Here is a good piece by Prof Ayo Olukotun. It's an article that I feel you should read. It details series of wrong decisions and policies the present administration has made.
The decisions presidents make or fail to make promote or demote them and the nation they govern. As a matter of fact, history can be read as a chronicle of decisions, indecisions, and blunders by the leaders of nations, in the context of reactions, domestic and international to policy outputs.
For that reason, the nature of decision making under the Jonathan administration eliciting such questions as who makes what decisions; and what is the input of Jonathan into decision-making are endless fascinating. Of course, routine or low-key decisions can be made by just about anyone in the administration; what is usually more important are matters of high state policy such as the decision, two years ago to remove the so-called subsidy on petrol price.
The reason for considering Jonathan’s decision-making style is the repetitive nature of controversial decisions by the administration some of which have earned it criticism by civil society, the media and the international community. For example, the bloated size and maintenance cost of the presidential fleet which at 10 planes is one of the largest in the world have been a source of repeated rebuke. And rightly so, in a world in which the presidents and prime ministers of several industrialised countries travel by commercial planes.
In 2011, it cost the nation N18 billion naira to maintain the fleet, while in the 2014 budget against the tide of public opinion and the government’s self declared objective of pruning recurrent expenditure, a provision of N1.6 billion was made for an 11th plane to be added to the fleet. The question is: Who took the decision that this was just the right time to increase the size of the fleet? Was it the President or the Federal Executive Council which in our top-heavy political culture may be one and the same thing? Could Jonathan, given the hue and cry over such budgetary items last year as constructing a banqueting hall in Aso Rock for N2.2 billion, have vetoed the proposal?
Are we to believe, and with regard to the requirements of image management in an election season that Jonathan did not notice the item as well as the one proposing almost N35 million naira to feed and regale the lions in the zoo at the Aso Rock villa? In other words, who exactly authors these kinds of low quality decisions that continually expose the administration as profligate and insensitive to the plight of Nigerians and to its own construction of our economic health as frail, requiring sacrifice on the part of citizens?
To flash back to January 2012; in the immediate aftermath of the ill-advised fuel price hike of that year, a joke made the rounds in the social media that Boko Haram, the dreaded Islamic sect had claimed responsibility for the decision to increase the price of fuel. The joke proved to be a prophetic riddle for that singular policy blunder did far more harm to Jonathan than several epic insurgent outbursts.
It also brought to the front burner the ability of Jonathan and his advisers to correctly gauge the public mood, or factor issues of timing and consensus building as well as carry out remote sensing of conjunctures that can ignite seminal upheavals.
But let us get back to the 2014 budget. The footloose spending habits which it indulges is well captured by Muda Yusuf, Director-General of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce who argues that “The relativity of the recurrent to capital budget (72 per cent to 27 per cent )in the 2014 appropriation bill presented to the National Assembly is even worse than that of the 2013 budget. This is a negation of the earlier assurance of the finance minister that the ratio will be adjusted in favour of capital spending.”
Even if the National Assembly exercising its power of oversight revises the ratio of capital to recurrent expenditure, as it should, the bill has already called into question the judgment of Jonathan, the minister for finance and other advisers in seeking to reverse a healthy developmental trend to which the government publicly committed itself. In my opinion, the authors of the 2014 appropriation bill have needlessly exposed the administration to public scorn by seeking approval for items whose funding should have been diverted into improving basic services.
Equally, if not more controversial and blameworthy is Jonathan’s decision to keep mute about the results of the probe he set up on Oduahgate, that is the controversial purchase for the use of the aviation minister of two bulletproof limousines at the incredible cost of N250 million. As The Punch editorial (Sack Oduah now, Mr President, The Punch, January 6, 2014) pungently expressed it, “This is a tragic error of judgment and confirms to the whole world what many Nigerians already know: that Jonathan’s body language encourages corruption.”
It is bad enough that Jonathan who publicly committed himself to an anticorruption agenda at his swearing-in as President in May 2011 did not ask the minister to step aside while she was being investigated; it is even worse that nothing has been done so far about the publicised report of the House of Representatives which indicted her as well as the findings of the internal probe.
In the wake of the breaking out of Oduahgate, this columnist (The Punch 25th October 2013) had admonished Jonathan “to act with dispatch if only to limit the political damage to himself and to contradict the impression that the sort of impunity that Oduahgate represents is national policy.” The counsel to ask Oduah to step aside was ostentatiously ignored; on the pretext that it will be too hasty to do so since she was being investigated at the time.
What happened to political symbolism and the capacity of leaders to signal intentions, values and predispositions by decisive actions? Anyway, the probes have come and gone and we are still waiting for the faintest clue that action will follow the elaborate and possibly stage managed efforts to “get to the bottom of the matter.”
Even if the president sacked Oduah today, he has already lost the momentum and proactive timing which would have demonstrated that he is truly fighting corruption or means to take value setting decisions to reorder the entrenched political culture of graft and greed.
If, as seems probable, nothing happens after the probes, lessons will be drawn by Nigerians and foreigners alike as to the character of the anticorruption struggle that Jonathan claims to be prosecuting, and indeed about his capacity to renew governance through fresh supply of moral energy.
There are more examples of poor judgment and baffling decisions such as the outrageous threat to sack striking university lecturers during the recent ASUU strike which ended up escalating and prolonging an already extended strike.
The bottom line however is that the administration has suffered more from its own policy blunders and misjudgments than from the fire of its critics or opponents. It is time for it therefore to go back to the drawing board in order to improve vastly on the quality and character of its decision-making thereby cutting its political losses.
Copyright PUNCH.
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