2023: The Nigeria salvaging mission continues

WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER  

info@medaner.com, justme4justice@yahoo.com

This election campaign season would predominantly revolve around the Muhammadu Buhari/ APC-led federal government performance. For lack of capability to match up with the antecedents of the APC candidate, the opposition would go the whole length to design a discrediting point against the Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu candidacy; and unsurprisingly with carefully woven lies and propaganda of a purported non-performing APC Administration. It is not new; it is a game play we have lived with and are well prepared to debunk when it would matter most. 

The truth is that Nigeria deserves a serious and performing political party; forming the government at the center and that was what was missing all through till 2015 when the Buhari Administration began. We have had to deal with the prolonged era of incompetent regimes that have bastardised the national outlooks of the country and the wellbeing of the citizens, most especially the 16 years of PDP reign from 1999 to 2015 which would best be remembered as an aberration, a period that ought not to have happened to Nigeria. It is the right of Nigerians and the electorate to access firsthand information about the party and candidates they are about to vote for, but then, serving them with unjustifiable lies about performance of a leader and a political party is a greater disservice to the country and the people who deserve the right decision making information. The difficulties the country has had to go through since 2015 till now, if it had been PDP in power, would have served the country and the citizens with much greater suffering than we are currently witnessing. Why? Because we would have been dealing with a party and a people without regards and sympathy for the people when stealing and appropriating national wealth to themselves.

The PDP government came at a time when the country was hoping for healing – politically, economically and socially. There were so many expectations, for instance, that the newly elected civilian administration would restore economic prosperity to the people, bridge the daunting infrastructural gaps that had named the country among the list of the most underdeveloped nations in the globe, and end the perpetual growing disunity among the people on many fronts. Unfortunately, just as much as the military dictators before them, PDP would prefer to engage the machinery of the state and its resources to serve self-profiting ends. 

The non-performance of the 16 years of PDP government precipitated long lasting challenges for the country that has become not only endemic but very difficult to deal with. When PDP forays into the annals of Nigeria history in 1999, for sure, the central agenda was lopsided as it may be, to grow the economy without development. Instead of, as expected by Nigerians, to prioritise social integration of the citizenry to a common goal, and a gross commitment to industrialisation as the next most important thing and only direct approach to deregister the nation from committee of dependent states to a self-sufficient nation, PDP literally and deliberately ignored infrastructural development and industrialisation drive that any serious minded government should have made a national priority.

Instead, the country began witnessing the birth and rapid growth of corruption. Between 1999 and 2007, under Olusegun Obasanjo Presidency, political corruption and economic corruption became institutionalised and a way of existence of not only the men in the corridor of power but also the ordinary man on the street. The endemic corruption killing the country today was given birth to. It was then the National Assembly learnt under the Obasanjo and Atiku presidency that they can become illegitimately richer by giving assent to decisions and requests at the behest of interested individuals from the executive and since then the legislature has stop serving the country but interest of its members, by collecting bribes to pass bills, appropriating non-deserving contract to themselves and looking the other way when they are needed to savage national ailments. Gradually, the ailment is passed to all government agencies and ministries until corruption has become the order of the day in government offices and for government workers in all capacities.

It is under the same PDP government that the ailment in the Nigeria oil and Gas industry began. An oil producing nation that should have no business dealing in gross importation of refined products suddenly becomes a gross importer of PMS, DPK AND AGO, among others. Our refineries were intentionally made redundant, and out of operation; all for the sake of selfish desires to feed on subsidy back payments, and illegal cross dealings in importation and diversions of products. Sometime in 2013, the former Nigeria’s Central Bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi informed President Goodluck Jonathan that the state oil company, NNPC had continually defaulted in remitting US$20 billion in oil revenues owed to the state on a monthly basis. The then president unilaterally dismissed the claim and punished the CBN governor with an embarrassing removal using a trump up charge of mismanaging the Central Bank’s budget; however a PwC and Deloitte report later established that truly close to $20 billion was indeed missing or misappropriated or spent without appropriation from the NNPC account as stated by the sacked governor of Central Bank. The government took no step to recover the said fund.

