By Dele Sobowale
“When those in office regard the power vested in them as personal prerogatives, they inevitably enrich themselves , promote their families, favour their friends. The fundamental structures of the modern state are eroded Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s Prime Minister.
(VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS p 3).

“Calamity has come upon you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserve it”. Albert Camus, 1903-1960, in THE PLAGUE Tucked in the inner pages, page 55 precisely, of THE PUNCH on Thursday, January 5, 2012, was a story which has great relevance to our present circumstances in Nigeria and it demonstrates why a small, nation with population less than that of Ondo State, is ranked higher than Nigeria with nearly the same Gross Domestic Product, GDP.

Consequently, its par capita income is one of the highest in the world while Nigeria’s is one of the lowest. Please read on and weep for Nigeria and her leaders – including the President we all elected.
“SINGAPORE’S highly-paid Ministers face massive pay cuts, following a recommendation by a government appointed committee.

The Prime Ministers salary is to be slashed by 36 per cent and the president’s by 51percent, the British Broadcasting Corporation reports.

The salary committee was set up after the parliamentary elections last year that saw the ruling party secure its lowest overall vote since 1965.

Members of parliament and political appointees are also included in the cuts…
That committee, and its recommendations, resulted from surveys carried out to determine what the electorate expected from government and parliament in that country where officials were regarded as over-paid by the citizenry.

Nigeria’s President, National Assembly members, political appointees, especially Ministers, are also considered over-paid, and compared to Singapore, under-performing by any metric applied to assess parliamentarians worldwide.

So many surveys and publications stated this before and after the election. Yet, the President of Nigeria presented a budget which informs us that he and his Vice-President would spend more money on free food than would be required to provide full scholarship to over 1,000 university students.

The contracts for the supply of food stuffs, cooking utensils, cutlery etc, will naturally be awarded to friends or family members – one reason why Singapore rose from the third world to the first in one generation while Nigeria remains stuck firmly in the basement.

And we might not emerge from the bottom given the sort of mindless corruption and waste which the ruling party has condoned since 1999 and which remain unabated. Let me provide an example of what could not have happened in Singapore but which occurs in Nigeria routinely.

Long term readers of this page would recollect the controversy over the PIB. The Minister of Petroleum, Mrs Alison-Madueke, wanted a bill signed into law which was not in the national interest and some of us objected. I was one of them.

President Jonathan, was so persuaded to sign the bill once passed, with all its deliberately inequitable provisions, that on a state visit to Turkey last year, he announced that the bill would be passed by May 2011. He might be President of Nigeria but not God; and we told him and his Minister that the PIB would not be signed. And we beat them; the PIB has not been signed.

Mrs Alison-Madueke recently announced that the original bill had been amended to make it more equitable to Nigeria – without admitting that we were right all along. That constitutes intellectual dishonesty. But, she has done worse.

The Minister of Petroleum had done what no Minister in Singapore could never do and remain long in office. She had spent about N200 million of the funds set aside for the implementation of the PIB when signed into law. The bill has not been signed, and will not be signed until we agree to the new version. But, N200 million had vanished.

The questions are: why and for what? Yet she stood on stage and asked for our trust!!!
N.B. A day after this piece was written Jonathan announced cuts in top government official salaries. It is a ruse. RMAFC, not the President is charged with fixing salaries.

AUTHORITY LYING ON FUEL PRICES
“Nigeria’s fuel price is still one of the cheapest in the world”.
Dr Reuben Abati, Senior Special Adviser to President (Media) at Press Conference in Abuja after subsidy removal.

Most newspaper readers would recall one Dr Reuben Abati, Chairman Editorial Board of the GUARDIAN, a newspaper whose motto still remains: “conscience nurtured by truth”. He was a great columnist and we recollect some of his former writings on fuel subsidy.

In fact, if Abati had remained in the GUARDIAN, he would have written another great column denouncing subsidy removal. Instead a new Abati had shown up on the national scene who now supports subsidy removal. That is not strange.

At Unijankara we have known for a long time that: “Stewards are not hired for their creativity but for their reliability”. (VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS p 233). For that matter, neither are governments spokespersons hired for their intelligence but for their ability to deliver the government’s line of argument with a straight face — even if it is false.

One lie government had dispensed frequently is the one above. And to disprove it please take a look at the list below: PETROLEUM PRICES IN SELECTED COUNTRIES
COUNTRY                               US$     
Algeria                                     0.41
Bahrain                                   0.27                  Brunei                                       0.39
Egypt                                        0.31                   Iraq                                         0.38
Libya                                        0.17
Oman                                        0.31
Qatar                                        0.22
Saudi                                       0.16
UAE                                         0.49                   Venezuela    0.023   
NIGERIA    0.87
Sources: Compiled by German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and published by Wikipedia.
Certainly somebody’s conscience went to sleep when truth was also laid to rest. Interestingly, virtually all those countries are oil producing nations.