In the last fortnight, President Muhammadu Buhari has embarked on a flurry of activities in an apparently determined bid to undercut criticisms of a slow track governance style. New service chiefs have been appointed, and announcement has been made that both the President and Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo will only receive 50 per cent of their stipulated annual salaries. There also was the rejection by the President of the purchase of new bulletproof cars estimated to cost N400m. All of these will be capped on July 20 by Buhari’s appearance on the world stage with a highly publicised visit to the White House to meet with the United States President, Barrack Obama.
All seems well therefore, until a few uncomfortable aspects of the reform drive are brought on the table, aspects which tend to create the impression of reforms without a clear reform agenda. This point is best introduced by a cartoon which appeared in The PUNCH edition of July 14. The pictorial, sardonic commentary had an illustration of Buhari enthusing thus: “Go and tell our people the good news. The Prof and I have cut our salaries by 50 per cent”. Conveying the impression that what was left unsaid is louder than what was announced, the cartoon depicted on another side of the table a humungous security vote and allowances. The message is clear: Buhari’s symbolic gesture while edifying and in tandem with the austere times does not tell the full story; as everybody knows that a salary of N14m for the President and N12m for the Vice-President barely scratches the surface of the structure of privilege of the Presidency.
The force, of example, in small things count for something, although even at that some lawyers have disputed the President’s “right” to slash his salary in the absence of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission, constitutionally empowered to fix the salaries of public officials. To develop the point, with respect to the legal dimension, it will be interesting to know on this and other decisions the input of Osinbajo, a reputed Professor of Law. More importantly, and to underline the principal thrust of this intervention is the issue of what happens to the other half of the salaries of the two top state officials which presumably would have been budgeted for. The point may seem trivial at first blush, until you factor that in the absence of a system overhaul, such gestures come to nought as what is forfeited to the state through the right hand may disappear to private pockets through the left.
Obviously therefore, there should be much more to a reform agenda if one indeed exists than symbolic gestures which attract public attention but do not get to grips with fundamental problems. The matter gets more untidy when you consider the clarification by the Presidency that Buhari will not compel his ministers to follow his example. This may soothe a liberal temperament but it says nothing about the need to institute radical departures if we must slay the hydra of the outrageous cost of governance. In the opinion of this columnist, a consensual approach runs through the legal system and binding on office holders may take a while but would have flashed a holistic approach to reform based on a reform project.
It goes without saying that such a perspective would have to be run through the legislators whose salaries and emoluments are believed to be one of the highest for any lawmaking body in the world. Furthermore, it will take on board such feeders to the high cost of governance as overlapping agencies lacking clearly defined boundaries and job descriptions, interminable official trips for which no clear policy impacts are evident, the inflation of contracts, the large entourage of state officials and of course the inevitable bottomless holes into which huge sums perennially disappear. To be sure, such a sweeping reform programme cannot be carried out in a hundred days of a new administration; it would have been consoling however if in the place of flashes-in-the-pan gestures, we articulate and begin to implement such thorough going reforms.
This is not the only aspect that one finds troubling. The imminent trip of Buhari to the US has elicited a conversation, rather shallow about who and who will make the President’s entourage. We have heard very little about the strategic objectives of the high profile visit. Such trips may end up as little more than buoying up good feelings or alternatively mollifying possible resentments about Nigeria not being listed on Obama’s Africa itinerary later this month. One scenario expressed by a diplomat projects that the trip may achieve little more than commitments from the US for training and intelligence in prosecuting the anti-insurgency war. Optimistically, Prof. Richard Joseph favours a prospectus that would “lay the framework for years of enhanced economic, strategic and political cooperation that Nigeria critically needs to overcome its institutional deficiencies.” If this latter agenda has been set, much less debated by the Nigerian government, there has been no word concerning any such policy engineering. The mood in so far as one can gauge it is to harvest public relations pay-offs without broaching more fundamental issues that connect with the government’s reform schema.
In the same vein, were a coherent reform plan in place and is being systematically pursued, the recent decision of government to approve a naira exchange rate of N160 to the dollar for Christian and Muslim pilgrims would have been thought through and in all likelihood jettisoned. Apart from its implications for important economic parameters such as inflation and the exchange rate, it clearly contradicts the government’s advertised syllabus of prudent, cost-effective governance devoid of special interest considerations. The heavens would not have fallen if that dubious subsidy was not granted; if anything, it would have further reinforced in the public imagination the policy direction of an administration struggling to define and occupy a reformist niche.
Regrettably, experts are already writing off this year and probably the first half of next year as lost in economic terms because of the tardiness in appointing key political functionaries. Such appointments, for example, of a Minister of Finance send signals to the investment and business communities regarding policy direction. There is no need to over-criticise the administration or subject it to trial by media for that may have a counterproductive effect of rattling it out of its depths. It is important however, to assess its progress thus far in order to hint at false starts and what seems to this columnist as an emerging trend of making policy on the hoof.
Conceivably, a policymaking approach driven by fidelity to a well-thought-out agenda and an inclusive style that runs decisions through a brain trust would have avoided some of the recent backslidings. We take into cognisance the assurances of the presidential spokespersons such as Femi Adesina, Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, that the administration should not be judged by its early interventions as it has a four-year term. It is pertinent nonetheless, to raise the question about how far down the road of reforms it can go at this rate.
Written by Ayo Olukotun
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