By Rotimi Fasanmi

The last one week or thereabout has seen agents of the Federal Government of Nigeria committing what one might call unforced errors that bring to mind the confusion and lack of transparency that makes many Nigerians write off members of the present All Progressives Congress-led government as working at cross-purposes.

In addressing these errors, I wish to call attention to the important need of Nigerians to separate, in their criticisms, Nigeria from the individuals and groups in charge of governance at any point in time. Many times, when Nigerians speak of Nigeria in very uncomplimentary and apparently unpatriotic terms, their target are the leaders whom they somewhat confuse with the human and geographical entity called Nigeria.

The first of these errors came from the controversy-prone Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami. In the wake of the return of some £4.2 million taken from Delta State, Malami had told Nigerians that the repatriated funds would be used in funding certain capital projects rather than being returned to the Delta State government.

Among other Federal Government projects, the repatriated funds would be utilised for projects across the South West, South East, North Central and the North East. All but Delta State from where the money in question was taken from. In an interview with Channels Television’s, Seun Okinbaloye, Malami made clear that the returned money would be used following a previous template Abuja had employed in expending looted funds in the past.

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What Malami failed to say was that the loot is in material detail different from, say, the Sani Abacha loots (which he was apparently referring to) that are still being repatriated decades after his death. Malami was clearly setting out on a punitive mission when he, without blinking, compared the money in question to the Abacha looting spree. He obviously wanted to pay back the Delta State government in its own coin for their criminal negligence and acquiescence in the impoverishment of the state.

But governance should not operate on the basis of vendetta. I’ll return to this point soon. What I want to make clear at the moment is that whatever of the loot that Nigeria is able to return in this case should go straight to the people of Delta State to save the cost incurred by Abuja in processing the return of the funds.

The logic for this needs no elaborate explanation. The money was taken out of Delta State by a former governor of the state. He is not known to have served as a minister of the Nigerian State nor has he served in any other capacity that could have given him access to federal funds. Should Mr Malami choose to advance the position that the funds in question came from Federal allocation to the state, he would do well to remember that the funds Abuja sends back to the states in the form of monthly allocations come essentially from the states- Abuja has no independent source of revenue per se, at least not to the extent that would enable it to fund the states. It is a mark of Nigeria’s skewed federalism that it is the so-called federating states that sustain Abuja that still go cap in hand begging for the same revenue they originally generated.

Malami would be making a tenable claim if he insists, as some Western donor countries do to Nigeria, that the Federal Government would monitor not just the return of the funds to Delta State but also the particular use to which the funds would be put to ensure probity. In a sense, the Delta State government forfeited its claim over the funds when it refused to cooperate with Abuja in its prosecution of the offender or in the drive to return the looted funds to the state.

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Not only did the Delta State government at the time rejected any attempt to prosecute, but it was also vehement in saying no funds were stolen from its coffers. But the rulers of Delta State, the political elite that were in charge of the state, now or in the past, must be separated from the suffering people of the state who bear the brunt of the looting of the state’s wealth.

Moreover, if the present Muhammadu Buhari-led administration could take ownership of the repatriated Abacha loot, there is no reason why the people of Delta State should be denied access to funds looted from the state but now returned. President Buhari never accepted that Abacha siphoned any funds from Nigeria. He, like the late economist, an Abacha appointee, Prof. Sam Aluko, was perpetually in denial of Abacha’s criminal pilfering. He has not to my knowledge changed that position even though his administration has received multiple tranches of the Abacha loot that it has expended on funding capital and other projects in past appropriations. There is no reason why what was sauce for the goose then should not be sauce for the gander now. More importantly, Abacha was a former Head of State with access to the central treasury that a state governor did not have.

The other unforced error came from the Petroleum Pricing Regulatory Agency, PPRA, which published a template that indicated a marked increase in the price of fuel from N162 per litre to N212. No sooner was the template released than Abuja started a campaign of denial that it had authorised an increase in the ex-depot price of fuel. It is no secret that the present government nurses an agenda to increase the price of fuel.

It has been dancing forwards and backwards about what it has been expending on subsidising or not subsidising Nigerians’ consumption of fuel ever since it emerged in 2015. But speculations of the anticipated increment reached a crescendo in recent weeks following an increase in the price of crude in the international market and the restiveness of independent oil marketers who complain of running at a loss.

There was panicked buying of fuel at the premium rates of N170 or more in different parts of the country last week. This happened in anticipation of yet another increase in the price of petrol even after the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, the sole importer of oil in the country, has said, ad nauseam, that there would be no increase in the price of fuel in March. But since government and its spokespersons have made an art of speaking from both sides of the mouth, Nigerians, always wary of power, have become far more sceptical and unbelieving of official pronouncements as ever.

Continues next week

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