Nigeria: The resignation of Adenike Grange

A new development

The resignation of the Nigerian Minister of Health, Professor Adenike Grange following allegations of graft would elicit much commentary and I would deign to add my own perspective to these interesting developments.

Obviously, the issues here cover the facts, the norms, the traditions, the aberrations and now the whistle-blower albeit an aggrieved one.

The President has spoken

President Yar’Adua had given an executive order ordering all ministries to remit to the Federal Treasury all monies that had not been properly allocated for spending by the end of the year 2007 and it appears the Ministry of Health and its officials flouted that order.

The President of the Federation has executive remit over all that pertains to Nigeria, he is implicitly the Chief Treasurer of the Federation and is crudely supposed to smack the hands of pilferers who try to raid the national till.

The clear fact is Professor Grange failed to follow a simple order from her boss and in the process had already committed an act of insubordination which could very well have embarrassed the President – she most definitely had to go - her resignation could only have been face-saving.

No leader of Chop I Chop

After the President gave the order, he followed up his request by auditing to see if the ministries had complied and found that the Ministry of Health had not fully complied, he definitely was not satisfied with the excuses and the rank disobedience of his appointees and their subordinates – he then requested and obtained the resignation of the appointed officials whilst ordering the indefinite suspension of the salaried officers.

The lesson we can take from this action is that the President has refused to be the leader of the “Chop, I Chop Party” and they who work to besmirch the name and dignity of his albeit illegitimate government would definitely face the music.

Prevailed upon by rotten people

Now, back to Professor Grange, there is a possibility that once she received the order she was prevailed upon but the norms of that institution which probably was steeped in corruption and headed previously by such incompetent buffoons that she found it hard to overcome the weight of their insistence.

Given that, it was still her responsibility to run that ministry and it is merely semantics to try and separate her responsibility from her culpability in allowing illegal actions to take place under her watch.

Bonus for what exactly?

It is quite instructive that the N300 million was to be shared out as a “Christmas Bonus”, there is probably no way how a ministry in Nigeria can really lay out clear performance goals as we have in the private sector for which the achievers could be justly rewarded.

People just have their noses in the trough and look for occasion to run off with funds that should be invested in issues that the ministries are supposed to be concerned with.

If our leaders still have to go abroad for health checkups and treatment, then all workers in the Ministry of Health have to have their pay docked till things begin to change – there is no way that any of them were deserving of any bonus talk less of a blanket Christmas Bonus where the allocations are just the plain daylight robbery of longsuffering Nigerians.

The disgruntled whistleblower

The matter of the whistleblower informing the anti-graft authorities is a welcome development; it shows that the little man in Nigeria now has a place to go to report corruption in public office and expect action to be taken to investigate and bring the people involved to book.

But looking closely at the whistleblower, it does not seem it was an act of altruistic piety but one of disgruntled pique – the allocations which would have amounted to N175,000 to the most junior thieves in this escapade was slashed to N40,000 to bulk up the takeaway of the middle managers.

I do not think we would have many whistleblowers in the future to expose these corrupt practices if everyone feels that they have been adequately compensated to keep their lips sealed, which is sad indeed.

Irregular alliances

That also is a snapshot of Nigerian partnerships where agreements are made and some influential apparatchik changes the rules of the game with impunity expecting nothing to result of that action – well, the game has changed – if you cheat someone even in an illegal alliance of looting the treasury, the cheated has every right to the “righteous” indignation of getting even.

Dishonest lettered people

Then we look at the names of the people involved, as academic excellence is considered a badge of honour in Nigeria, here we have a two Professors, a Dr. and all the others probably have academic letters of excellence garnered from global institutions of renown – we now know that no matter how much you have achieved academically, it does not proof in anyway that you have integrity, that you understand the responsibility of holding public office, that you are honest, that you are beyond reproach or that you can be trusted with any office.

Just as being religious does not confer godliness if you in and of yourself do not have that virtue after you have been stripped of everything that gives you substance.

Professor Grange is fully responsible

Finally, this allocation was approved by someone in that ministry and the Minister could not have been oblivious of that approval – she might not have shared in the largesse but she failed in her stewardship of her office and allowed the country to be defrauded to the amelioration of undeserving miscreants.

The full force of the law should be visited upon her for her dereliction of duty and hopefully an example shall be made of the issue that nobody should think public office is an opportunity for self-enrichment even if it is dressed as a Christmas Bonus.

Ministers cannot become bystanders to events that take place under their watch in their own ministries, if they cannot control their crowd they should return to their former day jobs. I am not convinced that this represents a sea-change in responsibility when holding public office - but I would say it looks like a start.

To the gallows of public shame with them all – Good job, Yardy!

Wikileaks - The right to know

An undying Internet presence

I happened upon a website that got its DNS entry removed through a legal process by an aggrieved plaintiff in cahoots with an Internet Service Provider.

In what might appear egregious in its remit, the judge not only asked for Dynadot the domain hosting service to remove all traces of the site from all systems that could resolve the name, they also any resolution from showing anything but a blank page.

The law as many would agree is an ass which by inference means it can only be laden with so much before it collapses under the weight of the load.

So, today as we can see Wikileaks.org no more we see Wikileaks.be, for any resourceful organisation taking a site offline only offers an inconvenience and not complete Internet obliteration – reincarnation is reality in new technology.

