How leaders misused oil earnings, by President's aide
From Lawrence Njoku,
Enugu
THE nation's economy would have been positively transformed with the over $280 billion oil proceeds generated in Nigeria in the last 30 years if the political and technocratic elite under successive administrations had not colluded with both foreign and local contractors to misuse the fund.
Senior Special Assistant to the President and Head of Budget Monitoring and Intelligence Unit (Due Process) at the Presidency, Mrs. Oby Ezekwesili, made the observation in a paper titled "Transparency and Due Process", which she presented at the Special Retreat/Training for members of the Cross River State House of Assembly in Enugu at the weekend.
She said any effort at rebuilding national integrity must directly attack previous arrangements that facilitated the abuse of the public treasury through discretionary and inflated contracts.
Her words: "The very obvious failure to effectively, efficiently and economically use the huge oil resources earned by the nation over the past three decades is a painful testimony to the failure of leadership
"Through a deliberate derogation of rules and procedures, enthronement of discretionary practices, aversion to openness and competition, abandonment of basic skills and competencies in determining cost of government contracts, the political and technocratic elite have over the years colluded with both foreign and local contractors to ruin the possibilities we had of using our estimated over $280 Billion of oil proceeds in all of 30 years to build our nation into a developed economy south of the Sahara.", she argued.
According to her, for Nigeria to effectively rebuild its integrity system, efforts must be made to bring back respect to the public treasury as the sacred vault of the nation, adding: "It must be an effort that insists on strict adherence to standards of fiscal transparency and accountability in the use of resources that are managed by those in government on behalf of the entire citizenry."
Ezekwesili pointed out that beyond the moral campaign against corruption, any nation that seeks the enthronement of transparency and accountability to replace a corrupt order must adopt institutional, structural and system-wide reforms that redefine the inefficient ways and manner in which government conducted its financial activities in the past.
She said: "An honest assessment of governance in the past decades of our independence will conclude that the ruling elite failed because they replaced vision, policy and strategy which should be the thrust of every leadership, with transactions, that is, contract award and other mundane money-related activities)."
She added that the control of public resources without critical functional oversight mechanisms to regulate and sanction improper conduct creates opportunity for corruption.
The Senior Special Assistant to the President explained that resource control and management provided the incentive for "state buccaneering by the leadership class at all levels", adding: "No class has been worse victims of the abuse of public power for private gain than the majority poor in the land".
She condemned in strong terms the death of public outrage against corruption, ethnic coloration and tolerance of corruption, which, according to her, had worsened the ills of the society.
