Nigerians have been called upon to ensure that the best of hands are ruling them, in order not to be destroyed by both political and economic corruption.
Making the appeal in Lagos yesterday was the former Federal Capital Territory, FCT, minister, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, while delivering a lecture on ‘Corruption and the Challenge of Good Governance’ at the national discourse, organised by The Companion.
According to him, the country is in great danger because corruption stifles good governance, as resources that should go towards improving public good end up in private pockets or are unaccounted for.
“Once government is seen as ‘corruptly’ managing public resources, the entire essence of good governance is lost and the society is in grave danger,” he said.
He urged all well-meaning Nigerians to fight corruption before it destroys the fundamental nature of our society and all that we stand for.
El-Rufai also enjoined those in authority to stop politicising and ethnicising everything as a convenient excuse for crass incompetence, unprecedented corruption and totally bad governance.
He said: “We live at a time of great distortions in our polity. Our natural resource lifeline, the crude oil, has been selling at over $100 a barrel since 2011, and we are producing at decent levels averaging two million barrels per day, yet our nation is broke.
“Our federal budgets for 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 all contain an average of 1.5 trillion naira deficit annually.
“Our capital budgets for investment in physical infrastructure, human capital and enabling environment for job creation in the last five years have averaged a mere 1.3 trillion naira, most of it borrowed by issuing bonds every single year,” el-Rufai revealed.
He said that one way of measuring the impact of corruption on national development and how it challenges good governance is by looking at the opportunity costs of stolen funds.
“President Jonathan says we only have mere stealing and not corruption in Nigeria: Assuming that it costs $1 billion to build a 1,000mw gas powered electricity plant, the $15 billion that varnished under the fraudulent fuel subsidy regime would have built about 15 different power generation plants capable of producing 15,000 megawatts of electricity.
“If you add the $20 billion that simply vanished into thin air from the NNPC’s accounts, you could increase the power generation of Nigeria by another 20,000mw.
“In other words, in the last four years alone, if we had committed some of the sums lost to ‘mere stealing’, Nigeria would actually generate nearly as much as South Africa’s forty thousand megawatts of electricity, not the miserable 3, 000 we currently generate.
“Then a globally-acclaimed Central Bank Governor was unlawfully removed from office because he dared to question the diversion of some $20 billion in federation revenues to accounts and purposes other than those allowed by the Constitution.
“A minister has spent billions on the charter of private jets and the president defends and justifies such waste on national television.
“President Goodluck Jonathan, who should be leading the fight against corruption, goes on air to pontificate that “what many call corruption in Nigeria is not corruption, but mere stealing,” he added.
El-Rufai described political corruption as a megamonster which can just be as deadly as economic corruption, if not more deadly to society.
He noted that the cumulative effect of political corruption is that incompetent, insidious and totally irresponsible people and parties get into sensitive public offices, and then end up perpetuating political and economic corruption in its various manifestations as corrupt people manipulate the political system to get into power only to further corrupt the political system and indeed, the entire society.
Stating that good people in politics provide the leadership, vision and effort needed to exploit a nation’s competitive advantages and create the inclusive institutions that would enable growth, development and prosperity. However, the reverse is the case in Nigeria as the worst among us are the ones ruling.
“Right now, the activities of the institutions that are supposed to fight corruption appear to be directed towards those who are not in the good books of the government. Unelected leaders in power rule, not govern, and do so with impunity.
“They know the citizenry neither elected nor supported them. They know they are in power only because they paid massive amounts of money to staff of INEC, the Police and the SSS in the first instance.
“They then spent further amounts to persuade the judges to uphold the fake election results written by the first set of electoral and security officials. Their single-minded focus in power is therefore to make as much money as possible to pay to write the results of the next election. “They do not care to fulfill any election promises, because they know that our votes have never counted.” El -Rufai said.
Source: National Mirror