Loomnie

WHEN BABANGIDA SEIZED POWER ON AUGUST 27, 1985, the country owed $12 billion. The squandering regime raised the national debt to $33 billion in only about six years. When he hijacked power, only N11.8 billion naira was in circulation in Nigeria. At the termination of his misrule, General Babangida, Osoba argues, had injected ‘an intolerably high level of cumulative devaluation and inflation in the national currency and economy’ by increasing the money in circulation through the printing of currency to N100.5 billion.

Even if the answer to the economic crisis surpassed him, Babangida found an answer to the lack of sufficient naira to fund his self-perpetuating project. His regime resorted to what Dr. Osoba described as ‘the sheer orgy of printing of currency notes.’

In a cover story in April 1992, which provoked the Babangida regime to shut down all the media empire, the Concord Press, owned by his friend, Bashorun MKO Abiola, Dapo Olorunyomi, who later became the Chief of Staff to Nuhu Ribadu, noted that Hannibal, who Babangida described as one his two key heroes – the other being Chaka, the Zulu – was ‘brilliant, witty, multilingual and deeply resilient’. However, Olorunyomi added that, Hannibal ‘was capable of the most recondite passion of kindness, but could also show transcendental acts of cruelty, treachery, and avarice.’

However, corruption, and its accompanying vices, non-transparency and non- accountability, survived the Babangida regime.

Even though he instituted a War Against Indiscipline and Corruption (WAIC) in an attempt to reclaim the anti-graft stance of the Buhari-Idiagbon regime, Babangida’s successor, General Sani Abacha surpassed the former in graft.

In what would count as one of the many ironies in Nigeria’s history, Abacha set up the Pius Okigbo Panel of Inquiry into the operations of the Central Bank accounts under Babangida. The Okigbo Panel report reportedly implicated Babangida in the disappearance of the $12. 4 billion that accrued to Nigeria from the 1990 Gulf War oil windfall – the matter for which Keeling was deported. However, the report was never publicly released. Abacha must have held it as a weapon to hold his endlessly scheming and dangerously mischievous retired comrade-in-arms on leash.

The Abacha regime also instituted the Failed Banks Tribunal which tried bank executives who had taken liberty with depositors’ and shareholders’ monies. In spite of Abacha’s apparent ‘anti-graft’ measures, his regime was one which a news magazine described as ‘Plundering and Looting Unlimited’. The infantry general, his close officials, family members and cronies ‘turned state power into a weapon for stealing the nation blind’. By the time he gave up the ghost on the laps of Indian prostitutes – as the rumour mills have it – more than US$4.3 billion were traced to 130 banks around the world to Abacha and his family members. Ismaila Gwarzo, Abacha’s National Security Adviser, alone reportedly siphoned US$2.1 billion into coded accounts in foreign countries.

Apart from condemning and acting against corruption and deception under generals Babangida and Abacha, Obasanjo, as president, also pursued with messianic zeal the recovery of Abacha’s loot.

Perhaps it is a cruel irony. But when Chief Sunday Afolabi, President Obasanjo’ssenior in high school and later his minister of internal affairs, in a moment of indiscretion, said his colleague in the cabinet and political rival, Chief Bola Ige, had been called to ‘come and eat’ in the Obasanjo government, he was imposing an epithet on the Obasanjo administration that was similar in its devastating implications to what was imposed on the Babangida regime by Obasanjo – eight years earlier.

For the now late Afolabi, public office in Nigeria was an eatery to which a select people were invited to ‘come and eat’.

R. Wraith and E. Simpkins argue that this culture of ‘come and eat’ has existed in Nigeria – like in the rest of the West coast of Africa – since independence. They contended further that this culture ‘flourishes as luxuriantly as the bush and weeds which it so much resembles, taking the goodness from the soil and suffocating the growth of plants which have been carefully, and expensively bred and tended.’

Alhaji Bashir Tofa, the presidential candidate of the National Republican Convention (NRC), who was unofficially defeated by Bashorun Moshood Abiola, the candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the June 12, 1993 election – eventually annulled by Babangida – said in early 2009 that ‘no Nigerian can fight corruption.’ Tofa argues that corruption ‘will continue as long as the masses depend on corrupt officials to earn their livelihood’. Corruption in Nigeria, said the politician, has gone beyond the ‘issue of greed, it is now a disease. People who steal have no sense of proportion because there is corruption everywhere.’

