Vested Interests

“In 2009 this country paid $291 billion naira as subsidy for petroleum products. By 2011, this number had jumped to 2.7 trillion naira!!! Did we start consuming ten times as much petrol? Do we have 10 times as many cars? Did the population of Nigeria multiply 10 times?”

The above excerpt is from a speech delivered by the Central Bank of Nigeria governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, at a youth forum. Sanusi, in the fear of “vested interests” paper, reiterated the same sentiments some of us have been voicing for quite some time now. But there is a funny irony in how the speech has resurfaced. It was delivered in 2012, while its video was uploaded in August 2013. Curiously, it only went viral last week, obviously as a direct response to the letter written to the president and leaked to the public, regarding some billions of dollars unaccounted for by the Petroleum Ministry/NNPC.  There is no coincidence in the timing of the “release”, just as one wonders why such thought-provoking material did not make it to the public earlier. To cut a long story short, the paper itself was a victim of vested interests.

Naturally, the first casualty in a vested interest-infested society like ours is respect for the rule law. At the same time as we were asking questions of the management of NNPC, one bank MD took 200 billion naira from her bank. A few of her assets were seized and she spent 6 months in a hospital under the guise of being in prison. Another was saved by elders in his church and has never answered for his crimes. I can go on and on.

This is a recipe for anarchy. Yet, vested interests have plagued our country for too long. The situation has attained alarming proportions in Nigeria, where subordinates graciously and shamelessly deploy themselves as apparatchiks of vested interests. The latest example is the pathetic behavior of the police commissioner of River State, who has forgotten the oath that he swore to and has become a goon of the PDP. It is clear that there is nothing that he will not do for his oga. He has forgotten that his primary function is to uphold the law.

Sadly, the same crime that is being perpetuated by the Centre is being perpetuated at state level and that is why Amaechi or any of the other 5 governors are so powerful and are supported blindly by the legislators in their states. What we have is a double-edged sword. The Centre has been weakened by the quasi autonomy of the governors and that is why they are resorting to lawlessness. Some power has however been arrested from them, they recognize this and are trying to take that power back. This is why there is a tussle for the Governors’ Forum and this is why there is a massive crisis at the top of the PDP. We should all accept that this is the status quo in the Nigerian polity but it has to change.

It is the same reason that the Centre has refused to allow state control of the police and the governors have refused to allow the local government chairmen autonomy. They will lose too much power and will not be able to dictate and do as they please with impunity. Do you see the pattern? For us to be able to control these vested interests and secure our democracy, we must weaken this power and not allow emperors to remain in our polity. It will be impossible otherwise to curb the excesses of our leaders. We must strengthen our institutions. Dismantling vested interests is in effect a mirage without a system strong enough to destroy the machinery that creates them. This is the vested interest that Sanusi is talking about, which de facto is more important than the constitution of the country today. This is the style of leadership that our politicians practice daily. We must break it. It is the reason for state in which we find ourselves.

          

We must jointly take responsibility for strengthening our institutions by standing firm in unison when institutions set up to serve and protect those very rights infringe upon our rights.  If we fail to do so we will pay for the consequences of our inaction with our lives.  We should remember that our growth and development in other sectors depends largely on our making the right political choices. We now have a semblance of balance in the polity. It is progress but we should however not allow these politicians (their tactics are the same) to carry on business as usual and only at best exchange batons, which they will still use to batter us. We must protect our vested interest.