INCORRIGIBLE MISCELLANIES

It is often advised that one needs to let emotions simmer a bit before a response to an affront is considered; failure to give a proper consideration may put one's response and the original affront on the same footing. However, the premise of a response to an affront meted out to more than 160 million Nigerians is one that may rightly jettison such ideal; but doing so belittles the responder, no matter how just the reason is. It is exactly for this reason, I have decided to let time pass before I say one or two (maybe three or four!!!) things about the so-called Okonjo's reply to the 50 questions posted to her by the NASS.

As one can imagine, it takes a lot of patience (of which I am ill-endowed) and time (of which I have none to waste) to maintain one's level of concentration and interest to go through 102 pages of pure, unadulterated drivel. By the time I got to page 50 or something, I'd had enough! Couldn't stand the torture any longer!! Okonjo foolishly thought she was writing a thesis, and imprudently trying to show off her mastery of economic (mis)management. Does she really think that by reeling off copious amounts of unintelligible data she could prove a point or two? She even had the cheek to reference a report she co-authored! Can you imagine? Please allow me to highlight just a few of the instances of this clown's impertinence:

• Okonjo claimed to have been responsible for an average of 16-18 hours of power supply in major cities in 2013? 16-18 hours? Now you can imagine the kind of world this woman is living in!
• What is the economic argument against borrowing to invest? Is she claiming to be a better administrator of an economy than those of the US, Germany, the Chancellery of the UK,  or those of other far larger and more complex economies like Brazil, China, or India? The problem is not that she disagrees, she just couldn't bring herself to admit in a pointblank manner that what has been happening is, and still is, that this government has been borrowing to embezzle. This is coupled with the timidity to confront the ballooning size of recurrent expenditure. PPPs are not the panacea for financing infrastructure developments, as the case of the NHS in England & Wales shows. Should she not have been more honest to acknowledge that a shrewd combination of financing models for the priority projects in health, education, transport and power generation, without the fraud element, would serve the country and its people well? 
• What of the drawing down of the ECA? Didn't she herself, in Davos last week, allude to the fact that the Excess Crude Account has been plundered from a high of $11.5bn in December 2012 to a perilous low of $2.5bn as at January 17, 2014? What's happened to the $10.8bn the NNPC failed to remit to government coffers? Is this the time then for platitudinous pronouncements?
• Measuring poverty level in terms of daily calorie intake of the average Nigerian! She patted herself on the back by saying you and I get an average of 3000 calories daily! What preposterousness! Tell that to my grandma in Iwaraja (by the way, that's my village in Ilesha, Osun State; now you know I'm a proper bush boy!) that she gets enough calories a day to make her life worth living. I wonder how many calories Okonjo and her clan of bandits get. The World Bank may deny the use of the word 'destitution' in their report, but doesn't Okonjo realise that there are actually millions of destitutes in the country? Do we need the World Bank to categorically point that to us? Getting tangled in semantics is just a way of burying her head in the sand. Has Okonjo ever heard of the phrase 'call a spade a spade'? There!
• Rather than finding excuses for every single area of failure, she would have had more credibility by first admitting to such failures and then highlight how she intends to work on those identified failures and turn them into successes. Some people have applauded her for 'lecturing' the NASS!! Is professorialism the main issue at hand? If she wants to impress, she needs to go back to the lecture theatre. 
• Gloating about the 'successful' privitization of our power infrastructure is very unbecoming of a truly well-meaning finance minister. Without going into the nitty-gritty of the whole privitization exercise (noting the fact that this was largely to the advantage of political cronies and associates), it is plain for all to see that Nigerians were woefully shortchanged, just as we were during the telecoms spectrum sell-off. Politicizing and politicking in matters of enormous economic implications for Nigerians is just an unforgivable misstep.

I could go on and on, but I'm sure the drift of my gripe is clear enough. The so-called 'Mr. Fixit' Anenih even waded in on the issue of the missing NNPC billions. As far as the old goon was concerned, the explanations provided by the NNPC thieves for the missing funds should be good enough and that should be the end of the matter. How I wish these kind of people could just keep their gob shut and disgracefully fade into the insignificance they have rightfully earned. Billions missing every blessed day and we have no right to question the most corrupt government in the history of mankind? Got to stop now for my emotions are becoming 'unsimmered'.