abdulraheem
I have never met Alhaji Hamman Tukur, the Chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC); but someone who knows him very well told me a story which underlines the character of the man. Tukur had been involved in one of his many disagreements with President Obasanjo, so the story goes, and the President shouted at Tukur to resign his appointment (everybody knows that Obasanjo cannot stand whoever will look at him eyeball-to-eyeball without quaking in his feet). Tukur challenged him to sack him. Of course, the President could not do that, and there the matter rested, I guess until the next disagreement! I have recalled this story today, because Hamman Tukur has remained a constant thorn in the flesh of the despot at Aso Villa, Olusegun Obasanjo. I remember that in 2002-2003, the RMAFC alerted the nation that over N300 billion was not accounted for in the proceeds coming from the sales of crude oil, through the NNPC. We had kept that story on the front burner for weeks at Daily Trust because of its importance to our country. It disappeared from the headlines without anybody giving an adequate explanation of why such a huge sum of money could have simply vanished from the nation’s cash cow. The truth is that Obasanjo has presided over arguably, the most lawless regime in our nation’s democratic history, as we all now know. This man is a serial rapist of our constitutional order, in a manner of speaking; we have lived through seven years of spendings without lawful appropriations, he has habitually refused to implement budgetary provisions that he signed into law, therefore he suffers a serious credibility problem in his management of the revenue of our country. Last week Hamman Tukur was back in the news, and as usual, as the trumpet blower, alerting the nation to the illegalities being perpetuated by the Obasanjo regime. The Nigerian newspapers of Friday, June 16, 2006, were awash with the latest revelations made before the Joint Senate Committees on Finance, Appropriation and National Planning that was investigating illegal withdrawals from the Federation Account. According to Hamman Tukur, Obasanjo runs three illegal accounts and has, since 2003, been operating a revenue formula that is unknown to the constitution. The illegal Obasanjo accounts are excess crude oil, excess Petroleum Profit Tax (PTT) and excess royalty accounts, and according to the Revenue Mobilisation boss, the Presidency has so far withdrawn 13.2 billion dollars from these illegal accounts. These accounts are not only illegal, they have no status in law and they contravene Sections 162 (1) (2) (3) and (10) of the Constitution which provide that “the Federation shall maintain a special account to be called the Federation Account into which shall be paid all revenues collected by the Government of the Federation” and shared among the three tiers of government on a formula approved by the National Assembly. The problem, according to Hamman Tukur, is that the Presidency is in breach of the Constitution by withholding money from the Federation Account,which has a zero account status in law. Zero Account? Well, “for elucidation,” to quote Tukur, “we need to stress that the Federation Account is a zero account. This implies that all accruals to it must be shared in such a manner that no funds remain in the account after each month’s sharing.” However, the practice that is extant is contrary to the Constitution’s stipulations. “This should have been so but for the maintenance by the Federal Government of an account known as the Excess Revenue Account for revenue derived from crude oil sales. PPT and royalties over and above the budgeted benchmark for each year. These benchmarks are generally imposed on the other two tiers.” Tukur also pointed out that in disregard of Section 162 of the Constitution, Obasanjo adjusted the revenue formula vide letter No. AGF/TRY/796/Vol.IV/41 of January 15, 2004, addressed to the Commission by the minister of finance. “In that letter, the following is the current formula: One column shows the executive order while the second column shows the adjusted formula which has no basis in law since it has not come to the National Assembly as amendments to the Modification Order.” Tukur went on that “the Executive Modification Order, as presented by Tukur, gives the Federal Government (FG) 56 percent, broken down as: FG (48.50), Federal Capital Territory (FCT) (one percent); general ecological problems (two percent); stabilisation account (1.50 percent) and development of natural resources (three percent). States get 24.00 percent and local councils 20 percent. “But in the adjusted formula, the Federal Government has 52.68 percent…states get 26.72 percent, councils 20.60 percent.” It is also instructive that Hamman Tukur’s presentation to the Joint Committees also indicated that the foreign excess account, as at May 2006, had a balance of $12.5 billion. This came on the heels of the allegations by two members of the National Assembly, Senator Farouk Bello-Bunza and Honourable Usman Bugaje, that Nigeria does not have the vaunted $34 billion in its foreign account, but “barely $10 billion.” The Revenue Mobilisation Commission also pointed out that the Obasanjo administration paid a “so-called one percent commission amounting to N121,022,881.89 (or N16.8 billion) from the Excess Crude Account. The commission therefore wished “to know who is supposed to pay the one percent commission … who are the beneficiaries is it the consultants, negotiators or who?” Justt a few months ago, the Thisday newspaper columnist, Simeon Kolawole, had alerted Nigerians that so much money was being creamed off in the name of debt negotiations consultancy; the over-rated, arrogant and reactionary Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala had posted a sharp reposte to Simeon Kolawole. Later on, the Debt Management Office came out to say that Nigeria had paid its consultants a sum of $100,000 permonth, which was the accepted international practice or something to that effect. This week, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala came with an explanation that the one percent commission deducted from the excess crude oil account was actually paid to the Central Bank of Nigeria, as a “ transactioncharge.” According to her, “contrary to the assertions of the RMAFC, no phantom consultant was paid one percent, the Central Bank of Nigeria charged one percent transaction commission.” There was also the laughable effort to present Obasanjo insome positive light again, when the finance minister added that “since the repayment, the president had insisted that the fee the bank is legally allowed to charge be reduced in the future. This percentage was later reduced by the CBN to 0.25 percent on the instruction of the President.” We will come back to this later. Dr. Okonjo-Iweala went further to argue