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Govt has let us down, Anna is our only hope
In an indication of the kind of effect Anna Hazare has had on the nation, Jai Karan, a sapera in Badarpur, on the Delhi-Haryana border, who can't read or write and is jobless most of the time, tells Shobhan Saxena that the anti-corruption crusader is his only hope. Excerpts:
How do you make a living since you are not allowed to keep snakes or perform with them anymore?
Most men here have formed been and dhol parties, and we perform at weddings and birthdays. We get some work for four-five months during the wedding season. The rest of the year we sit here and wait for work. Our situation is hopeless .
The government doesn't allow you to follow your traditional profession, but has it done anything to help you get alternative jobs?
They have done nothing at all, only promises. Five years back, the Delhi government invited us to perform at Central Park in Connaught Place, and Sheila Dikshit promised to give us jobs. We are still waiting. We have been demanding jobs for our children in zoos and forest departments because we can handle snakes, but no one has bothered to call us.
But the government invites you to perform at cultural events. Doesn't that help?
Rarely. More than 70 saperas were invited to perform at the Commonwealth Games village during the Games. We were paid Rs 200 per person per day. We were supposed to get complete sapera dress but they didn't give us shoes. I think Suresh Kalmadi swallowed that money too. They spent thousands of crores on the Games and gave us Rs 200, making us walk barefoot in front of foreigners .
Have you put your demands for jobs and education in front of the government?
Yes, dozens of times. But nobody listens. We have submitted petitions and raised slogans. No one has done anything yet. They have killed our profession, snatched our snakes and abandoned us. We have no hope from the government which is itself drowning in scams. Now, Anna Hazare is our only hope.
Anna is campaigning for a strong Lokpal. How will that help you?
Anna is fighting against corruption and we are the worst victims of corruption . If we go to a government office for a job, the officials ask for bribe. If we want scholarships for our children , they ask for bribes. When we tried to make BPL cards, they asked for money. Because we didn't have money to bribe them, they gave us Above Poverty Line cards.
How will a Lokpal check all this?
If there is a strong Lokpal, we can go to him and register our complaints. At the moment, there is no one to complain to. The corrupt are not scared of anyone and they openly ask for bribes even for things which are due to us. When we go to government offices with our caste certificate , they ask us to go away, saying 'You are not Scheduled Caste' .
But you have a SC certificate...
Yes, I have, but it's in English and I don't know what it says (shows the certificate issued by deputy commissioner, south district. It says saperas are SC). This is a useless piece of paper. We have no education. How can we get jobs without education? It's better that the government gives us licenses for performing with snakes. Then we won't have to beg before politicians, and bribe the officials for education and jobs. At least the future of our young men will be secure.
Do you expect the government to listen to your demands ?
We expect nothing from the government. If there is a wedding or a party in your house or neighbourhood, please call us to perform. At least, we will make some money.
Privatisation Probe: Litmus Test For Jonathan’s Govt
While passing through Agidingbi in Ikeja, Lagos, where the once popular Daily Times of Nigeria is located, one will be amazed and disappointed, at the same time, to to think it was once a place where people who had all shades of opinion once went to nourish their mind, satisfy curiosity, sharpen intellect or critically disect the decay prevalent in the government of the day.
Today, desolate and worn, the premises, once the citadel of the journalism profession in the country, is a shadow of itself, littered with empty crates of assorted, alcoholic drinks.
Media assistant to the president, Dr. Reuben Abati, once wrote in his column that, “until its asphyxiation and eventual death, the Daily Times of Nigeria was the Mecca of Nigerian journalism. It was home to a multitude of brilliant minds and first-rate writers and journalists; and was also a training ground for emerging young Turks, most of whom went on to great heights.
“The Daily Times of the 1960s and 70s helped shape public and private thinking and also influenced how civil servants formulated and implemented policies. It was a time when Nigeria’s role and place within the global community was assured, so domestic and international decision-makers paid attention to its pulse”.
That such an institution was allowed to die and disappear from our landscape and our collective consciousness in the name of privatisation is a sad commentary on our national life and collective value system.
