Senator Victor Lar, the Chairman, Senate Committee on Drugs, Narcotic and Financial Crimes where Jonathan got it wrong is known for his radical views on national issues. In this interview with Richard Ihediwa, he opens up a number of issues including how the Presidency got it wrong in the subsidy removal saga as well as other burning national issues
You were very outspoken in the House, now that you are in the Senate it appears that you have become very quite. What informed your new attitude?
When I was in the House I was 39 but now I am approaching 52. So I am beginning to appreciate realities and probably from a far more sublime view point. I believe that much can be achieved without calling names and making outlandish allegations and grandstanding.
But the electorate, your admirers can misunderstand you.
No. The people listen to the words and not the slogan. Let me give you an example. The Sunday, before the declaration of strike by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), the House had a session and made resolutions about the issues. The following Tuesday, the Senate had its session and did not say anything about the strike. The allegation in the public domain was that Senate had sold out. When I was approached by some reporters from the BBC and VOA, I told them that the insinuations were far from the reality. The government is one. That we are in the National Assembly does not mean that we are any different from the executive. The problem is that we have a national challenge and washing our hands off and saying it was the President’s cup of tea does not inspire confidence in the leadership that have been bestowed on us. I believe that collectively we should put our heads together to find as solution for it and that the leadership of the Senate had taken to initiative to discuss and negotiate with labour and that at the time we met on Tuesday, the negotiation was already going on and it would not have been fair for anybody to come out and make any pronouncement on the negotiations and agreements that have not been arrived at, which was why we kept that dignified silence and at the end of it all, you saw how the Senate President was able to settle the issue. That added to the credibility of the Senate. It convinced people that you don’t need to make noise or grand stand to achieve result, that is the thinking of the Senate. Don’t forget that it is the highest and the most mature law making body in Nigeria and having found myself there and people will see it that anything contrary to that will be childish and I don’t want to be clothed in that toga. So that you take a matured view does not mean that you have adjudicated your responsibilities. Sloganeering is an aspect of activism. I have only stopped sloganeerism
There is this perception that some of you supported the removal of subsidy even when majority of Nigerians were against it. What is your direct personal opinion on this?
Let us look at it this way, I am a son of a farmer and my father farms yams. The frequency with which we eat yam should be a factor of how much yams my father is able to produce. It should not be tied to the vagaries of the menu of our neighbours who do not farm yams and who in any case buy yams.
What I am saying is this. If we have a welfarist government, all these comparisons are neither here nor there because if we have this natural resources that is meant for the people, in fact government can even go ahead and produce fuel and sell it at N5 per liter; but you see you cannot take the issue of petroleum in isolation. It is tied to a chain of certain economic indices and activities.
Government necessarily has come up with a depraved, truncated and inverted economic policy that cannot be classified into the conventional platform of either being capitalistic or socialist or welfarist. We just know that we have a government that believes in the operation of open market forces and any ambiguous economic policy from IMF is seen as a verse from the scriptures.
I believe that because Nigeria and Nigerians have adopted the economic policies that have allowed us to grafted into the money economics and the capitalist world, we are now subjected to be the vagaries of debt crisis, the vagaries of currency fluctuations and appreciation, imperfect market forces that we cannot control.
To that extent, Nigeria’s decision to deregulate and remove subsidy make sound economic sense, but the timing is wrong and the method used in introducing it also has some problems. Government would have phased this policy over a period of, say, two years and implement it in trenches; maybe after the first six months it will introduce like N30 and so on until it gets to where you want to stop. I do not believe it should get to N140.
Again, all these issues about the Kolade Committee and subsidy reinvestment committee issues are to me an after-thought. All the issues that have been included in the Kolade committee mandate are budget items that we have been appropriating funds for. Are we saying that the money we have spent on railway during the Yar’adua tenure is not as effective as the money you will get from the removal of subsidy? Are we saying that it is only the money from the subsidy removal that will correct the imbalance in the public sector? I think that they are an after-thought and government should come out with better and more convincing reasons and programmes.
Was the National Assembly not consulted in the process?
