its angst on the former central bank, CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, serves the purpose of making the banker a scapegoat for the bigger culprit, former President Muhammadu Buhari, on whose desk, the buck stops. Moreso, in this specific instance, when the bank was effectively reduced to the status of an Aso rock villa annex. At the level of generalisation, this is a universal political phenomenon in which deniability is a strategic component of reducing the vulnerability of presidents to hostile inquiry in and out of office. Deniability is plausible and effective when it is minimally deployed, not when it becomes the raison d’etre of the totality of a benighted presidency.
In the instant, we are led to believe that Buhari is a daft empty minded sovereign who sees no evil, hears no evil and does no evil.That his minions and proxies, from top to bottom, are the ones exploiting the leadership vacuum, to wreak havoc on Nigeria. A misrepresentation is all but summed up in the frivolous exculpation that Buhari is not personally corrupt. What are the parameters for making the determination that a president is not personally corrupt? Would a president be deemed personally corrupt or not corrupt if he, by omission and commission, set up his family and friends to serve as fronts? What would be the implicit utility of the billions allegedly accumulated by the likes of Tunde Sabiu and the eighty two years old nephew of the president, Maman Daura?
If a president’s cronies took a cue from their principal’s body language to gorge themselves senseless with public resources, would this exculpate Buhari from being judged personally corrupt? How much was his security vote and how was it expended? For what reason would a president resolutely retain so called juicy appointments for ethno regional confederates, if not a dog whistle of a tacit acquiescence to plunder as they wish.
Hobbled by a number of circumstances, the regret is that his successor, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, cannot be realistically expected to avail the Nigerian public of the extent to which his predecessor is personally not corrupt. There is the constraining intervening variable of intra-party succession made worse by the fact that the party itself is corruption personified. It is the rule globally, much more so in Africa, that the inclination to probe a predecessor positively corresponds to the degree of the ‘hostile takeover’ by a successor. Were Jonathan to have been succeeded by a Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, president, it is improbable, his government would have been subjected to the public show trial conducted by his All Progressives Congress, APC, successor.
This partisan abetment is reinforced by the implication of Tinubu in the story of institutional corruption in Nigeria. As such he is not expected to readily don the toga of anti-corruption crusader, were he to be otherwise persuaded, in the first place. There is the additional hamstring of anticipatory or aspirational corruption in which a government turns a blind eye to prior acts of corruption and tamps down on anti-corruption rhetoric (in the interest of its own potential fignalling with the public till).
President Tinubu bore witness to this scenario when he publicly identified a personal opportunity for corrupt enrichment in the legacy of the hitherto two tier window of dealing in foreign currency. “I could afford to share the benefit by participating in the arbitrage, but God forbid! That’s not why you voted for me,” he said. There are, even now, reports of incoming public officials swearing to ownership of fictitious trillions in their declaration of assets as alibi for what they intend to steal from public coffers, going forward.
There is a morality tale for the president here. In the Nigerian corruption perception index at the inception of their presidency, Tinubu is the opposite of Buhari. At that stage, the latter enjoyed national and international acclaim as an anti-corruption crusader. At the time, this seemed a fair albeit generous assessment
Eight years of his presidency to the bargain, the man had launched a grenade to explode the myth of his abstemious integrity. Never call a man great until the end of his life, cautions the bard. To the contrary, Tinubu is coming to office with the baggage of a deserved reputation as ‘a corrupt political fixer’. Now, he has an opportunity to make amends and poked the middle fingers at the sceptics. Personally my prayer is that like Buhari, he would undo this earned reputation.
Beyond the unravelling of Buhari’s reputation as a man of integrity, the myth of his naive innocence is controverted by his freudian slip declaration of intent he let loose in faraway Washington at the early days of his presidency. He solemnly swore to adopt parochial discrimination in favour of those who gave him ninety-seven of their votes. He then proceeded to double down on this policy with his request from the World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim. “In my very first meeting with President Buhari the president specifically said that he would like us to shift our focus to the northern regions of Nigeria and we’ve done that,” said Mr. Kim.