that the statement of excess crude presented at the Senate last week by Tukur was not correct, because no money was illegally paid out of the account. “Contrary to the insinuations made by the chairman of RMFAC … not one kobo of the nation’s resources was missing. All the monies in the statutory accounts (statutory accounts apart from the ONLY constitutionally recognised Federation Account?) are intact and no irregular or illegal deductions were made. The paper presented by Engineer Tukur has a table in it thatwe don’t recognise. It is not part of our documents at FAAC and is made up of figures that are not valid.” In respect of the commission paid to the so-called consultants, Okonjo[1]Iweala said “The $100,000 monthly fee paid Lazard Freres, the financial advisors on the debt deal was both concessionary and competitive. The industry standard is in the region of $250,000.” Apparently, the so-called advisors even did Nigeria a favour of climbing down from the“industry standard,” because “the finance minister (blow your trumpet!) and the DMO already had the necessary technical capacity (the capacity I believe to do the biddings of imperialism). What is playing out in the field of the nation’s political economy is a clear case of trust and credibility. Who should we trust? Who is credible? Hamman Tukur and RMAFC on the one hand and Obasanjo and his pro-imperialist economic experts on the other? I think the records of the past seven years have not spoken well for the Obasanjo administration. It has been very rich in platitudes about openness, transparency and fight against corruption. Maybe it even has good intentions, but we know that even the road to hell is often paved with very good intentions. The problem is that the practices of the Obasanjo administration have not matched its rhetorics over the past seven years. Obasanjo’s regime is one of broken promises, of budgets not implemented, of voodoo economics, of dubious privatisation processes, of spending without appropriations and of arrogant assumptions that it knows what is best for the country, whether we like it or not. Underlining these problems is the lack of legitimacy of the regime that seized power on the basis of a fraudulent, over-rigged elections in 2003. In real terms therefore, it does not feel obliged to the Nigerian people in the realm of genuine accountability. This is where a public officer of the calibre of Hamman Tukur has come into the frame. His courageous disposition and ability to stand up for the constitutionally sanctioned practices in the realm of the finances of the country sets him apart and naturally would bring him into conflict with an Obasanjo Presidency that has perfected the illegal route to its operations; especially in the field of finance. This is the reason that such a public officer cannot be popular with an Obasanjo Presidency that suffers the delusion that has afflicted it, and has made it lurch from one avoidable crisis to the other, in the past seven years. Of course it is very easy to cast a web of mystification upon the subject matters of national economic management and financial transactions, with the hope that the Nigerian people will become further confused in the process, and hopefully leave Obasanjo and his economic experts alone. If that is their hope, they are mistaken. We will continue to probe, ask questions and seek clarifications about the way they manage the resources of our country. The truth is that the regime suffers a tremendous lack of credibility and Nigerians just don’t believe whatever emanates from its operatives. We have the past seven years as a platform of experience that cannot be deconstructed by slick, Washington consensus, mystification that works for the imperialist countries and their institutions, but when taken together strip our country of the attributes of its national sovereignty, entrenches dependency, destroys the national productive base. I salute the courage of Hamman Tukur, because it helps to deepen the content of the nation’s democracy, by keeping the despot at Aso Villa on his toes. The forceful opening of the niche of transparent management of our nation’s revenues has come about not because Obasanjo loves it, but because there are courageous public officers like Hamman Tukur at the RMAFC. So if the choice is who to believe between a Hamman Tukur, who works for Nigeria’s people and Okonjo-Iweala, working for Obasanjo and who carries the albatross of imperialism’s financial agencies, I leave you to make your choice. I have made mine. The removal of Buhari Bello When Buhari Bello was appointed the Executive Secretary of the National Human Rights Commission a few years ago, he paid a visit to our office at Lusaka Street, in the Wuse area of Abuja. A very unassuming and decent human being, Buhari was very determined to make the commission work for the genuine human rights needs of the Nigerian people. In a few years, the commission became more visible and its affairs were conducted in a much more independent spirit as befitting a national body of that stature, at a time of increasing awareness about human rights issues. Buhari Bello has spoken very forcefully and eloquently for the protection of the human rights of the Nigerian people, and at the height of the desperate effort by President Obasanjo to subvert the nation’s constitutional processes to achieve a third term, Buhari was reported to have addressed the 39th ordinary session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights, and he urged members to help stop the bid. That act must have sealed Buhari’s fate as the Executive Secretary of the body. In the murky environment within which official activities are conducted today, the independent-minded public official has become endangered; Obasanjo brooks no independent mindedness. A public official is to kow-tow, or in every speech delivered must either praise the President directly or make some tangential reference to the “ingenuity” of the all-knowing, President. Those who have become specialists at massaging the ego of the despot at Aso Villa, last in positions for as long as possible. The independent minded, decent person with a genuine commitment to the nation’s good, don’t last. I am not surprised that Buhari Bello was removed and of course, I am not convinced when Bayo Ojo, the Minister of Justice, my old friend from Ilorin, attributed Buhari’s removal to a “routine exercise beinconducted in the ministry,” because “the ministry can decide to rotate its staff from one unit to another without jeopardising any of its functions.” Whatever might be responsible for his sudden “redeployment,” Buhari Bello would be remembered for the verve he brought to the work of the National Human Rights Commission, at a time when the body needed to speak up for the Nigerian people, in the context of the suffocating ambience of the despotic Obasanjo regime.
