YAR'ADUA: A FICKLE MINDED PRESIDENT?

“Soludo should go screw his new naira policy"...

I didn't say that, but Yar'dua did by putting a "screech" on the new naira policy. Yardua has now become a fickle minded Go-Slow president. Yardua can't make up his mind on what direction Nigeria should be heading; he backed out of the proposal of having the AG exercise his oversight function over EFCC within 48hrs "Here"... and now he quickly retraced his footsteps on the new naira policy in less than 2 weeks. I am neither in favor nor against any of these policies, since I am not in support of an illegal Nigerian govt. However, I am positive that Yardua either lacks the vision to lead or he doesn't have the balls to make hard decisions to move Nigeria forward or at worst, he is being controlled by some unforseen political forces...who are doing a good job to undermine the interest of Nigerians.
Yar'dua lame ass excuses? First, he was misled by the attorney-general of the federation on the AG-EFCC fiasco. Now, the same Attorney-General just discovered that the CBN Act 2007 does not in fact grant Prof. Soludo the powers he claimed with respect to currency denomination. Ummmmh, is the whole Yardua's ruling cabinet so slow they can't get it the first time?....

Yar'dua, Sicko he is and so is the Nigerian government! Thinking about it, we should all ask ourselves...what do we expect from an illegitimate Yar'dua government?!

The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.

MADAM SPEAKER: BIRTHDAY BASH AND FRAUDULENT CONTRACTS

Madam Speaker's Birthday Bash at Bowie, Maryland!

Contrary to denials by her colleagues at the National Assembly in Nigeria, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mrs. Patricia Olubunmi Etteh celebrated her Birthday on Friday night at her Willes Vision Drive home in Bowie, MD (USA). There were lots of guests and many house of reps members who traveled from Nigeria for the purpose of celebrating her 54th birthday. Could this be the medical check up Mrs. Speaker came for? You judge!

“MORE PICS OF MADAM SPEAKER BIRTHDAY BASH HERE"...

Prior to this celebration where she led some members of the House to the United States for her birthday bash, Madam Speaker Etteh and her deputy illegally approved an unbudgeted N629m to renovate their official residences. Nigerians are miffed that the Speaker and her deputy could spend such a whopping sum on the renovation of their official residences and the purchase of 12 cars in a country where poverty and disease are endemic, where unemployment remains sky-high and where basic infrastructure have broken down, with more than half of the nation’s 140 million people living on less than a dollar a day.

The costs of the projects of renovating their official residences is mind boggling and unacceptably exorbitant and the award of the contracts was illegal as it was not provided for in the 2007 budget. The National Assembly must approve any extra-budgetry expenditure to be made by any public official. The award of the contracts also violated laid down procedure, as the jobs were not advertised in the Federal Tenders Journal or national newspapers to allow for competitive bidding. In conclusion, Etteh’s action is an economic crime for which the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission should bring her and her collaborators to book and she definitely needs to be impeached.

Etteh is believed to have reached out to her bigger powerful "pimps", former President Ole Baba Jaguda (OBJ), the leadership of the Peoples Democratic Party and the leadership of the Senate to save her from disgrace.

In contrast, here are hapless Nigerian women who were branded as prostitutes and whose less powerful "brothel" pimps couldn't do anything to save them from the hands of the over zealous Nigerian Police Force.

Now who deserve justice? The innocent hapless women or the fraudulent Madam Speaker? You be the judge!

Apparently, in an attempt to prove their mettle, the Lagos State Police is chasing after Nigerian females paraded in this photo, they, the police have ignored two categories of men who make Lagos ungovernable, immoral and unsafe. The armed robbers who the police claim hides out at the "Brothels" where these citizens were arrested and the men who prostitute them (especially the married men and corrupt politicians who engage in this acts at the expense of their wives), since it takes two opposite sex to tango in a prostitution business. This is chauvinism at its worst. Leave these women alone if you can't parade their patrons. Shame on Lagos Policemen!

NIGERIA: GOVERNANCE AND DECAYING INFRASTRUCTURE

A World Bank report: "Governance Matters, 2007: Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) 1996-2006" says that some African countries are making significant strides on the path to good governance and corruption control, a development that is encouraging, given their place in long-term growth and poverty reduction.