If I say the National Assembly was not consulted then I will be lying, but consultation is not arrived at the point of taking a decision. The President asked the coordinating minister on the economy to brief the National Assembly. She came up with some slides and said we will do this and that and when we do so we are going to create jobs and this and that and the response then was a resounding no! In fact at some point the minister was actually booed. Then the Senate President rose up to the occasion and said, ‘okay you have introduced this, let us go to our respective chambers and digest it and come out with a resolution’, we never got back to him with a resolution, then we heard that they have started implementation. Yes the matter was introduced but there was no resolution. So I can say that the President introduced the matter to the National Assembly but he did not get our own feedback.
The decision of the Presidency led to protests and crises here and there. Do you think this method helps government test the waters about its policies?
I think it should be the other way round. Rather than introduce an unpopular policy that will elicit disapprovals, government should learn to factor the people into policy formulations before undertaking to implement them. However let me say that I understand the psychology of leadership. Most leaders do not retrace their steps. So it is to the credit of the President to accept that if his policy was meant to serve the people and the people are saying no, he should retrace. I want to appreciate the President for that humility.
Most Nigerians believe that the National Assembly is to blame for the economic problems in the country because some of the leakages that pave way for corruption should have been taken care of if the legislature was up and doing with its oversight functions.
You see there are many factors responsible for the issue you raised. Don’t forget that we are only 12 years old as an institution. If the military comes, the first casualty is the legislature. They cannot dissolve the court neither can they dissolve the bureaucracy. So we are still very young and we are learning. The first is that the high turn-over rate is a problem. When people come, they will start learning the ropes; before they will start understanding the practice, the four years would have elapsed and they will go and a new set of green horns will come. This attitude of ‘it is my turn’ will not allow the system to benefit from the cognate experience of the lawmakers.
So every new assembly that is inaugurated will have a new set of people that will start learning the ropes and the working of the legislature. So in that case, when you send a new legislature to, say, the ministry of defence, he will not know what to look for and how to checkmate the bureaucrats. He does not have what it takes to checkmate them.
Secondly, the legislature as an institution has missed it. We missed it in terms of generation of data. In the U S, there is what is called the office of congressional budget. That office comes up with a damning document that looks more like an opposition party document coming with alternative view point with policies of government.
Here in Nigeria, the legislature relies on the executive for data. If we raise questions on how much was disbursed and how it as spent, we still rely on the executive for information. When they propose budget, they come with their figures and we approve. That cannot checkmate the corruption in the system.
We should rise above story telling. We should be able to access the document in the Central Bank; in bank reconciliation and have experts to scrutinise spending and assess projects as they are on the ground and come up with professional advice on the cost of the projects at the time the certificates were issued. You see, we have not been able to do that.
There is this wide spread perception that the National Assembly is very corrupt and as such cannot check corruption in the system.
I disagree with you. Nigerians seems to agree that the people they elected should not be entrusted with public funds and that the public funds they are entrusted with amount to corruption; that is wrong. I will give you an example. Go to every government offices, you will find out that every director or assistant director has a budget. The deputy director, staff matters has a budget, deputy director audit has a budget; they all have budgets which they administer. They write and the man in-charge approves and payments are made and they make retirements. That is what obtains in the civil service.
The National Assembly has simply said that every elected official should have an office and that the office should attract a running cost in the mould of what obtains in the civil service. In our case, the head of Senate and the head of the House approve. People should apply and make retirements. How does that translate to corruption other than what obtains in the civil service? It does not. I am given a running cost which I administer in the manner prescribed because there are sub heads.
When I travel, I come back with a flight ticket; I give them to retire. That is in the interest of the service. How does that translate to corruption? We don’t award contracts. So saying that we take money outside what is prescribed is not correct. Let me tell you what I have. I have a housing advance of N5 million for four years and another N5million for furniture. By rank, I am higher than a minister. I am higher than a governor. A minister takes N25 million while a senator takes N5 million. Check if that is fair and just. It is not. Yet we are the most maligned; most misrepresented and criticised. I will give you another example. Talking about the budget, I have just told you about the constrains we have in oversight and so on. We are given money to engage the services of a consultant. If I do that, tell me how it translates to corruption? The tragedy of the National Assembly stems from the fact that we have an arm of government than controls less than five percent of the national budget, but is expected to operate with very high pedestal to be able to oversight the people who spend more than 95 percent of the budget. So what is happening in the National Assembly is sheer blackmail. We in the National Assembly do not award contracts. We do not keep government money. So what are they talking about?
