SAN FRANCISCO, June 21, (THEWILL) – Mallam Ahmed Joda, the Chairman of the President Muhammadu Buhari Transition committee has revealed that the past Goodluck Jonathan government left behind a whooping N7 trillion deficit.

 

Joda, a retired Federal Permanent Secretary, who had also served in two previous presidential transition committees (Chairman, 1979 committee) in an interview with the Daily Trust newspaper, disclosed that the transition committee found evidence of corruption “everywhere’ during its work.

 

The committee submitted its report to President Buhari about a week ago.

 

“Nigeria should be ready to face a lot of challenges. The biggest in my view is corruption; it is everywhere. There is no department, no ministry that can be said to be free of corruption. There is nowhere that fraud does not take place on a daily basis,” Joda said in the interview Sunday.

 

The full text of the interview is reproduced below:

 

Can you recall your experience when you were appointed to head the APC transition committee and your feelings over the appointment?
I really don’t know how I felt. I had gone to bed and there was a bang on my door at about 1:30 am and I was naturally feeling sleepy and even afraid that anybody should wake me up at that hour. But they persisted so I opened the door and asked what it was and they said it was the president-elect who wanted to speak with me. I woke up a little bit jolted and the person who was on the telephone said the president-elect wanted to speak to me but they couldn’t get me earlier so he had just gone up but wanted to see you tomorrow. I do get surprises like that sometimes but I went to bed and slept without knowing what he was calling me for. But I guessed that it must be some kind of involvement in the transition, though I didn’t know in what capacity. The next day I flew back to Abuja and met with the president. He told me about my appointment as chairman of his transition committee. I thanked him for the honour and privilege to serve our country and that was it. He then gave me a letter with the terms of reference attached and said I should do the work in two weeks and I made two observations. That, for the size of the task the number of the members was too small because I anticipated that we needed to set up a number of specialized committees that would receive volumes and volumes of papers from both the government and from other interested parties: the business community, the society groups, individuals who felt they wanted to make an input. He explained to me why the size of the committee was kept too low and I said the time was too short, but he said I should try and do it. Our first problem was where to meet and work; how to get the personnel that would help to do the work, set up the secretariat and appoint the resource persons, appoint rapporteurs and everything. It took us three days to find a suitable area of buildings where we could do our work efficiently. We then had to buy the computers and the necessary hard and software with which to work. At the end of the first week we were ready to go and I had my first meeting with the former secretary to the federal government after one week of being appointed and we learnt that the government handover notes, upon which our terms of reference were based, would not be available to us until sometime in May, which would be four weeks after we were appointed and two weeks after our mandate would have terminated. We had to strategize to receive memoranda; sometimes even without invitation there were a lot of memoranda coming from the public, trade groups, chambers of commerce, industry experts whether oil or gas, agriculture or electricity or transport, railway, waterways, port, harbours; everything was coming. But there was nothing coming from the government and we did not receive a single piece of paper until May 25, four days to the handover. This came in many volumes amounting to 18,000 pages so we had to set up our work groups and about five sub-committees. We spent the next three to four days trying to sort these papers out and assigning them to the various committees. We couldn’t start real work until the first of June and we eventually submitted our report and our recommendationson Friday the last week to the president.

Specifically, what were the major terms of reference given to your committee?

Broadly speaking, we were to receive the handover notes from the outgoing government, study the notes, analyze them and make recommendations to the government on the economy specifically, on governance, security, corruption, on ministries and departments of government and agencies, defence; nearly everything you can think about. Specifically, we had to look into revenue streams from NNPC, from Federal Inland Revenue Service, Customs and other big corporations of government.

In the course of your assignment were you under some kind of pressure from people coming to lobby for one favour or the other?

There was a lot of that from people who wanted contract, who wanted to be given special favours. They were coming to me day and night and I said to them these are my terms of reference; they didn’t include things like award of contracts or recovery of bad debts from government or for employment of any group of people or individuals. I told them these were not part of our terms of reference. But we continued to receive them and nobody believed me when I said I could not appoint them ministers or chairmen or whatever; they said look you have influence on Buhari and I said I don’t have and even if I had I didn’t think he would respect me if all I did was go to him with piles papers and saying he should do this favour to this or that man or this or that woman. Also, I was inundated with telephone calls. For example, somebody telephoned and after introduction said he wanted to vie for the position of minister of sports. I said well I don’t know the address to which you would send it to.

Did you come under similar pressures from people connected with the government of the past government who wanted to cover or influence certain things?

No! Not one single case. I have had people coming to me to say they had information about what went wrong, but I said to them we were not an investigative panel, and even if we were given that term of reference we would politely tell the president that we could not be investigators because we didn’t know how to investigate and more importantly we didn’t have time to undertake such investigations. But where people submitted documents incriminating people we just put them in envelopes and sent them to the relevant authorities.

You said it was barely four days to May 29 when you received communication from the past government’s transition committee. How did that delay impact on your assignment?

Of course, it delayed our work because we were mainly to receive the handover notes from ministries, departments and agencies of government. But we could not receive them for five or nearly six weeks after our appointment and, to that extent, our work was delayed. But as soon as we realized that this was going to happen we devised methods of getting our information because so much of this information is in the public domain. The problem was that you couldn’t define the true situation in the government.