Daily Times was one of the 122 Federal Government enterprises that had been either sold or concessioned by the BPE since 1999. Unfortunately, the situation in the privatised companies had gone from bad to worse, as over 80 per cent of the privatised enterprises have become moribund.
The ugly scenario prevalent in most of these companies was observed by the vice-president, Namadi Sambo who, as the chairman of the National Council on Privatisation (NCP), got the Senate to set up an ad hoc committee to carry out an inquest on the privatisation activities of the Bureau of Public Enterprise, BPE from 1999 to date.
So many reasons have been given by the federal government for the sale of virtually all its enterprises. One of the ‘cogent’ excuses was that the sold companies had become completely inefficient and therefore, unable to deliver the much needed services to Nigerians. These companies only eneded up as conduit pipes for siphoning public funds, as well as a huge sink-hole for the government’s revenue.
The motive behind the policy introduced by the Olusegun Obasanjo administration was to ease government of the burden of running moribund firms by transferring them to private hands who, that administration believed, would be more efficient in steering the wheels of business and economic growth. The policy was to ensure that the fortunes of the declining government companies were revived through the injection of technical expertise, experience and funds by the private entities. The private firms were to ensure growth of the companies, and thereby create jobs and opportunities for the people.
Also, it argued that since the late 1970s, public enterprises had stopped working. Instead, they were not only a strain on the economy, as they had ceased providing services, but were captured by the elite for their own benefits.
The policy, initiated to hand over all federal government-owned companies to private operators, either through privatisation or commercialisation, resulted in the establishment of the Privatisation and Commercialisation Act of 1999. In November 1999, Malam Nasir el-Rufa’i was appointed the director-general of the
Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE), the agency saddled with the sole responsibility of selling off the companies.
El-Rufa’i also gave an insight into the state of the companies then when he said that as at 1998, during the military regime of General Abdulsalami Abubakar (rtd), the budget of the federal government was N300bn, out of which the government spent N265bn to support inefficient, corrupt and epileptic public enterprises. According to him, it was to check this huge waste that the government came up with the policy of privatisation and commercialisation of the companies.
Sambo had argued further that the much touted “job creation and liberation of the economy believed to come with the divestment in the commercial entities by the federal government during the privatisation exercise,” was nowhere in sight, due to loss of jobs and the inability of the sold public enterprises to create new jobs.
The Senate, in response to the outcry of the vice-president, commissioned an ad hoc committee to look into the entire privatisation exercise, with a view to ascertaining the true status of the privatised companies.
The senate’s intervention was occasioned by the fact that the privatised companies had failed to achieve anything after they were privatised, inspite of the “grace period” of about five years, inherrent in the policy, for the privatised companies to take-off.
According to reports, during the sixth National Assembly, several lawmakers made efforts to bring up the issue of the rot in the privatised companies.
The session was burdened by several other probes of the power, aviation, FCT and transport sectors, as well as the probe of the food crisis. The assembly also focused more on the constitution amendment to achieve reforms in the electoral process.
Though most of the privatised companies already showed signs of decay characterised by the fraudulent bidding process that accompanied their sale, the last National Assembly could not directly probe the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) on the matter.
Within six days of non-stop public hearing, the Senator Ahmad Lawan-led six-man committee had met with stakeholders in the privatisation exercise, some of who included past and current directors of the BPE, board members of the privatised companies and members of the Nigerian public.
The probe uncovered embarrassing, under-hand details, some of which were bogus, hilarious and downright pitiful. Facts, figures, and other details contradicted themselves. Accusations and counter-accusations flew all over the place as company executives who felt they had been unfairly by-passed during the bidding process engaged in mud-slinging.
Top government functionaries were accused of frustrating the privatisation exercise. Besides, there was the allegation of a siphoning of Nigeria’s commonwealth, in billions of naira, notably in the sale of the Aluminium Smelting Company of Nigeria (ALSCON), Ikot Abasi; Delta Steel Complex (DSC), Alaja; and the Ajaokuta Steel Complex, Itakpe.
Shareholders lamented, pensioners of privatised companies, and host communities of some the privatised companies came forward to reveal how they were being short-changed.