According to the report launched last month by the World Bank Institute and the Bank’s Development Economics Vice-presidency, Kenya, Niger, Sierra Leone have between 1998 and 2006 showed marked recent improvements in voice and accountability, while Algeria and Liberia have strengthened their rule of law.

In a press release, the bank said countries like Algeria, Angola, Libya, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, the report notes have made improvements in political stability while Tanzania has recorded gains on control of corruption. However, other African countries still face enormous governance and development challenges, the report says.

While emerging economies are matching rich countries on key dimensions of governance; with poorer African nations showing marked improvements on key benchmarks of governance, Nigeria did not show any improvement that was worth mentioning in this report.

Now, click on the color coded key Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) chart for Nigeria below.

You will see that Nigeria is ranked below the 50th percentile on Voice & Accountability (VA), below the 25th percentile on Government Effectiveness (GE) and Regulatory Quality (RQ) and below the 10th percentile on Political Stability (PS), Rule of Law (RL) and Control of Corruption (CC). This is a shameful statistics for a nation that prides itselfs as the "Giant of Africa"!

This research study was based on the premise that; in a country like Nigeria where there is no voice and accountability; no freedoms for the citizenry to participate in selecting their government, no Government effectiveness; as in lack of quality civil service and it’s independence from political pressure, the quality of policy formulation and implementation and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies, it may be hard to pressure public officials/administrators to be accountable to the public. As a result, it is hard to control corruption. Thereby giving rise to the perception of the likelihood that the government will be destabilized or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means including political violence or terrorism.

To say the least, this is an indictment on the last administration for the lack of governance in Nigeria for the last decade – the period in question in this report. And adding to this, the scathing statement made last week that “Revamping Nigerias Decaying Infrastructure is taking too long...
”by Kavalsky, a World Bank official, one is constrained to pass judgement that the Obasanjo vis-a-vis the Yar’Adua's administration would be the worst Government Nigerians will experience in recent memory.

The World Bank team from the Independent Evaluation Unit (IEU) who was in Nigeria to assess the impact of the bank’s projects in the last 10 years expressed shock that the country was still grappling with the problem of infrastructure, and indeed all the facilities that could have made life easier for Nigerians in spite of the huge funds injected into its provision during the tenure of Obasanjo.
"Infrastructure is a difficult problem. There should have been a breakthrough but it is taking a longer time. In my discussion with President Obasanjo, he said he thought they could fix the problem in six months but it was not possible." Kawalsky added.
Nobody knew what was Obasanjo's excuse for failing Nigerians on this most crucial duty as a president!

Here is an excerpt from the news article - “Both federal and state roads across the country have been the subject of much concern by business and the Nigerian public who use them. Over an eight-year period, the last government, under Olusegun Obasanjo, is believed to have spent well over N1-trillion for the rehabilitation of roads across the country for which nothing is on the ground to show for the huge expenditure.

The country also continues to suffer from poor state of electricity supply, with generation capacity falling to below 3,000 megawatts this year. The country actually requires an estimated 40,000 megawatts to be able to enjoy constant power. Poor state of refineries has also meant that the country is faced with constant disruption in fuel supply, with a litre of petrol selling for N150 in some far northern and eastern states.

Education remains in a shambolic state in a period of rising global oil prices for a country known for being the world’s eighth exporter of crude oil in the world. The five-man team from the World Bank appears to have been convinced to draw its conclusion from its observation of the current state of disrepair of the different infrastructural facilities that it examined. “
He, however, described the privatisation programme under the last administration as a difficult issue with the several policy somersaults experienced as he condemned the sale of refineries.

This brings to mind the fallacy of Obasanjo's questionable achievements, when mirrored against his administration many evident failures. One is forced to question - What was the sense in handing off billions of dollars to the Paris Club in settlement of questionable debts when your nation's roads are in deplorable condition? How do you justify keeping $40 billion in foreign bank vaults when Nigeria’s infrastructure remains inferior to Ghana’s, the Congo’s and Uganda’s, and closer to those of war-torn Liberia, Sierra Leone and Somalia? And why hasn’t the EFCC responded to the grave accusations, by his Vice President no less, to the effect that Obasanjo has engaged in corrupt self-enrichment? How committed is this anti-graft crusade anyways, when Yar’dua have now decided to cage these anti-corruption agencies and strip them of their independence?

