Here is one place where you may have to pay a bribe in order to be allowed to pay your tax. Nigeria is the haven of the absent executive. You are not unlikely to hear that so-and-so officer is “not on seat.” It is of course, often a code word, but it carries the weight of finality.

Once he is “not on seat” - a totally Nigerian gift to the English language - then all official matters come to a halt. Governance can wait. Sometimes the halt in the system might just be for the “officer in charge” to simply fan down post-coital sweat. “Not on seat”often expresses a queer combo of bureaucratic inertia and fatalism. Sometimes, in the primitive filing system of Nigeria’s bureaucratic tradition still in force from practices inherited from the colonial civil service, a file containing policy decision could either be “treated”or marked “Keep in View.”

This is one of the most interesting rhetorical flourishes Nigeria’s officials speak.It simply means, “forget it.” Such files are meant to gather dust and disappear into the slush pile. Such filing systems ensure that the Nigerian system has selective memory: amnesiac when it is necessary, and fully conscious when it wishes. It all has to do with how powerful, more or less, is the interest it serves.

Take for instance, this past Tuesday, apparently in response to the outcry in my column about the crumbling Niger Bridge last Sunday, the House committee on public works and transportation promptly invited the minister for works, Mrs. Diezeani Madueke to answer some questions.

In response to questions put to her by the honourable Chuma Nzeribe about the state of Nigerian roads, delays in effecting the required repairs of the old River Niger bridge and the construction of the second Niger Bridge, Mrs. Madueke uttered another classic Nigerian evasion, “my hands are tied.” The ministry cannot authorize repairs on the Niger Bridge because the minister’s hands are tied! Just imagine it: the hands of a Nigerian federal minister tied. She is a hostage to a fate beyond her.

It is the language of impossibility. It is also the language of diddling. Play with the mind of these simpletons called the “ordinary Nigerian.” Her hands are tied, minister Madueke says, because of some powerful concessionary logjam, and because of some budget snafu.

Well, somebody simply has to untie the hands of this minister. In any case, particularly on the contractual demands on concessionary agreements - a nice bread and butter word - entered on the Niger, what Mrs. Madueke evokes is the force of law: the fact that legality constrains further action and demands further negotiation, especially apparently, as Nigerian concession-makers cannot be seen to step back a bit and break an agreement in order even to avert disaster.

It is significant: when Nigeria wants to obey laws, and function within the bounds of legal morality, it does it effortlessly. It is this matter of the legality or non-legality of the procedure that is at the roots of another question that I propose to raise today. It is the question of the EFCC - the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission - and its chairman’s recent declaration that certain files necessary for the prosecution of certain key Nigerians for economic crimes have grown wings.

They are missing. Yeah, right, Ms Farida Waziri! But the EFCC is not being original.
Perhaps it should have found a simpler, less obvious story. I should of course say that what is often aimed at on such occasions when it is deployed by government is not always the fine truth of fiction, but its effect. Governments lie with a straight face.

That too is an art. This case of the missing files raised guffaws in many places in Nigeria. Perhaps mostly because disappearing acts belong to the realm of magic many people now think that there is a Houdini somewhere at the EFCC hoodwinking us all with some cockamamie. But two things are quite clear from this situation. One is that Farida Waziri, current chair of the EFCC is not in charge of the EFCC. Again, this is not surprising.

The EFCC chair is a most political position subject to the whims and interests of the president who appoints the chair of the EFCC in the first place. This lever placed in the hands of the president is one of the greatest flaws in that piece of legislation that established this body. It made it possible for the EFCC to become a tool in the hands of the president and his cronies.

As I said once, precisely in the days when the EFCC legislation was still in the drafting stage, the lack of more oversight over presidential privilege in this matter of the role and function of the chair of the EFCC and in the general function of the EFCC itself was literally like handing a hunting license to the lion to hunt in the forest. It became clear not long after, in the restricted zones subtly placed before the chairman of the EFCC. He could never move against the president’s friends or interests. He could never move against the president himself.

The EFCC was an impotent Alsatian as soon as the president picked the phone. Yet, there are no restraints on that office except those as may be implicated in the president’s power to appoint or sack whoever is the chair of the EFCC who himself has total executive authority over the EFCC.

Internal review and oversight systems within the EFCC is also fundamentally so weak, that nobody can challenge or question either the administration or the wisdom of any incumbent chair of the EFCC. So, the EFCC chair can play bully as much as he or she likes on the president’s enemies and political opponents, or some little fries who may run afoul of some obscure import law.

In other words, the chair of the EFCC can cause the files of investigations carried on against the president or his friends to disappear at will. That seems to be the situation today, fellow Nigerians, and it is damning.  Secondly, the case of the missing files at the EFCC suggests that the Yar Ardua doctrine is not even gradualist, as we’ve variously interpreted his snail-speed pace in handling issues which Nigerians thought he could have dealt with within the first six months of his administration.

The crimes tribunal seemed set to go. But it led to a firefight. In that battle of wills, the powerful interests gained ascendancy over the president, and Nuhu Ribadu lost out badly in the event.  He became a marked man. His stubbornness and his moves to press ahead with the Ibori case and with the other cases of Yar Ardua’s former gubernatorial colleagues has cost Nuhu Ribadu his job, his pips, and his sleep.

His humiliation was complete, because today, the case is currently stymied, and apparently may be among those whose files have gone missing. This muddling or attempts to muddle collected evidence was even given a hilarious edge recently when the chair of the other superfluous agency the ICPC asked people to provide the evidence that would enable them prosecute the former president.

Well, some groups already did, and perhaps the ICPC should begin from there. But the most important point to note here is that there are folks out there who think that Ms Farida Waziri is not her own agent.

She may be teleguided; a ventriloquist for the powerful interests who have basically captured the Yar Ardua presidency mostly because the president is far too weak to act, and too discombobulated by his personal situation to comprehend or even contain the intricate web of the powerful lobbies that have now, apparently, caused the files to take a long walk from the filling cabinets in the EFCC. But let us then make a point of this: should Farida Waziri then not take the responsibility of accounting for the loss of government files and documents placed in her care and authority?

Does it not say something about her competence or her inability to manage such a sensitive agency if she cannot as much as protect its files. How can government records simply disappear? Where are the back-up files, both paper trail and electronic?

These are questions we must ask Ms Waziri. We should not simply let her go to sleep on the statement that the EFCC cannot act because she has lost the files placed in her care. That would simply be condoning executive irresponsibility. Somebody ought to pay for this outrage. And the buck stops with her.

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