X-RAYING JONATHAN’S GOAT AND YAM ANALOGY
By Abdurrahman Adeyemi

If I were on the news desk, my headline after the last media chat by President Goodluck Jonathan would have read “Anti-corruption: Don’t Keep Goat and Yam Together, says Jonathan”.

Until that media chat, I never really appreciated the President’s approach to anti-corruption. For a country that is used to dramatized arrests and entertaining arraignments in court, you would not really blame those who were critical of the President because no one had taken the time as Mr. President did to explain his anti-corruption philosophies.

It was the former Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Malam Nuhu Ribadu, who once said that when you fight corruption, corruption also fights back. Fighting corruption in a democratic Nigeria is not exactly the same as fighting corruption in a military regime or in advanced democracies like the USA and UK. It comes with an assortment of weighty loads, such as judicial corruption, legal loopholes, appeal to political, ethnic, and religious sentiments, etc.

That is why, except former Governor Lucky Igbinedion who ‘naively’ pleaded guilty in a plea bargain arrangement, the celebrated arraignment of former Governors by the Ribadu regime have gone nowhere since 2007. The actual trial is yet to start in most of the cases as the courts and lawyers continue with pre-trial rigmaroles and gymnastics. A former governor even got a perpetual injunction restraining the EFCC from arresting or arraigning him, while the Supreme Court only recently ruled that former Governor Joshua Dariye should stand trial for corruption- 8 years after he was first arraigned.

Even when the courts give some judgments, the popular feeling among the populace that only people who did not steal enough to go round the right quarters pay for their sins. How does one begin to lament all over again in the case of John Yakubu, the self-confessed pension thief who got a paltry N750,000 (Seven hundred and fifty Naira) fine for stealing N32 billion pension fund?
Worst still, corruption in Nigeria borders on depravity. Otherwise, why on earth would a sane man steal old people’s pension/livelihood and bring curse on their present and future generations? A furious Senate President, Senator David Mark, once said “Pension money is blood money… whoever steals money meant for pensioners is guilty of taking blood money and would suffer the pains associated with taking blood money”.

But did the cabal of pension thieves ever care? After all, they were hitherto the untouchables who hold the law enforcement agencies, the judiciary, bureaucracy, political leadership, and even the media hostage through corrupt manipulations, and inducements. They are laws unto themselves. Impunity is their surname. So, for all they care, the old can pay death by installments through starvation, curable, and avoidable diseases.

It is against such background that Mr. President’s ‘goat and yam’ philosophy or preventive approach in the anticorruption struggle can be best appreciated. As he rightly pointed, keeping a corrupt Nigerian top bureaucrat or politician and money together is like keeping the goat and yam together and expecting that nothing would happen. Granted, we might be lucky sometimes. But why gamble with the yam when you can actually build foolproof administrative and technological systems capable of denying the goat access to the yam in the first place?

We must give it to the President that his anticorruption strategy of denying access to public fund has worked in all the key areas it has been applied. The introduction of the Integrated Payroll System (IPS), according to the Director-General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms, helped weed out ghost workers in federal public service, saving the nation some N160 billion as at December 2014. Until the introduction of the Electronic Wallet System in the agricultural sector by President Jonathan, Nigeria had simply been subsidizing corruption for over 40 years in a futile attempt to get fertilizer, seedling, and other critical farm inputs to farmers. But with this, government cut off the middlemen gave farmers direct access to manufacturers through the subsidized electronic vouchers sent to their mobile phones. For decades, people used to supply bags of sand as fertilizer and get away with it.

In the pension area, which is my main focus, the activation and reform of the Pension Transitional Arrangement Department (PTAD)- by the Jonathan Administration has helped to curb corruption in the pension sector.

