Sanusi in the eye of a storm
In one swoop, Sanusi ensured that he would have no allies among politicians, civil servants and local government workers who interpreted his call as disparaging and acerbic. Unsurprisingly, his enemies have in turn called for his sack, the House of Representatives described him as a failed economist whose proposals have always failed under public scrutiny. […]
In one swoop, Sanusi ensured that he would have no allies among politicians, civil servants and local government workers who interpreted his call as disparaging and acerbic.
Unsurprisingly, his enemies have in turn called for his sack, the House of Representatives described him as a failed economist whose proposals have always failed under public scrutiny. The Deputy Chairman of the House Committee on media and Public Affairs, Victor Ogene, said the Kano prince has a penchant for overheating the polity with esoteric theories, recalling the rejection of the N5000 note and the brouhaha that heralded the proposal. The lawmaker said Sanusi’s call for a reduction in the number of members of the National Assembly was “another avoidable gaffe to be ignored.”
Also responding to the CBN governor’s statement, the President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Comrade Abdulwahab Omar, was more critical and sarcastic. He said, “We see in Sanusi an agent of death that must be defeated and crushed before he further destroys the Nigerian economy. While President Jonathan is trying to create more jobs, Sanusi is calling for mass sack of civil servants in a country with one of the highest number of unemployed which has indeed led to gross deprivation and the current state of insecurity in Nigeria. While we believe the Federal Government will ignore the ranting of this hollow economist, Sanusi has never demonstrated patriotism in all his advice on economic and financial management…”
Likewise, the government which the Dan Majen Kano serves seemingly came out to dissociate itself from his statement, saying it would create more job opportunities rather than reduce its workforce.
Apparently responding to Sanusi’s call for mass sack in the public service to reduce recurrent expenditure, Labour Minister Chukwuemeka Wogu, said: “Government owes the society an enabling environment to create job opportunities and the president’s desire to create more jobs and not retrenchment,” countering the CBN governor without mentioning him by name.
However, the CBN said its governor was quoted out of context when the Deputy Governor (Operations) Mr. Tunde Lemo told the House of Representatives Committee on Banking and Currency that what Sanusi meant was that if resources are freed up to remove structural rigidities it would permit employment to flow in the private sector and there would be no need to cluster employment in government.
According to Lemo, if this is done “everybody will not be clamouring for government job. Big government hurts economies all over the world.” Surprisingly, Sanusi got the backing of Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) whose National Publicity Secretary, Rotimi Fashakin, retorted in a statement, saying the call for the sacking of Sanusi as CBN Governor for volunteering his personal opinion is “preposterous.” The opposition party, which described Sanusi as “forthright public officer” further added: “We equally believe that rather vilifying the CBN governor for the commentary, this should throw up meaningful discourse on extricating the nation from the financial recklessness of this PDP-led Federal Government. In the first place, the CBN Governor is not in a position to implement policy for sacking the nation’s public servants. We are at a loss at the nexus between Sanusi’s personal opinion and the strident call for his sack, except there are other sinister underpinnings in this call. As a party, we have equally taken note of the ignominious manner this present crop of Labour leadership truncated, in January 2012, the people’s popular refusal to yield to the exploitative tendencies of the nation’s rulers. In the course of scuttling the people’s revolt, some of these Labour leaders got appointed into some dodgy committees that were not primed to achieve result. This is why we view this call by the Labour leaders for Sanusi’s sack as a cheap, opportunistic ploy to crawl back to the people’s reckoning.”
No doubt, Sanusi spoke with the uncongenial penchant of a technocrat, a man gripped with figures and facts. He did not speak as a politician and his views are, at times, too idealistic. But for someone who holds the lifetime ambition of becoming the Emir of Kano, it will do a lot of good to assimilate the etiquette of royalty; by being reserved, calculative and less loquacious. Silence, they say, is golden.