As revelations from the privatisation exercise by the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) continued to attract criticism from Nigerians, the Conference of Nigerian political Parties (CNPP) asked the Economic and financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to take up the challenge of questioning the individuals mentioned in the matter.
The coalition of political parties lauded the Senate Ad-hoc Committee on Privatisation chaired by Senator Ahmed Lawan, for having done a good job by “exposing the monumental fraud” which subverted the noble intention of the Public Enterprises (Privatisation and Commercialisation) Act, 1999, under the watch of former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.
After submitting a petition to the EFCC head office, Abuja, publicity secretary of the CNPP, Osita Okechukwu, said that, “the Senate ad-hoc committee has thrown an open challenge to President Goodluck Jonathan, the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and indeed the chairman of the EFCC to prosecute Obasanjo for his alleged culpability in defrauding the Nigerian State.
“the verdict is that the Public Enterprises (Privatisation and Commercialisation) Act, 1999, had been violently violated. Its laudable objectives of eradicating corruption, plugging the leakages in state-owned enterprises, attracting foreign direct investment and stopping rent seeking were smashed.
“We urge the Senate ad-hoc committee to invite Obasanjo to appear before it to state his own side of the story and go ahead to recommend revocation of the failed transactions.”
The former president of the Nigeria Bar Association (NBA), Olisa Agbakoba (SAN), urged the National Assembly to extend its probe of the Bureau for Public Enterprise (BPE) to the maritime sector, to check the privatisation of the country’s ports in 2006.
According to Agbakoba, a probe of maritime activities would help Nigerians and the investing public see that the ports concessionaires that won the bids for the take-over of the ports in 2006, had not fulfilled their pledge to the Federal Government to “turn around the facilities to become a market-driven sector of the nation’s economy”.
He noted that 90 per cent of the investment requirements port concessionaires pledged to undertake at the ports during the signing of the port concession agreement in 2006, had not yet been met, due to government’s inability to appoint an economic regulator to regulate and oversee shipping operations, as a way to enhance trade facilitation in the sector.
Agbakoba said the BPE should be held responsible for the woes in the sector which had witnessed dominance of foreign shipping companies, to the detriment of indigenous ones.
However, the managing director, Cowry Asset Management Limited., Jonson Chukwu, in a chat with Leadership, said that though he was disappointed by the facts unearthed by the probe of the privatisation exercise, he still believed that the gains of privatisation far outweighed the cost of the mistakes and abuses reported about the transactions.
“It is on record that the Nigerian public sector has been hopeless in the management of public assets, particularly productive assets. Virtually all the privatised companies were drain pipes of the public treasury or were operating at very low capacity.
“I hope that the outcome of the public hearing on privatisation and BPE activities between 1999 and 2011 will lead to the strengthening of the system and not the reversal of the privatisation, as that will heighten the level of uncertainty of the Nigerian business environment and possibly discourage prospective investors in the on-going effort to privatise the unbundled power companies,” he said.
Managing director, Lamberth Securities Limited., Mr. David Adonri said, “we inherited the mixed economic structure, where state enterprises exist side by side with privately owned enterprises, from our colonial authorities.
“During the military regime, prohibitive laws were enacted to protect some state sponsored enterprises from competition. Failure of most of these enterprises at the commanding heights of the economy, especially in the heavy industrial sector denied the economy the much needed engineering infrastructure to propel industrialisation.
“Consequently, having proved to be bad managers of economic enterprises, government is under compulsion to withdraw by privatising, before the deregulation of the affected industries. Despite the embarrassing underhand deals now being exposed (which should attract the necessary sanctions if proved conclusively), privatisation of all remaining state enterprises must proceed with increased intensity, so as to expedite the recovery of the damaged sectors.”
As Nigerians continue to await the outcome of the investigations, there is cynicism expressed in many quarters that the result of the probe may go the way of previous probes, namely: the allocation of houses to ministers, PTDF, FCT, food insecurity, power sector, customs, among others, carried out by the National
Assembly, all of which failed to produce the desired action from the government, due to the ‘high profile’ of citizens involved.
This cynicism, nothwithstanding, the revelations, so far, provide some litmus test for the present administration which has been preaching against corruption. The opportunity to act decisively has presented itself.