On his penchant for literally zoning the office of the chief of army staff position to the pan Islamic North, this was his revealing rationalisation. “People who have been there for 18 years or even for 10 years, they trained in Zaria or in Abeokuta, they come through the ranks.“And because they served under all the circumstances, the crises and everything and they gradually rise to that status and you think you just pick somebody just to balance up? These positions have to be earned”.
So here was Nigeria’s commander in chief making the dubious claim that, of the lot of Nigerian army officers of Christian North and Southern Nigeria origins, none merits appointment as chief of army staff. It did not occur to him that were this truly the case, the Nigerian army will willy lilly stand accused of the practice of apartheid in the upward mobility of officers. This is not the language and logic of a man blissfully unaware of the world around him. It is the mindset of a cunning mischief maker set on an ulterior agenda. If this segment of the Nigerian army were so lacking in qualification, where, then, did his successor find the newly appointed chief of army staff.
To further prove the point of his malicious capacity for full engagement with selective policy issues was his ideological agitation over IPOB and Biafra. “IPOB (said the purportedly empty minded simpleton) is just like a dot in a circle. Even if they want to exit, they will have no access to anywhere. And the way they are spread all over the country, having businesses and properties, I don’t think IPOB knows what they are talking about. In any case, we say we’ll talk to them in the language that they understand. We’ll organise the police and the military to pursue them.”
From what we know of Nigeria’s power politics and how it impacts the tenure of appointees from outside the ranks of the exclusive favoured captive enclave, Emefiele should be reckoned to have compensated for his retention in office with a sworn oath of servitude to the Buhari writ large cabal. He remained in office at the sufferance of a president loath to tolerate any strategic office holder not bearing a pan arabic northern identity. Thus sworn to mindless sycophancy to the Buhari cabal, it was how high he would jump whenever self-enrichment requests to compromise his office were made from the Villa.
There is absolutely no reason to doubt that pervasive corruption was the order of the day during the pendency of Emefiele at the CBN but such comitance was coterminous and coextensive with the agenda of his principal. With specific regards to the monetary policy that got the goat of then candidate Tinubu, (the currency redesign policy), the vested interest fingerprints of Buhari are boldly implanted all over the policy instrument. Such indicators are ‘”President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the appointment of Ahmed Halilu as the Managing Director of Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Company, NSPMC Plc, DAILY NIGERIAN reports. Halilu, an elder brother of First Lady Aisha Buhari”. “I am aware that this new monetary policy has also contributed immensely to the minimization of the influence of money in politics,”
Former governor and former minister of aviation, Isa Yuguda, may not have had Buhari in mind when he went public with his committee report on the Nigerian national petroleum corporation, NNPC. Inter alia he said “I am sad to let Nigerians know what I saw; we came across situations where subsidy was claimed on pipelines that never existed. They (NNPC and Marketers) just claim that they have pumped X amount of either finished products or crude”
“Those that claimed to pump the products and those that are in the subsidy scam, they just fill papers, invoices and they claim subsidy on it” When asked again if it was indeed the NNPC that was making these claims, Yuguda replied in the affirmative. “Who else is doing it,”. Yet, Buhari was the minister of petroleum.
And in the spirit of the Bulkachuwa confession culture, the former president pointedly unveiled his culpability in the subsidy scam a week ago. Playing dubious politics with the lives of Nigeria, he confessed “Finally we must be politically honest with ourselves. My administration in its last days could not have gone the whole way in removing the subsidy because the APC had an election to win. And that would have been the case with any political party that was seeking election for another term with a new principal at its head. Poll after poll showed that the party would have been thrown out of office if the decision as envisaged by the new Petroleum Industry Act was made”.
From our standpoint, the sum of the Buhari personae is his mastery of the art of hypocrisy, convenient memory lapse and looking the other way pretending to be unaware of the Nigerian fire he relentlessly stoked. This, for me, is his primary DNA to which incompetence, incapacity and ignorance of arrogance are adjunct genetics.