Lest we mix things up, there are two sets of pensioners: the pre-Pension Reform Act 2004 (Defined Benefits Scheme called the old pension scheme) and the post-Pension Reform pensioners (Contributory Pension Scheme- CPS) directly regulated and supervised by the National Pension Commission (PENCOM). The later has no problem because no one can even steal from the fund. It is tamper proof. Each contributor has his/her Retirement Savings Account (RSA) where his/her benefits are deposited monthly and they get alerts. The Pension Fund Administrator (PFA) is also separate from the Pension Fund Custodian. Thus, the person who keeps the money cannot spend it, while the fund administrator has no access to the money. Even former President Obasanjo, Jonathan’s biting critic, gave him kudos for maintaining the sanctity of the contributory pension fund, which now stands at over N4 trillion.

Unfortunately, it is a different story for the old pension scheme. Pension Departments like the Civil Service Pension Department; Police Pension Office; and the Customs, Immigration and Prisons Pension Office (CIPPO) handle their pensions. Regrettably, these were turned into covens of pension witches where the nation’s resources are bled and death warrant of pensioners signed. The N273 billion looting for which Abdulrasheed Maina, John Yusuf, Atiku Kigo, etc were in the news occurred just in the Police Pension Office alone.

How was this monumental theft possible? Every year, the government made funds available to these Pension Departments to service pensioners under their Departments. The beneficiaries here were supposed to be reducing until the scheme fizzles out because whereas no new pensioners join it (new pensioners fall under the Contributory Pension Scheme), pensioners under this scheme grow older and pass on.

However, trust the evil geniuses in the pension offices who use ghost pensioners to milk the government. There were real and man-made ghost pensioners. The real ghosts were pensioners who died, but whose pensions kept running into the private accounts of the pension cabals because they were not declared dead to government. Man-made ghost ‘pensioners’ never existed in the first place, but were mere names planted for siphoning the treasury.

Worst of all, these crooks would not even pay the living pensioners. They use endless verification exercises to buy time. Thus, while pensioners died in road crashes travelling up and down; while they slumped and died in the queues in the name of verification exercises that never verified anything, pension funds stashed away in fixed deposits yielded interests (blood money) for the cabal.

Instructively, such stealing could have been curtailed simply by activating Section 20 (2)(a) of the Pension Reform Act 2004, which provided for the Pension Transmission Arrangement Directorate (PTAD). This system should have consolidated and taken over the various Pension Departments long ago so that pensioners’ monies could be transmitted directly into their accounts without the involvement of a third party (the Pension Departments). It is a kind of financial autonomy for pensioners.
The PTAD was conceived to use institutional framework to sanitise and stabilise the pension departments and institutionalise a viable, virile and transparent pension system that is devoid of corruption and other sharp practices. It was conceived to resolve the complaints of pensioners and eliminate undue interference by other government agencies. Indeed, it was conceived to consolidate the pension offices and centralise the pensioner database and IT platform that would make it impossible to steal pension funds.

Admittedly, the Pension Reform Act 2004 left some structural and administrative issues in the running of the PTAD that needed to be addressed. But the main reason it was never activated was because it was not in the interest of the cabal and the powers that be to do so. It was their slush funds- like the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF).

However, the Jonathan Administration not only mustered the courage to activate the PTAD and appoint an Executive-Director for it in August 2013, it further spearheaded the Pension Reform (Amendment) Act, 2014 to, among many other critical reforms, properly establish and strengthen the PTAD. Section 41(20) of the Act has removed the ambiguities in the parent Act and enhanced PENCOM’s oversight and regulatory powers over the PTAD.

The Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, recently told pension stakeholders that since its setting up, the PTAD has helped fish out over 15,000 ghost pensioners and saved the nation about N4.2 billion that would have gone down the corruption drain. Instructively, only 3 geopolitical zones have been verified! Little wonder the Federal Universities Pensioners Association, described the Jonathan pension reform in this respect as the shortest and safest route between pensioners and their pensions. In other words, the middlemen- the pension departments- cut off and denied access to pension funds, the yam is now kept away from the goat and pensioners can now sleep with two eyes closed.

I believe this is a better way to fight corruption than the usually dramatized arrests and arraignments that get nowhere.
Adeyemi wrote in from Ilorin

http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/x-raying-jonathan-s-goat-and-yam-analogy/204079/