I read a very interesting story in the This Day of (November 3, 2004) about the encounter between the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Aminu Bello Masari and new country Director of the World Bank, Mr. Hafez Ghanem. From the news report, Mr. Ghanem was at the Speaker’s office on a courtesy call. And it is only natural and expedient for a principal officer of a national legislature, particularly where that branch of the legislature has been the most radical and sensitive to the aspirations of Nigerians of the two branches, to choose such an auspicious time to speak the minds of most Nigerians about the policy recommendations of the Breton Woods Institution.
Typical of his position the Speaker spoke what every right-thinking Nigerian would say about the policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) not only in Nigeria but also in other third world countries. He told the visiting country director to his face that the policies of the institution he came to represent in Nigeria have not worked the magic of alleviating the poverty of Nigerians. Rather, they have aggravated the poverty to intolerable level. This is a frank talk from a key officer of the national legislature.
But looking at the Speaker’s remark from another perspective, one may not resist the temptation to suggest that Hon. Masari was either speaking with his tongue in cheek or he was pointing accusing fingers at the wrong quarters. My reasons for saying this are three.
First, the policy recommendations of the World Bank or any other international organization are not directives that must be accepted and implemented hook line and thinker by a country. The federal government has the prerogative to accept or reject such recommendations and come up with alternative policies to address our economic problems. But as we have seen in the past five years, both President Obasanjo and his key economic advisers and policy makers have an abiding faith in World bank and IMF programmes, and could go any length to not only defend them but also impose them on the citizens, however stiff the resistance to such policies could be. President Obasanjo is not the first Nigerian president to insist on imposing these policies on Nigerians even as they seemed not to be producing desired results, as the Speaker rightly stated.
Military President Ibrahim Babangida and maximum ruler Sani Abacha have both insisted on doing same. They fought almost every opposition in the country, including the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), to push the policies through. In the end, the fight never paid off, as we never achieve the results. But the current craze to implement the policies is attracting more conde-mnation because there is a general feeling from Nigerians that a government supposedly elected should listen to the wishes and appeals of the electorate before taking such a deadly decision as the implementation of World Bank policies. It is on this particular case I consider Speaker Masari’s remark a cajolery. As a key player in the legislative branch, he has several options to make the executive reconsider its position on World Bank policies on poverty eradication.
The most effective of such options would have been for the Speaker and other principal officers of the legislature to use party machinery, since most of them are from the People’s Democratic Party, PDP to lobby the president to change his mind or at least moderate his liberal approach to considering the World Bank/IMF policies. This is the most auspicious because the President was elected on a party platform not as an independent candidate. If this failed, he could mobilize support from within both branches of the legislature to refuse passing bills on economic reforms that the executive presented to them until the President listen to their demand regarding the World Bank/IMF policies.
The third option, which should be the last resort, would have been for the legislature to consult with their constituents to mobilize support for a national protest against the obnoxious World Bank/IMF policy recommendations. One must ask: why did the Speaker and his colleagues not adopt any of these options and chose to make a press war over the World Bank policies that were adopted by the Executive at will? The second reason for making my suggestion is the fact that the Poverty Alleviation Programmes of the current administration are not recommended by World Bank as the Speaker imputed. They are homegrown programmes packaged by President Obasanjo’s economic think-tank. Secondly, the failure of the programmes has more to do with corruption in our public service and politicization of the programmes than with the World Bank. Take the Poverty Alleviation Programme (PAP) as an example. Right from its take off the PAP was mired in controversy over concept and strategy. For whilst the President chose to name it Poverty Eradication Programme (PEP) some critics observed that eradication of poverty is practically impossible, and advised accordingly. The President ignored the advice and criticism until a year or so after its take off. It was later changed to Poverty Alleviation Programme (PAP)
Besides the semantic or conceptual error party politics also crept into the programme to the effect that incompetent people were appointed to manage it at state levels. The incompetence was so glaring that some of them could not mobilize support for the programme even as they tried to sidetrack state chief executives that were supposed to be their chief hosts. In some states, the governors washed their hands off the programme.
The third reason, which is the strongest, is the fact that corruption more than anything else, is responsible for the failure of most programmes in Nigeria. Many of us are aware of the manner the beneficiaries of the PAP fund were recruited and the manner the fund was disbursed to them. We have observed how party chieftains and stalwarts hijacked the programme, submitted ghost names and recruited thugs as potential beneficiaries of the programme. The proofs of all these malpractices have been recorded in media reports and editorials.
I watched an NTA network programme last Sunday in which a host was making exactly the same claim I am making in this piece. From his statement I later realised he was an official of the PAP Directorate. He substantiated the claim that the bulk of the PAP fund never reached the intended beneficiaries because party chieftains used the PAP to keep the thugs they hired during elections silent and busy. The other aspect he did not mention was the fact that officials of the Agency fraudulently managed the chunk of the disbursement. The fact that party chieftains from above were abusing the programme gave some officials of the PAP agency the leverage to create their own directory of beneficiaries and siphoned off the fund.
I believe the National Assembly can play much role in ensuring that the PAP fund gets to the right people than just passing the bill that set it up or appropriate fund to it.
The remark of Hon. Masari, in this regard amounted to crying over spilt milk. He is taking the fight to the wrong quarters because Mr. Ghanem is in Nigeria to carry out a mandate given him by his employers. The acceptability of the bitter pill whose administration he was sent to inspect and enforce rests with Nigerians who can speak only through the National Assembly of which Hon. Masari is a principal officer. One would like a situation where the Hon. Speaker could face the President and tell him the bitter truth he told Mr. Ghanem. Then we the electorate will take him serious. But the practice of adopting a siddon look until the die is cast, as the Speaker seemed to have done in this instance, is unhealthy for the emergence of a strong and efficient legislative branch in our democratic experiment.
Ibrahim Dan-Halilu
10 Alkali Road Badarawa Kaduna
