Oshiomhole Vs Okonjo-Iweala
Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, the diminutive governor of Edo state has paid his dues on the streets since the 1970’s when he emerged as the champion of Nigerian workers’ rights as a trade unionist in the textile industry – an industry once reputed to be the largest employer of labour in the northern part of the country.
He shot to national limelight as the President of the Nigerian Labour Congress in 1999 and gave former President Olusegun Obasanjo a hell of a time while the latter held sway in Aso Rock. His populist image upset the apple cart in Edo state in 2008 when against all odds he became the State’s Helmsman thereby dealing a mortal blow to the Tony Anenih myth that was elevated to the apogee of mysticism. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala plied her trade all her working life in the World Bank – an imperialist institution.
She made history by being the first female Vice-President and Corporate Secretary of the Bretton Woods Institution in Washington DC. History was also repeated when she became the nation’s first female finance minister under Obasanjo but her decision to be remunerated in American dollars drew the ire of Nigerians as being insensitive and a sabotage on the nation’s weak currency.
She drew further blood when she said she needed the money to fund her four children’s Harvard education at a time when the nation’s universities were comatose. This further depicted her as anti-people and affirmed the western conspiracy against Nigeria through the propping up of one of our own to carry out their ruinous agenda.
It is no surprise that the progressive and conservative have publicly clashed. Oshiomhole drew the first blood when he alleged in Benin at a public function for top civil servants there that the erstwhile Co-ordinating Minister of the Economy spent $2.1 billion from the Excess Crude Account without authorization. He also went ahead to opine that the fuel importers got $1 billion as subsidy payment debunking the assertion that they received $2.1 billion. He then accused her of using the remaining balance to prosecute the failed re-election bid of former President Goodluck Jonathan.
Paul Nwabuikwu, the media aide to the former minister came to her defence when he said that the decision on withdrawals from the Excess Crude Account was discussed at the monthly meetings of the Federal Accounts Allocation Committee attended by the Commissioners of Finance from the thirty-six states of the federation. The Minister of State for Finance informed them that the then President Jonathan approved the withdrawal to end the fuel queues.
The media aide then went further to dismiss Oshiomhole’s figures as numerical diahorrea and accused the Governor of the Heartbeat of the nation as attempting to tarnish the image of his boss and lampooned the governor by saying that his statements were stupid and unfounded. He said that the finance ministry regularly published details of revenue allocated from the Excess Crude Account in the national media and that Oshiomhole’s calculation was just a ploy to score cheap political points. The impression being created was that the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee which comprises the Federal Government and the 36 states was a private monopoly of Okonjo-Iweala.
In a strange twist, FAAC has denied the approval of the withdrawal and spending of the $2.1 billion from the ECA in December 2014 and described her claim as far from the truth. They weren’t informed when the ex-minister approved the release from the ECA and reminded the public of the law which precedes it which didn’t empower them to approve such withdrawals.
Oshiomhole also said that Edo state lost about $10 billion over a four year period from the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas remittance to the federation account and challenged her to publish the letter of authorization as to how $6 billion of Excess Crude taxes from NLNG and other funds to the consolidated federation account was spent.
There has been palpable silence from Okonjo-Iweala on FAAC’s denouncing of her claims and we are yet to see a publication of the NLNG remittance in response to Oshiomhole.
The mystique of Okonjo-Iweala was bolstered when Jonathan did the unthinkable by creating an unconstitutional office – Coordination Minister of the Economy which was a usurpation of the constitutional role of the Vice-President who is in charge of the economy. He openly told his ministers to agree with her policies without questioning or face the boot. What were really the achievements of the Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained Economist? Under her watch, monthly personnel costs ballooned from about 35 billion naira to 65 billion in the face of dwindling oil revenues. Another 50 billion went into monthly interest payments on capital market bonds.
Between April 2012 and 2014, 35 billion per month was sunk into the ill-fated SURE-P project with the funds obviously coming from the ECA. The program which was largely unsustainable from the onset stopped when the funds dried up leaving the hapless graduates who were receiving a monthly stipend of 18,000 naira a month – money that can’t buy lunch for any top ranking government official stranded and worse off than before. There were the Youwin, Project Nollywood, Safe School Initiative – needless expenditures at a time when financial prudence was badly needed.
It is in the nation’s best interest to have a collective agreement that should assume fierce national consciousness never to hire anyone from the IMF or World Bank to run our economy. The lessons of the Asian Tigers and China – self-propelled economies and the eating of the words of the IMF when the then Malaysian President, Mahathir Mohammed told them to go to hell at the height of the 1997 Asian financial crisis underscores the need for us to relegate them and their agents to the museum where they rightfully belong.