How can anybody in Femi Fani-Kayode’s position not have a short fuse in today’s Nigeria? The people who are criticizing him for admitting that he has a short fuse and is liable to explode at what they think is a journalist’s harmless question, know not what they are talking about.
To the critics, it looked reasonable that Daily Trust’s Calabar correspondent Eyo Charles asked FFK who is bankrolling his trips around PDP-controlled states to inspect projects. What is harmless about that question? You mean in this Nigeria, a man should disclose that a state governor shoved a bag full of naira notes and an envelop full of scarce foreign exchange into his pockets in order for him to come to his state, “inspect” carefully selected and well dressed-up projects and then try to convince the world that the governor is doing a wonderful job?
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Look, do you even know how projects are chosen in Nigeria before a VIP’s visit to inspect or to commission them? Senator Aliyu Magatakarda Wamakko once told me a story, that when he was the military-appointed Sole Administrator of Sokoto Local Government in the 1980s, Government House lined up a project to be commissioned by a visiting VIP. Trouble was, the project was uncompleted but it was already listed in the protocol schedule for the VIP visitor to commission. So, the Sole Administrator rounded up the contractor and told him he must work overnight. The contractor complained that his men could not paint the building in the dark, so Wamakko turned around his official Peugeot 504 car and beamed the headlight throughout the night while the men worked.
If not because of “mobilization,” an honest project inspector should not accept a list of projects carefully orchestrated by the state government. He should do what a Senate committee did four years ago, according to a story that then Senator Baba Kaka Bashir Garbai once told me. His team was in the Niger Delta to inspect NDDC projects and they asked for a list of completed and paid for projects. The commission turned over a list of 3,000 projects scattered across seven states. All these are completed and paid for? Yes, NDDC officials said, and we have lined up the ones you will inspect. No, the committee members said. Since all of them are completed, we are going to select at random those to be inspected. Sure enough, when they selected three dozen projects at random, 90% of them were non-existent. Did FFK select the projects he was to inspect or did he just accept a list drawn up by Cross River State Government officials?
Besides, just because you come to “inspect” a project and it looks impressive to you, did you find out how much it cost, whether the work done justified the cost, if and how much money was siphoned from the contract, or even whether the project was a priority identified by the community or whether it was just erected at the behest of bureaucrats and politicians for other reasons? A community may get an impressive ICT centre when, left to them, they prefer to have pipe-borne water or a refurbished health center. I attended a workshop organized by UNDP in Bauchi in the 1990s, where experts attributed the large number of abandoned projects in this country to lack of community input in the choice of projects.
Newly arrived governors and LGA chairmen in Nigeria do not want to complete projects started by their predecessors, no matter how laudable, because they will not get political credit for it. Nigerian voters only give you credit for a project that you started, even if someone else completed it. According to UNDP, the solution to that is for communities to identify their own priorities so that even when a new ruler comes, they would say, “This is our priority project. Please complete it. Don’t worry, we will give you political credit for completing it.”
You don’t expect an inspector like FFK to ask questions about whether the project is a community priority or whether it was instituted by a politician because of its contract-intensive nature. If he asks questions like that, who will invite him next time to inspect projects in his own state? Such invitations don’t come cheap. Governors are not fools. They don’t invite every Tom, Dick and Harry and make costly arrangements for him to come and inspect their projects, unless they will gain something politically from it.
What is the likely gain from having a man like FFK inspect your projects? One obvious one is that he get mouth, to use Nigerian parlance. He speaks volubly with a faint posh English accent, all the while glaring at his listeners and regaling his audience with a claim to glorious family history and rich Cambridge education. Well, not so fast. If FFK’s resume were that glorious, why is he not invited to inspect projects in the Southwest? I have not seen any Southwest state governor invite him to help inspect his projects. There must be more to it than APC control of most Southwestern states whereas FFK is a PDP member, for now. Is it because his family’s political history isn’t so well perceived at home?
With respect to PDP state governments’ invitation to FFK to inspect their projects, we do not know for sure who initiated it. It is unlikely that PDP governors sat at a forum and identified FFK, of all available prominent persons sympathetic to the party, to be the one to go round and inspect their projects. Much more likely that they received a proposal. It was an offer they could not refuse because FFK has shown himself capable of going overnight from sweet mouth to a very foul mouth, and vice versa.
One only has to refer to his very acerbic attacks on President Obasanjo’s administration in its early days. Overnight, he accepted a job as Obasanjo’s top attack dog. When a reporter asked him that time why he serially launched acerbic attacks at anyone who criticized Obasanjo, including General Yakubu Gowon and Col. Dangiwa Umar, FFK said, “My brief is that whoever joins issues with the President, I should join issues with him.” I see; whoever joins issues with the president, even if what the person said had a ring of truth to it. Is it the same principle that he is extending to this project inspection tour, that whoever joins issues with any of his hosts, he should acerbically join issues with him?
That includes the reporter who asked to who is bank rolling the tour. In between fits of rage, FFK actually tried to answer the question by saying as a lawyer and a former minister, it should be apparent that he could finance his tours. Not necessarily. Money does not come flowing to anyone just because he is a lawyer; he has to work hard to earn it. There is scant evidence that FFK earned money from the law. In answer to a question he was asked in Gusau last month, he said he has been in politics since 1990. Now, since he was called to the bar only a few years before that, that timeline did not give enough time to earn money from the law.
As for being a former minister, that is probably a revelation. Even a serving minister would not be able to pay his way through a nation-wide tour from his legitimate earnings, not to mention a former one. How many former ministers and former governors do we have in Nigeria that are having trouble fueling their cars? One can only escape that fate if he made hay while the sun shined, to put it delicately. Maybe that is why some former ministers are standing trial for alleged embezzling of public funds. We now begin to see why Eyo Charles was stupid to be asking questions about bankrolling.
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