Off the mark - The Nation
Two former officials in the President Goodluck Jonathan administration, Dr Abubakar Olanrewaju Sulaiman, and Prof. Sylvester Monye, goofed in their reactions to the claim by President Muhammadu Buhari that he inherited 'virtually an empty treasury.' Sulaiman is former Deputy Chairman of the National Planning Commission (NPC) while Prof Monye was special adviser on monitoring and evaluation.
There is nothing wrong with people who should know putting the record straight, especially if they were active participants in the government or institution being wrongly criticised. But it is a different thing if those reacting to criticisms resort to mischief, which is what, to us, the two former aides to President Jonathan have done.
In the case of Dr Sulaiman, he said, contrary to President Buhari's claim of meeting an empty treasury, the Jonathan administration left behind $2bn in the Excess Crude Account (ECA) and another $28bn in the external reserves, making a total of $30bn.
He however began to go off the mark the moment he attempted to make the past administration look holier than it was. 'Are we saying the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and related agencies had not in the last one month been generating revenue? Until they are able to prove they had no receipts from these government agencies in the last one month before Nigerians can now buy into Mr. President's claims of an empty treasury' he said.
Now, who is fooling whom? Even if those agencies have been generating money in the last one month, how does that form part of what the Buhari administration inherited? Secondly, Did the inputs from the parastatals amount to much, given that they avoided lodging earnings in the federation account? Thirdly, even if all such monies were paid into the Federation Account, what is the percentage, given that crude oil is the country's economic mainstay?
Furthermore, going by Dr Sulaiman's logic, the new government could not have inherited an empty treasury with Nigeria's economy adjudged the largest in Africa and the 26th largest in the world in the Jonathan years. What is the correlation between this claim and the treasury? Again, his position that civil servants were not owed in the Jonathan years in spite of the drop in oil revenue is also false and misleading. Despite the robust income made by the Jonathan government, civil servants' salaries had started being in arrears before his government was sent packing on May 29. If Dr Sulaiman had forgotten, we would like to remind him that the Federal Government and commissioners for finance had been having issues with revenue sharing long before the government left the stage. We should not forget that former finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala confessed that the the Federal Government borrowed to run its business in the first quarter of this year.
Finally, like Prof Monye, Dr Sulaiman too believed that there should not be an issue with a government incurring an empty treasury because all monies made by government are supposed to be spent. Hear Monye, '… It is not the issue of meeting empty treasury. The fundamental issue is, was there supposed to be anything in the treasury? That is the fundamental thing', he added. He said the constitution stipulates that all monies made must go into the Federation Account and then shared among the tiers of government. True, but was this not obeyed more in the breach by that government?
If Dr Sulaiman and Prof Monye had nothing to say, they should have kept quiet instead of exhibiting ignorance or mischief in response to President Buhari's claim. The president was apparently referring to the reckless spending of the Jonathan government which made it impossible for it to leave something reasonable for its successor. Even if the Jonathan government ensured that all the monies due the government were brought into the Federation Account, what did the government do with the money? These are the issues. Unfortunately, neither Dr Sulaiman nor Prof Monye clinically addressed these. Rather, they merely launched into the realm of mischief or simply put facts on their head