The perceptive anti-graft musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, had used the metaphor of the intersection at Ojuelegba, on the Lagos Mainland, where there was neither traffic lights, nor a traffic warden, to illustrate the confusion that arises when there are neither rules nor rule-enforcers.

Sings Fela: ‘With this confusion wey e dey, police dey inside well, army dey inside well. Who go come solve dis confusion? …Confusion e breaki bone, nko?’ [‘In the present confusion, the police are implicated, the Army is implicated. Who will then solve the problem? ....Confusion breaks bones, doesn’t it?] In the song, ‘Confusion Break Bone’, Fela concludes with the parable of a corpse which is involved in an automobile accident. His musical verdict was that this translates to ‘double wahala for deadi bodi and the owner of deadi body.’ [‘double trouble for the dead and the relations of the dead.’]

It is a metaphor for his country.

From Wale Adebanwi’s A Paradise for Maggots. 2010. Pp 118 and 119.

1. Another one strikes black gold (trying desperately to resist using the line from Queen’s popular song)

2. Can stocks be safer than bonds (strange times, right?)

3. Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, formerly of World Bank, then of Nigeria’s finance ministry, then of World Bank, returns to take charge of Nigeria’s economy

4.  Commentary on Islamic finance in Nigeria

5. Robert Skidelsky’ – Life after Capitalism (Let me just quote Mark Twain: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated).

Here. The concluding paragraph:

At close quarters it is hard not to warm to the man. He has a winning sense of humour and unshakeable belief in self as well as country: “I love Nigeria,” he says over breakfast. “Some people see that as a weakness.” There is also a streak of ruthlessness and a Machiavellian ability to steer a political course between dark and light. It is a mix well-suited to the complex task of governing Africa’s most populous nation but perhaps less so to the role of former statesman. He is no saint, as his first wife makes plain in a searing account of their marriage published recently in Nigeria, but is he the scheming, vindictive and ultimately corrupting influence he is portrayed as now in much of the Nigerian press? Certainly, he will never admit as much. “Human beings are what they are: ungrateful souls,” he says of all the sniping. “That is why I am very happy with my animals and birds I rear on the farm,” he says, showing a hint of disingenuity and no sign of withdrawing from the fray.

BBC:

The chairman of Nigeria’s governing party, Vincent Ogbulafor, has been charged with fraud.

Mr Ogbulafor is accused of fraudulently awarding $1.5m (£1m) in federal funds when he was a government minister under President Olusegun Obasanjo.

He denies the charges but if convicted, Mr Ogbulafor would have to resign.

Correspondents say the case is being seen against the background of a struggle for control of the leadership of the People’s Democratic Party.

Let the game intensify!

No, it is not 419.

The BBC reports:

Charles Taylor ‘duped’ by Nigeria: Former Liberian President Charles Taylor has said he was duped by Nigeria into being arrested there in 2006.

Speaking at his war crimes trial in The Hague, he said Nigeria’s then-leader had reneged on a promise to let him leave the country freely.

He also claimed a plot involving the UK and the US led to his indictment.

Mr Taylor is accused of backing rebels, who committed widespread atrocities throughout the 1990s in Liberia’s neighbour Sierra Leone.

He was living in exile in Nigeria in 2006 when US pressure to put him on trial for alleged war crimes increased.

Mr Taylor now says the president of Nigeria at the time, Olusegun Obasanjo – who is currently a United Nations peace envoy – told him lies that caused him to be arrested.

The full story is here.

$140 per barrel is the appropriate price of crude oil - Rilwanu Lukman, Nigerian Petroleum Resources Minister. Hat-tip to Nigeria, What’s New?.

Mr Obasanjo on Hardtalk.

The disconnect of the Pope.

Are we really in the age of mass intelligence?

Individuals give NGOs more funds than donors.

The Berlin wall came down 20 years ago this year. A look at Berlin by The Economist’s More Intelligent Life.

The credit crunch is dragging down the global economy and raising political tensions.