Let's not even rehash the issue of insecurity of the nation; as the Nigerian Police have now stooped to the lowest of the lows; wantonly arresting defenseless women for dressing ‘inappropriately’ under the guise of imposing a veiled Sharia state; while leaving 419ners, rapist, street thugs, pedophiles, murderers and armed robbers to roam freely, unleashing terror and mayhem on the ordinary citizenry. And do we expect a President Yar’Adua’s govt to stop this ugly menace by the police? Not in Yar’Adua’s lifetime; this is the same staunch Shariarist zealot, whom, while he was the governor of Katsina State, allowed the conviction and death sentence of a hapless Muslim woman who was still nursing her child for allegedly committing adultery!

The sad news is that while a considerable number of countries, including poorer and smaller African nations are showing that it is possible to make significant governance progress in a relatively short period of time, Nigeria continues to experience deteriorations in a number of governance dimensions and decaying infrastructures. The reality is that the Nigerian government will never come to grips with the fact that improvements in governance are critical for government effectiveness and for the sustenance of long-term political stability and economic growth, if any.

Corrupt Government Shares Loot

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo and the Vice-President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, are to get a total of N19.5 million as severance pay as soon as the National Assembly ratifies the payment of severance allowance to former public office-holders.

Documents exclusively obtained from the Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Allocation Commission on Friday indicated that Obasanjo will get N10,544,115; while Abubakar will collect N9,094,717.
These figures represent 300 per cent of their annual basic salaries. The documents showed Obasanjo’s basic salary as N3, 514,705.00, while Abubakar’s was N3,031,572.50.

Already, all former members of the National Assembly and its leadership have been paid. The highest among them is the former Senate President, Chief Ken Nnamani, who got N7,452,727. He is followed by the erstwhile Speaker of the House of Representatives, Alhaji Aminu Masari, who was paid N7,431,330. While Nnamani earned N2, 484,242.50 annually, Masari got N2,309,166.75.

The documents also showed that each of the former governors is to collect N6, 671,115.00; while each their former deputies will receive N6, 336,645.00 each.
Of the 36 former governors, only nine returned. They are the governors of Borno, Ondo, Osun, Ogun, Anambra, Kano, Kogi, Kwara and Gombe. Apart from the Governor Adebayo Alao-Akala, who was the deputy governor of Oyo State, others who returned as deputy governors after the 2007 elections include those of Bayelsa, Borno, Ondo, Ogun, Osun, Anambra, Kano, Kogi, Kwara, Kaduna and Gombe. The former governors and deputy governors were on N2, 223,705.00 and N2, 112,215.00 respectively.

For the former Deputy Senate President, Ibrahim Mantu, his severance pay is put at N6, 927,566. This represents 300 per cent of his N2, 309,188.75 annual basic pay.
For former senators, whom it was gathered had been paid because they did not require legislative approval as stipulated in Section 70 of the 1999 Constitution, they each went home with N6,079,200.00. Ex-members of the House of Representatives got N5, 955,637.00. The former Deputy Speaker, House of Representatives, Chief Austin Opara, was also paid N4, 337,947.00.

At the state level, the commissioners and each of the former Secretary to the State Government is due for N4,011,675.00m; while the permanent secretaries and auditors-general will go home with N3,743,610.00 each. Each of the former special advisers to the governors are also to get N5, 000,440,00.
For the former local government chairmen, each of them will collect N3, 406, 170.00 while their deputies will pocket N3, 198,960 each. The councillors are not also left out as each of them is to smile home with N2,850,285,00.

Former ministers; the former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Obong Ufot Ekaette; the former Head of Service, Alhaji Yayale Ahmed; and chairmen of some public parastatals are to go home with N6, 079,200 each.
For this set of former public servants to be entitled to the severance pay, it was stated that they must have served for a period of two years in office.

While millions of Nigerians are struggling to survive with meagerly stipends, these bunch of political buffoons are cutting for themselves fat severance package from the national treasury. What did these politrickscians achieved in the past 8 years to justify this largesse? Beats me!!!