Getting everyone to account

Several newspapers and numerous online sites quoted Vice President Yemi Osinbajo as having said on Friday that present and former public officers in this country would be made to account for their wealth. My first question to the Vice President is, how about current and former public servants who are living in penury? Will he […]

Several newspapers and numerous online sites quoted Vice President Yemi Osinbajo as having said on Friday that present and former public officers in this country would be made to account for their wealth. My first question to the Vice President is, how about current and former public servants who are living in penury? Will he ask those ones to account for their poverty as well?
There are many other questions I will like to ask regarding this major anti-corruption pronouncement and I hope that the big lawyer, academic, pastor and politician Osinbajo has got answers for them. First of all, has he defined what current and former ‘public servants’ he is talking about? There are millions of public servants in this country, including public school headmasters and chief prison warders. The Federal public service alone must have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of such officers today. I got this idea from the statement made in Jos last week by Secretary to the Government of the Federation David Babachir Lawal, who said the Federal Government borrows N600 billion annually to augment its funds in order to pay its workers’ salaries. Since the national minimum wage is only N18,000 a month, how many workers are required to gobble up these hundreds of billions?
Let us concentrate for a minute on serving public servants. If all of them turn up at Osinbajo’s office tomorrow and submit a list of all their assets, can he process it? Which agency does the government have that can sort out this paper work? Even if all public servants submit their asset declaration forms online, which software does the government have that will identify ill-gotten from properly-gotten wealth? Then we come to former public servants. People have been retiring from the Nigerian public service since colonial times. Many have since died but hundreds of thousands of them are still around, judging from the length of queues anytime government does one of its endless pensioners’ verification exercises. If all these people turn up at Osinbajo’s office to declare their assets, will he even get a chair to sit on?
Maybe Oga Vice President was not referring to all current and former public servants but probably only the top ones such as ministers, perm secs, directors and heads of agencies. Even these could number in the tens of thousands, given the frequency of cabinet reshuffles in Nigeria and the revolving-door character of agency headship appointments. In his first cabinet reshuffle in 2008, President Umaru Yar’adua sacked 20 ministers in one fell swoop. President Buhari too swept away 20 perm secs in one fell swoop last year, which gives us an idea of how many former top public servants are lying around in Nigeria.
Now, all these officers must have filed their asset declaration forms at the Code of Conduct Bureau [CCB] at the time they were appointed and when they were leaving. If it is true, as government is saying, that corruption has assumed epidemic proportions in this country, the evidence for most of it is already contained in those asset declaration forms filed by the former top officers. Why have these forms been lying unattended to in CCB’s vaults all these years? Is it true that they find a use only when someone defies his party in legislative leadership elections and is taken to the Code of Conduct Tribunal?
The VP said Buhari and him will make public their asset declarations when they are leaving office so that we will see if they enriched themselves. This is a good promise, except that they made a similar promise last year and we had trouble getting them to fulfil it by making public their asset declaration forms. They initially dribbled us around by saying they declared the forms at CCB and we should go there and see it, knowing full well that the feckless CCB will not allow anyone to see any form. Newspapers and civil society groups’ insistence that the forms be made public was on the very reasonable ground that a secret asset declaration is as good as useless because the public can help to ascertain whether an officer lied about certain assets.
The truth however is that even the public cannot completely help in this matter. Nigerian public officials have perfected the art of hiding their wealth in bank accounts, properties, bonds, shares and in cash hidden under their beds. Right now our public records in all spheres are so poor that most wrong doers are confident they can get away with it. Whenever a problem threatens to overwhelm us in Nigeria, we try to amend the law and provide for a stiffer penalty but as Malam Adamu Ciroma said last year, it is not writing a tough penalty in the statute books that deters criminals; it is making sure that every culprit is apprehended and punished.
Think of all the motorists in Abuja who beat the red light at traffic junctions. While many law-abiding people are patiently waiting for the green light, a motorist will just accelerate and beat the red light. He gives the impression that those waiting for the green light are fools. It does look like that for as long as those who beat the red light are never apprehended and punished. To photograph a red light beater’s number plate, as traffic lights do in Europe, will be of no use here because no one has a proper record of car number plates. More and more motorists are thus encouraged to join the ranks of the red light beaters.
There was this story about ten years ago of an American man who committed murder in Chicago in 1961, fled the city and had since become a respected man living in San Francisco with a good career and a family. One day police men suddenly knocked at his door and arrested him. They said new forensic technology had just proved that he committed that murder in Chicago nearly 50 years ago. The shocked man admitted it! One can imagine the level of institutional order in society that made for such a feat.
Which reminds me of another story I read many years ago, about a man who was kidnapped by the notorious American gangster ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly and held in a barn in the 1940s. When the victim escaped, he told police that two planes flew over the barn where he was kept at precise times every day. The police then collected the schedules of every commercial flight and were able to pinpoint the exact place over flown by two different commercial flights at the times the ex-hostage mentioned. I am just wondering; given that most commercial flights in Nigeria depart late or sometimes ahead of schedule, how can anyone ever pinpoint where they are at any particular time of the day?
As we reporters know, it is often impossible to find out the owners of a company in Nigeria but referring to Corporate Affairs Commission records. The same thing applies to trying to find out the true owner of a house by going through land registry records. No VIO in Nigeria can be able to tell you the true owner of a particular car. Until recently, the same applied to bank accounts. One person will open many accounts in different banks under different names, which facilitated the ghost worker syndrome in particular.
When CBN came up with the clever idea of linking all bank accounts by BVN, look at the number of people who are placing change of name ads in the newspapers. I suggest that government should start with those ones. Anyone who opened accounts in different banks with different names should be invited by EFCC to explain why he or she did so. Before Oga Osinbajo can get current, not to mention former, public servants to account for their wealth, he must first straighten record keeping throughout Nigerian society.