The need for whistleblowers

Wikileaks provides a unique service as a repository of documents posted anonymously by whistleblowers in government or corporations.

Obviously, if organisations, governments, politicians and powerful organs of influence conducted their businesses with transparency and honestly within the bounds of legality, justice and fairness there would probably be no need for whistleblowers.

Now, this is no advocacy to break the law and countries with official secrets legal codes should for matters of national interest be able to govern what gets revealed to the general public – the only problem is that it gets abused and used to conceal criminality, illegality, subterfuge and injustice.

Kenya stands out

Going through the site, it is not surprising that Kenya which stands out as a paragon of corruption amongst political leaders and their cohorts features prominent.

As it transpired the newly elected government of Mwai Kibaki engaged Kroll Inc. to investigate issues of corruption concerning the looting of Kenya under government of Daniel arap Moi his predecessor.

They produced a 110-page report in 2004 which implicates the ex-President’s sons in activities that have both of them worth just under a billion pounds or $1.8 billion.

This report is either gathering dust or being used as political leverage since it is interesting that Daniel arap Moi came round to supporting Mwai Kibaki having been unseated by him 5 years earlier.

The Kenya page shows a number of whistleblower documents that should be explosive and having people indicted and convicted but systems in Africa sometimes do to seem to deliver justice to certain strata of the society.

Dearth of Nigerian detail

The Nigeria page does not show much apart from personalities like Dr. Dora Nkem Akunyili, who as the Director General of NAFDAC runs the gauntlet of corrupt organisations and interests who flood Nigerian markets with sub-standard drugs.

Her job is made harder by sometimes unresponsive federal ministers or demi-god thugs with undue political clout like Alhaji Lamidi Adedibu, we have every faith that she would prevail.

Another name was that of Chris Anyanwu who was jailed for life for publishing information about an alleged coup plot in 1995, a sentence that was commuted 15 years and she was eventually released in June 1998.

However, when Amy Goodman revealed the collusion of the Chevron Corporation with the Nigerian Army – in that the company offered transportation and logistics support – that lead to the killing of two villagers in the Niger Delta in 1998 and number of shady liaisons left a good few people in the poorest light but it resulted in a documentary that won her the George Polk Award in 1998.

The HRW expose on the unholy alliance sealed in a contract between Godfather Chris Uba and Anambra State aspirant governor Chris Ngige would have been a prime document for Wikileaks.

No fear in revealing

Maintaining the possibly tenuous Nigerian link is Dr. Martha Coleman-Adebayo (An African-American with a seemingly Yoruba name - Adebayo). As an employee of the Environment Protection Agency she found out and revealed that a United States firm was poisoning African workers and families with toxic waste.

Rather than get accolades, she was harassed and severely discriminated against within the EPA, however, what transpired after winning her case against discrimination lead to the signing into law by President George W. Bush of the No FEAR Act 2002.

The Notification and Federal Employee Antidiscrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR Act 2002), seeks to prevent organisations or managers from engaging in unlawful discrimination or retaliation against whistleblowers.

The Right to Know - I

Once again, one has to be careful about the reasons for whistle-blowing and what is to be achieved by revealing such information. A writer for the Zimbabwean Financial Gazette wrote an article that appeared on allAfrica.com, the premise being the attacks on the right to know.

The article tackles a number of issues but in summary, one could say that if the power of political leadership derives from the people, they should have the right to know about the fitness of their leader for leadership and their ability to govern.

For instance, reporting about the health of the President where its seriousness can make the person incapable of performing their duties should be covered by access through the right-to-know; closer to home is the need to squelch the rumours about the health of President Umaru Yar’Adua of Nigeria.

Dr. Beetroot had details of her alcoholism revealed as it appeared she jumped the queue for a liver transplant having been a public advocate against the dangers of alcoholism.

The judge in a case brought against the newspaper said, “This is a case where the need for the truth is, in fact, overwhelming. Indeed in this matter the personality involved as well as her status establishes her newsworthiness.”

The Right to Know - II

Truth, status and newsworthiness pertaining to matters that have public relations façade far different from the concealed realities need scrutiny and should have the light shone on them.

• In the end, Africa has a right to know how their vast resources are being commercialised but never affecting their livelihoods for the better and why.
• They have a right to know how unscrupulous and corrupt global conglomerates under the guise of humanitarian aid poison them with drugs they would not dare test in their home countries.
• They have a right to know how their politicians deviate from the service to democracy and their constituents towards their selfish ends of self-aggrandisement, corrupt enrichment and influence peddling.
• They have a right to know that they should by merit and qualification be able to attain any goal and if that is not the case, they should know why and who is creating that unfair situation leading to tough sanctions against that practice.
• They have a right to know how the electoral process ends up with results that are not representative of their voting. Some whistleblower electoral officers in Kenya came forward to reveal irregularities with the December 2007 collations.
• If anything, they have the right to know the truth, the whole truth which does not prejudice valid national interest and nothing but the truth regardless of who it touches.

Wikileaks – a resource and repository

Basically, if we cannot obtain information of the sources about issues because of red tape, officialdom, corrupt interference or abuse of legal process, the only way to get at the truth would be through whistleblowers and they have Wikileaks to keep their identities whilst exposing rotten situations.

Support the crusade for the truth, support the message of Wikileaks in the global defence of sources and press freedom as a just, fair and importance cause.