2019 in retrospect: Politics, economy and anti-corruption

Merry Christmas everyone! What a year 2019 has been. It opened with preparations for the sixth general election in this Fourth Republic being at fever pitch. From November 18, 2018, aftermath of the candidate nomination process campaign commenced in earnest. From January to March 2019, politicians continued to mount the soap boxes to woo voters. Of course, severe cases of violence were recorded across the country. Political opponents, party secretariats, campaign vehicles were primary targets. Not even the election umpire, Independent National Electoral Commission, was spared, as some local government offices of INEC in Plateau, Osun, Anambra and Imo states were torched by unknown arsonists.

Logistical challenges made INEC to postpone the February 16 elections by one week. Eventually, the elections –presidential, Senate and House of Representatives– were held on February 23, while the governorship, state Houses of Assembly and Abuja Area Council polls were held on March 9. Though the elections were successfully held, they were blighted by the familiar challenges such as vote-trading, election-related violence, late commencement of voting, and low voter turnout. According to the INEC chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, while addressing the Inter Agency Consultative Committee on Election Security on Thursday, March 7, 2019, “The commission is concerned that many of our materials, including ballot boxes, voting cubicles, voter registers and Smart Card Readers were lost to acts of hooliganism and thuggery in the elections held two weeks ago. Most worrisome is the attack on electoral officials. Some of our staff were abducted and taken hostage in an attempt to disrupt elections or influence the outcome. In fact, some of the supplementary elections were caused by such acts of thuggery.”

These ugly electoral incidents have not abated. Rather, they are becoming heightened as observed during last month’s Kogi and Bayelsa off-cycle governorship elections. Electoral malpractices were so rampant in the November 16 governorship elections so much so that civil society organisations such as the Nigerian Civil Society Situation Room and Youth Initiative for Advocacy, Growth & Advancement better known as YIAGA Africa called for the cancellation of the Kogi governorship election.

As things stand, the media and CSOs are unanimous in calling for a comprehensive electoral reform. Among other things, some of the recurring key electoral reform issues include the need for electronic voting and electronic transmission of results; granting of voting rights to Nigerians in the Diaspora through Out-of-Country voting; enhancement of participation of marginalised groups in the electoral system through affirmative action for women, youths, and persons with disabilities; provision for early voting for millions of Nigerians who are disenfranchised from voting due to their election-day duties.  There has also been a call for the upward review of the 180-day time limit for presidential election petitions given the vast areas covered by presidential candidates.

On the economy, Nigeria is still grappling with a lot of economic challenges. Our debt portfolio as of October 2019 snowballed to N25.7tn. Yet, tabled before the Senate is the president’s external borrowing plan of $29.96bn. Very heart-rending is the fact that these humongous borrowings have not translated into any significant improvement of the nation’s infrastructure. The roads are still largely terribly bad, electricity has remained epileptic despite increased tariff, no new rail services have commenced though there are assurances that these will be a reality in due course, public schools and hospitals are mostly dilapidated with obsolete equipment.

But heartwarming is the fact that Nigeria has been able to return to the January – December budget cycle with the timely passage by the National Assembly and signing into law of the 2020 appropriation bill by the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) on Tuesday, December 17, 2019. It is believed that this will lead to improved planning and implementation of budgets. The lot of Nigerian workers was also bettered this outgoing year as the Federal Government approved a new minimum wage of N30,000 upward from the N18,000 minimum wage of 2011. While federal workers have started to enjoy this, many of the states are still negotiating with their labour unions.

Despite signing on to the Open Government Partnership, there is still a lot of opacity in government most especially at the state and local government levels. Budgets of these sub-national levels are not available to the public and this makes it difficult to hold government to account. Still on the economy, Nigeria took a bold step of partially shutting its land borders to its West African neighbours on August 20, 2019. This has caused a lot of international row with some of these countries such as Ghana and Benin Republic claiming that the step is in breach of the ECOWAS protocol on free movement of goods and services as well as the Africa Continental Free Trade Area Agreement. This border closure, we are told, has been a blessing in disguise as it has boosted sales of locally produced food items such as rice, poultry products and even textiles. There has also been significant increase in the revenue of the Nigeria Customs Service.

Nigeria became the 53rd country to sign the AfCFTA when Buhari signed on to it on Sunday, July 7, 2019. Eritrea is the only country out of the 55 African countries yet to approve the deal.  The signing took place at the 12th Extraordinary Session of the Assembly of the Union on AfCFTA and the First Mid-Year Coordination Meeting of the African Union and the Regional Economic Communities in Niamey. According to Buhari, AfCFTA can be a platform for African manufacturers of goods and providers of service to construct regional value chains for Made-in-Africa goods and services.

Notably, in the outgoing year, there has been a feeble attempt at reducing the cost of governance with some travel restrictions placed on the new set of ministers. However, Buhari did not show commitment to reducing the cost of governance when he appointed a 43-member cabinet, himself included, and increased his and the VP’s travel budgets from N1.3bn in 2019 to N3.3bn in 2020. Just last week, it came to the fore that a princely sum of N37bn was approved in the 2020 budget for a mere renovation of a section of the National Assembly. This is preposterous! Not only that, an estimated 22 million barrels of crude oil were reportedly stolen in the first six months of this year according to the Edo State governor, Godwin Obaseki. Quite unfortunately, billions of naira is still being used to subsidise the refined petroleum products.  With the review of the seven finance laws by the National Assembly,  Nigerians will now be paying 7.5 per cent Value Added Tax from the initial five per cent.

Even though much efforts are being made to curb corruption, the monster has yet to be dealt a lethal blow. It came to the fore recently that an estimated N1tn earmarked for Zonal Intervention Projects otherwise called constituency projects of the National Assembly has not yielded a commensurate service delivery. According to Transparency International, in 2018, Nigeria scored 27/100 to place 144/180 countries on the Corruption Perceptions Index. This is unenviable.

However, several efforts at fighting corruption are yielding positive some results. According to the information gleaned from the website of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, its acting chairman, Ibrahim Magu, disclosed on Tuesday, October 22, 2019, that the agency earned a record of 882 convictions between January and October. Magu made the disclosure as he defended the commission’s 2020 budget of N30.921bn before the Senate Committee on Anti-Corruption and Financial Crimes. Though the year has not ended, the conviction figure in the meantime represents over 200 per cent improvement on the 312 convictions recorded last year.

Speaking further on the notable achievements of the EFCC in the current fiscal year, Magu disclosed that between January and September 2019, the commission made monetary recovery on behalf of both the Federal Government and third parties in the following sums: N64,721,161,510.01 (Sixty Four Billion, Seven Hundred and Twenty One Million, One Hundred and Sixty One Thousand, Five Hundred and Ten Naira, One Kobo), $14,030,512.32 (Fourteen Million, Thirty Thousand, Five Hundred and Twelve Dollars, Thirty-Two Cents), £4,644,493.00 (Four Million, Six Hundred and Forty-Four Thousand, Four Hundred and Ninety-Three Pounds), €53,325.00 (Fifty Three Thousand, Three Hundred and Twenty Five Euros). And on Thursday, December 5, a Lagos Division of the Federal High Court sentenced a serving senator and ex-governor of Abia State, Orji Uzor Kalu, to 12 years in prison for N7.65 billion fraud.