Elizabeth Ohene: Lessons from Nigeria
When Lagos was still the capital of Nigeria, I once sat in budget hearings for the Nigerian Foreign Affairs Ministry and I heard a senator dismiss Ghana as a country whose national budget was smaller than the budget of one state of their then 18-state federation.
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Touche‛, I said, and Ghana once defeated you in a football game with a score line of 7-0, or as a former boss of mine used to put it, we spelt their name with goals: N-I-G-E-R-I-A, 7-0. We tease each other. We emulate each other’s mistakes, we irritate each other, we hate each other’s guts and dare I say it, before a third person, we would defend each other to death.
I hesitate to say this but at the moment, I believe we in Ghana can and should learn a few lessons from Nigeria, our eternal rivals.
Ebola prevention lesson
The first lesson is the way they managed to prevent the crisis triggered by the entry into Lagos of the Ebola patient, Patrick Sawyer, into becoming a disaster of monumental proportions.
The handling of the problem was admirable and has undoubtedly led to a great improvement in the image of Nigeria. People will have to hesitate now before they dismiss Nigeria as a land of perpetual chaos.
The second lesson is a bit tricky because of the reputation that Nigeria has as a country that looms large in the area of the looting of public money.
There is more in the public purse in Nigeria and therefore more to steal and our Nigerian cousins have always demonstrated they are braver by far than us and the stories of how much public officials have stolen in Nigeria are legendary.
Lessons on accountability
Last week there was a story reported in the Nigerian media that I felt ought to be of interest to us in Ghana and that might offer us a few lessons.
The story states: “the State High Court in Gusau, Zamfara State, has sentenced acting Provost of the Federal College of Education, Technical, Gusau, Dr Bello Ahmed, to five years imprisonment for collecting double Duty Tour Allowance, DTA, for the same trip.
Dr Ahmed was accused of collecting DTA, between November 13 and 16, 2006, from the college for an official trip to attend a board meeting of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, while equally collecting an equal amount as DTA from JAMB, including sitting allowances, all totalling N385,000.00.
The accused, who was arraigned by ICPC on an eight-count charge bordering on corruption and abuse of office, pleaded guilty to the offence and asked for leniency. (The ICPC stands for the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission.)
However, the presiding Judge, Justice Amaize, said he was not swayed by the plea of allocutus, as the accused lacked integrity and sentenced Ahmed to five years imprisonment without an option of a fine”.
Three hundred and eighty-five thousand naira is the equivalent of about GH¢7,500, or 2,332 US dollars, and one may make the point that in the scheme of things in Nigeria where people are said to steal public funds on the scale of hundreds of millions of US dollars, this Provost might be said to have been unlucky.
But the story struck me because I have never heard of any official in Ghana being hauled up before any court for such an offence. Indeed, I am not sure that any such offence exists here on our books; and yet I am quite sure there are possibly hundreds of officials who abuse the system in a similar way here in Ghana.
Doubtless, there are probably thousands of Nigerian officials who regularly claim double DTA, and have got away with it all their working lives. But I am certain that many Nigerian officials will now be a little careful about claiming Duty Tour Allowance (I don’t know what the equivalent of DTA is in Ghana, but I am sure we have one) from their departments and from the organisations on whose boards they serve.
For some years now, the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament has been holding public hearings and we have been hearing details of how public funds are dissipated. Apart from the theatre of the hearings, I am unaware that any official of any rank has been brought before the courts as a result of the findings of the Auditor General that made it to the Public Accounts Committee.
In much the same way, presidential commissions and committees of inquiry into various scandals now serve as entertainment with live broadcasts of their proceedings where the chairmen of the committees are turned into stars for a while. We all know nobody is going to be prosecuted for changing an amount clearly denominated in cedis into dollars.
I know I should not get carried away by one story of one middle level official being prosecuted for petty thievery when people have been stealing on gigantic scale and been getting away with it.
I can just hear many people asking why should we be worrying about people stealing GH¢ 300 or GH¢3000 when people are stealing 10, 30, 50 million Ghana cedis and getting away with it.
A few years ago, nobody in Ghana dreamt that anybody could steal five million cedis of public funds; we didn’t think we had such money in the public purse to be stolen. Now we know better. And if you don’t prosecute those who steal three thousand, you are not likely to go after those who steal three million either.
And while I am on the possible lessons there are to learn from our neighbours in Nigeria, it is worth recalling that they did retrieve $120 million from a former Inspector General of Police.
I agree that the quantum of public money per capita stolen by public officials in Nigeria is probably much higher than in Ghana, but we have no example of retrieving money from an IGP or sending a Provost to jail for claiming double DTA.
Therein lies our problem and that is why we should be learning some lessons from Nigeria.