When you submitted your report to the president you called on Nigerians to be patient with him over his cabinet appointments.  What informed that appeal?

Well, I was the chairman of the transition committee in 1979 when General Obasanjo handed over to president Shagari. That handover was the military deciding on their own to handover power back to the civilians. They conducted the elections, accepted the outcome and decided to hand over and go and rest. There was no acrimony between incoming and the outgoing government because they were all polite and nice; it was smooth. By the time I was appointed chairman the Obasanjo administration had set up a complete office, furnished it and equipped it together with committee and conference rooms. He had also appointed people from the civil service and from the private sector to serve as rapporteurs, resource persons and so on. All we needed to do was to walk into these offices and start work; absolutely there was no problem. In 1999, I was on what Obasanjo called Presidential Policy Advisory Group under the chairmanship of General T.Y Danjuma and I was Number Two and the same thing happened. We had a complete office block already made, vehicles and buses and our accommodation had been booked and when you arrived everything was smooth, including all the handing over notes were prepared on the first day. We had everything. Now, this election is the first time in the history of Nigeria that an opposition party had uprooted a ruling party. It was not just changing the president or changing the members of the states or national assemblies. We were all witnesses to the election campaigns, how bitter it was. There were predictions that the country would collapse; there were also all sorts of allegations and counter-allegations and the environment was very hostile. People were expecting the worst, but God, in His infinite mercies, diffused all the tension but, perhaps, the outgone government did not expect to lose the election, I don’t know. They lost the election and had to put up a brave face.

 

I, as a person, I completely understood the difficult situation emotionally they were in but the meetings I had with both the SGF and Vice President Namadi Sambo were extremely friendly. They offered me all the cooperation and we discussed things as Nigerians. I personally decided that I was not going to enter into any controversy or make the situation worse. In any case, whatever they did or did not do would not likely affect the critical question of the change of government on May 29. And if they didn’t give us any information that information would be ours on that May 29. Therefore, I worked on this basis and I think our committee accepted that way of doing things instead of creating unnecessary additional tension to the political environment.

Was there any interface between your committee and some of the critical sectors of the past government and if there wasn’t, how did you cope?

The situation was this: we were to receive the handing over notes, study them and wherever necessary to seek clarifications from wherever, whether ministers, civil servants or chairmen of boards or chief executives of parastatals. But, like I told you, we did not receive those notes in time and our terms of reference although extended by the president limited us by the mere fact of our name ‘transition committee’. On May 29, we could not be a transition committee because the transition had ended. We did not want to ask for extension in order to be able to interrogate the other government people. In any case the ministers had gone and it would have been a complicated, probably expensive exercise to bring them. We did not want to stay and nobody asked us to extend our time to interrogate them so what we said in our report is that look in view of the fact that the handover notes were delayed we did not have time to interrogate, question or interact with any of the people of government; therefore we leave this to the incoming government. In any case, it would be an investigative thing by now and the government can do what it likes.

What would you consider to be the greatest challenges you face in carrying out this assignment?

Nigeria should be ready to face a lot of challenges. The biggest in my view is corruption; it is everywhere. There is no department, no ministry that can be said to be free of corruption. There is nowhere that fraud does not take place on a daily basis. It has become embedded in the minds of the people because the rule books have been thrown away and everybody is doing what they like. Nobody follows the rules anymore. You employ people anyhow and pay them anyhow and I think you in the media have a fairly idea of what is going on and are surprised how bad things are. I often wondered, since the beginning of this exercise, if the PDP and president Jonathan had won the election what would have been the fate of Nigeria. It would have been more difficult for them to face the challenge because they had been telling people that everything was good; the roads are good. They were not talking about the absence of light in the house, but they were talking about the capacity to produce electricity is 12,000 megawatts out of which only 5,000 could be released. But even out of this 5,000 at the time they were doing the handing over notes only 1,300 megawatts were being generated, but they were talking about 35,000 kilometers of distribution lines and so on, but nobody told us the real problem – that there is no gas, or there is no capacity to transmit the electricity that could be generated; that even when it is delivered at the point of distribution the distribution system is so weak that it can’t take it. I personally didn’t know that until I got into this exercise. Now, if they came back, they couldn’t wake up in the morning and say we can’t pay salaries, we couldn’t do this or even pay contractors and might even not be able to pay pensions and gratuities or finance any of our operations. We were told at the beginning of the exercise that the government was in deficit of at least N1.3 trillion and by the end people were talking about N7 trillion; everything is in a state of collapse. The civil service is bloated and the military and police, if you are a Nigerian, you know what they have been facing for a long time; everywhere is in a mess and these things have to be fixed.

OK! I think NLC should go on strike for this. After all its been strike here and there through out his tenure

Worst president ever..

Too lng 4 me to comprehend. Wetin i go say nw? Well make we just cont. to pray 4 dis country sha.

I sorry sorry ooo, I sorry for Nigeria.

Rubbish

Jooooonatan the hero

Okay