bY Dele Sobowale
“0803-476-1981:Area Presido. One major thing I have observed about you is that you have always criticized every government and their policies without proferring alternative to such policies”. UZOMA OLOWU.

Among the things I have tried to avoid doing since this column started, was to make myself the subject of an article. But, the point this message has raised, which had been raised several times before by others, has now forced me to tackle the issue head on.

Contrary to what many people assume, I have offered advice through channels close to government in the past; often without even an acknowledgement of the contributions and when their policies fail they gather around them praise-singers who try to deceive the public. Then I go on the offensive.

Let me present just a few starting from 1976 before the Udoji awards were announced by the Gowon administration. The Udoji awards represented a combination of salary adjustment and revolutionary changes in the remuneration packages of public servants.

While it made Gowon extremely popular leading to people asking him to continue after nine years in office, a few of us in the Nigerian Economic Society were warning that the measure would sow the seeds of Nigeria’s economic destruction later. We were at first ignored; then abused as “prophets of doom”. When the repercussions came during the Shagari, Buhari and Babangida administrations nobody remembered that we had tried to avert the disaster which resulted in the Structural Adjustment

Programme, SAP. Even during the debate on SAP, alternative proposals were placed on the table and swept off by those in power.
Let us move fast forward and skip the Murtala/Obasanjo regimes which destroyed the ethos of the civil service forever; the Shagari government which first appointed over 50 ministers 27 years ago and the Buhari government. In the year 1987, after an exhaustive study, personally funded, I sent a detailed report to Babangida’s Minister of Transport (name withheld for personal reasons) pointing out that in a few years, motorcycles (okada or achaba) would become the major means of urban transport on account of SAP.

I then proposed two things. First, that the government should pro-actively pass all the legislation necessary to control this phenomenon before it got out of hand. Second, that the Federal government through a joint private-public initiative should establish two factories to mass produce motor cycles.

As usual, there was no official acknowledgement of receipt of the proposal. But, there was a private reply. The Honourable Minister through a mutual acquaintance told me to “drink less DOUBLE CROWN”, which was the beer produced and marketed by North Brewery where I worked. As far as he was concerned Nigerians would never embrace okadas as a major means of transport. Today, there are over 15 million okadas plying Nigerian roads virtually all of them imported.

Incidentally, the only government which ever took any suggestion serious was the Abacha regime which also sent me to detention four times. But, when I wrote an article in the VANGUARD titled  FUNNY MONEY, warning about how banks were deceiving the public with phony annual results and asking for strong action, I not only received a call for discussions from a top Adviser, but the FAILED BANKS DECREE followed.

Today, we not only have 45 Ministers and countless Advisers, our banks are mostly down on their knees. Yet, I warned Yar’Adua about proliferation of Ministers and Advisers and I admonished Soludo about the false impression banks were creating during his watch. The public sector wage bill and related expenditure can be halved by reducing number of Ministers and Cecilia Ibru, Akingbola etc would probably still be heading their banks if the series of articles I wrote about banks in 2007 had resulted in a call by those in charge.

As the sages have told us, “a stitch in time saves nine”. The 2010 budget is proposing huge deficits in order to pay ministers and advisers we don’t need; and banks are in disarray because I was wasting my time talking to deaf people in power.…..
TO MY BROTHER JEGA – 5

“Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result”.
Anonymous.

Professor Jega, with less than a month in office, has already started to fall into the trap of the PDP. When on Thursday July 22, 2010, the INEC Chairman was quoted to have said that INEC will use the 2007 voters register to conduct the 2011 elections, my first reaction was, the man was probably misquoted. But, when in the same newspapers, I read the Senator Adeleke, Chairman of the Senate Committee had pressed the position on INEC, then I knew that once again the Chairman of the Commission had got himself wrapped up in somebody’s under wear. Certainly, INEC will find itself in court if it dares to conduct the 2011 elections based on the defective and outdated voters’ registration list from 2007. Finding itself in court will exacerbate the problem the Commission already has with time. It will amount to self-inflicted injury.

It requires no doctorate in anything to know that with a constitution which entitles any one over 18 years to vote, all those who have, since 2007, attained the voting age would be denied their constitutional right to vote. We won’t allow INEC to get away with that travesty.

It requires even less intelligence to realize that several hundred thousands on the 2007 voters’ list have passed on. Leaving their names on the voters’ register creates the very first opportunity for vote manipulation. Again, we will not condone that.

More to the point, the election petitions in several states –especially Osun and Ekiti – have revealed how strange and unbelievable names like Mandela, Obama, Mike Tyson etc have found their way into the voters’ register. A hundred INEC Chairmen cannot expect us to go to the polls with those glaring anomalies.

Reportedly, INEC proposes to disenfranchise our youth on account of time. Last week on these pages, I was pointing out that danger to the INEC Chairman; namely, that the “Garrison Commanders” will lead him into a time trap as well as fund trap. Again predictably, two days after, it was announced that INEC needs N72 billion for voters’ list.

The money will not be forthcoming until it is too late because the ”do-or-die” politicians who have Nigeria in a vice grip don’t want a free and fair election. After battling for funds for voters’ list he will again have to slug it out for funds for ballot papers which will not arrive until a day before the election. And the crooked game goes on.

The fact is, Jega is an amateur political office administrator engaged in a war of wits by professionals like “Mr. Fix it”. He needs better advisers than the usual crowd which attends seminars at the Faculty of Social Sciences….
MINIMUM WAGE AND THE SILENT MAJORITY –1
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