The unchecked corruption in the nation’s oil and gas industry, which was  managed by NNPC, went overboard with an organised cabal that successfully created diversionary pipelines for the nation’s crude oil and without the nation’s security agencies saying anything tangible about it. The discovery of gross diversion in 2022 actually began then and has remained perpetual till now. The same elements that ensured the refineries went down so they could milk the country dry via continuous importation and subsidy regime, are the same ones responsible for crude diversion to the point that close to 20 percent of the nation’s daily crude lifting are being diverted to some private pockets.

The list of scandals that rocked the Jonathan administration does not end, in fact, it was a dark period in the annals of the history of Nigeria as Nigerians threw caution to the wind as they looted the country’s resources without fear. While the country experienced relative peace in the oil producing Niger Delta region, and a global stable high cost of crude per barrel, the PDP-led government accrued incomes that did not translate to development for the people. Between 2010 and 2014, a five year period under the Jonathan presidency, according to the foreign trade Statistics of the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the country had a receipt of $399.75 billion from the sales of crude oil. Between 2017 and 2021, a period of seven years, under the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, the country has so far earned a receipt of $399.75 billion from the sales of crude oil, yet the level of infrastructural, economic and social development under the seven years of the Muhammadu Buhari government literally swallows the entire era of PDP with respect to development. This is a fact, because sentiment aside it is very difficult to point at a tangible, physical infrastructure that is done by the PDP administration; they all ended on paper. 

The corruption perpetuated by the PDP government in the nation’s oil and gas industry still remains a major defining factor of our national economic woes till today; the more we struggle to wriggle out of it, the more it seems to engulf us. While they keep receiving oil and gas based incomes, and continuously denying us evidence of basic infrastructural development, they still have the audacity to continuously empty the nation’s excess crude oil account into non-existing projects and personal pockets. As at 2010, Nigeria had $107 billion in its excess crude account but by the middle of 2015, when PDP was handing over power, the account had been depleted to a meagre $2 billion. Yet, during this period, characterised by no-economic and infrastructural development, the government was still borrowing to cover a substantial percentage of civil servants’ salaries and left backlogs running into months for the Muhammadu Buhari government. Similarly backlogs of liabilities were also recorded for contractors handling sundry federal projects and which got stuck until the present APC government had to clear the liabilities. 

As the campaign progresses, it would be only appropriate to state the fact each and every time: PDP and the Labour party’s attempt to accuse the APC-led government of creating the many woes of the Nigeria nation; however, it was indeed the making of both the PDP and the Labour party candidate, who was until some months ago, a full fledge PDP stalwart. We would remind them that if they had sorted out the national power program and provided stable electricity for Nigerians, we would not be where we are now, and the Muhammadu Buhari government would not still be busy engaging Siemen to fix the problem they claim they had fixed with a whopping $16 billion. We won’t be grasping with fixing our roads if the enormous incomes of the country has been expended judiciously over the PDP 16 years, and also PDP would not have made a caricature of the nation with a meagre 88 km of constructed roads in 16 years, as compared to the Muhammadu Buhari government 8000 km in less than 8 years.

The national currency is in total mess because we created the grounds for it to perpetually be at a disadvantage; PDP over 16 years permitted a consuming economy. Nigeria imports virtually everything from groceries to equipment. Leaders of PDP, who should be in the forefront of the drive for local production, lead the pack of gross importers of finished products into the country, thereby killing the naira all the way by their non-patriotic actions. When PDP and Peter Obi make an attempt to use the present weakness of Naira to campaign against the APC candidate, we will literally point them at the NEXT supermarket, and ask simple questions.

The 2023 election would be about the antecedent of the parties, and the proven and recorded capacities of the candidates to continue the process of salvaging the country that began in 2015. There wouldn’t be space for deceitful lies and propaganda of the manner the PDP and Peter Obi are framing up as weapons to lure the electorate.

GOD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!