Now you are the chairman of the Drugs, Narcotic and Financial Crimes Committee and you oversee the anti-graft agencies like the EFCC and the ICPC. What magic wand are you bringing into the anti-graft effort in the country?
I believe that the agencies of government as they are, have ran short of ideas on how these jobs can be done. War against corruption is not about allowing somebody to steal N50 million then you arrest them and recover N30 million. We want a situation that you will be stopped even to take N10 not to talk of N1,000.
As a matter of fact, if EFCC has risen to the occasion and had taken a proactive step on the stable of corruption which is the petroleum industry, the mistrust that informed the strikes in Nigeria would not have been there because people would have been assured that the corrupt tendencies would have been curbed by the agencies empowered to do so.
I am approaching this assignment with all sense of seriousness; but with a very serious sense of objectivism because I am aware that the various books and laws of the land frowns very seriously at corruption and if I say or do things that are not approved by the law, I will be destroying the destiny of some people.
So I am taking this job from a systemic point of view. I do not like this police approach of arrest and grandstanding and at the end of the day there is no conviction. That is what is obtainable and that is why we are not getting anywhere.
Let us look at the issue this way. What is it that gives civil servants access and undue say in the process of award of contract? The first is that he initiates the memo, in the memo he spells out the job and spells out conditions and other issues concerning the job. That is not so good; we should have a system where another person will undertake the bill of quantity and then the process of communication leading to the award. A situation where you allow one man to have contact with all these points will enable him corrupt the system.
I am approaching this assignment with alternative view. The perception now is that it is only government people, that is, legislators and governors and local government chairmen that are corrupt, but I tell you, the quantum of resources pilfered in the private sector makes the budget figures a child play.
Look at the oil and gas sector. Check the administration of very large gas carriers that convey gas in and outside this country no single Nigerian is involved in that business. Nobody knows how much gas that is taken away. We should insist that we have agents of anti-graft bodies to be present. I will give you an example. Hiring one vessel alone cost about $150, 000 a day. No Nigerian is involved in the supply or maintenance of the vessels.
No Nigerians know how much gas that is taken; the same thing for petrol because oil multinationals are the monopoly. Forget what they tell us. No Nigerian knows the amount of petrol that is taken out of the country. So the situation now is that whatever they declare as returns is what we start basing our budget projections on. I think that is not correct. That is why I said that our approach should be systemic.
We are going to canvass for a legislation to make our anti-graft agencies independent. Their sources of fundshould be on first line charge. Look at the Chairman of the EFCC come here with his budget. If we want to frustrate him, what we will do is that if he requests for N25 million for investigations and prosecution, we will give him N5 million. What that means is that I don’t want him to take anybody to court. So unless and until we look at the enabling legislation and truly guarantee their independence, we will not be helping the anti-graft agencies to win the war.
You will also notice that the anti-graft agencies have been finding it difficult to secure conviction due to congestion in courts. We are going to create a special court in the mould of the Code of Conduct Bureau to exclusively handle corruption cases. We will also put a lot of emphasis on personnel and training. The whole workforce of the EFCC is less than 500 for a population of about 150 million people. That is why they are almost limited to government offices. The corruption and theft that is perpetrated in the private sector is far more than what is going on in the public sector. I am not saying that people in the public sector are saints but the impression should not be created as if it is only the National Assembly and state governors, ministers and local government chairmen are the only corrupt people.
Some people are worried that the EFCC is using more of media hype for its operations.
We in the committee have come to an understanding with the leadership of the EFCC and the ICPC on that. In my address during the inauguration of our committee, we made it clear that we must bring international best practices in the system. Now they are doing quite a lot of work. Recently they swung into action over the allegation of fraud in the petroleum industry; that has not been reported like before. A number of high ranking people have made useful contribution. So they are still investigating so they cannot go to the press until they finish.
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