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From: maggie anaeto <maganaeto@yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 15:17:53 +0000 (GMT)
To: ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com<ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com>
ReplyTo: maggie anaeto <maganaeto@yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: SANUSI AND THE VARIETIES OF WHISTLEBLOW
SANUSI AND THE VARIETIES OF WHISTLEBLOWING
Ayo Olukotun
The recent suspension of Central Bank Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi has been trailed in the media by heated and unprecedented debate.
Lawyers lined up on both sides of the divide have paid microscopic attention to the provisions of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Act of 2007 with a view to finding if there is legal warrant or not for the president's action. Similarly, the report of the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN) which indicted Sanusi has been torn to shreds by some analysts who take the view that a whistle blower is being hounded or by those who for other reasons have cause to plead his case.
A respected Professor of Law and former university Vice-Chancellor posted on his blog a point by point rebuttal of the allegations contained in the FRCN Report. Sanusi himself could not have done a better job. On the side of Sanusi's critics are those like well known lawyer, Chief Mike Ozekhome (SAN) who argue that his misdeeds are such that he ought to have been fired long ago. Obviously, only a court of competent jurisdiction can resolve the extensive legal tussle surrounding the president's action.
But leaving aside the suspicious timing of the president's axe coming close to Sanusi's exposure of the running scams in NNPC, it would appear to be stretching the meaning of autonomy if it is construed as a licence to operate above the law or if nobody in the system can call the governor to order. Indeed, much has been made of the independence of the Central Bank. These assertions, however, should be taken in the light of the fact that the credo is no longer as sacrosanct as it used to be in the aftermath of the global financial crises of 2007 to 2008 which saw the American Federal Reserve Bank, the Bank of Japan as well as the Bank of England surrendering some of their autonomy as fiscal and monetary policies converged in the bid to create soft landings for those economies. The autonomy model also did not quite apply to the developmental states of East Asia which practiced a form of developmental central banking. This point as well as the issue of whether autonomy under Sanusi's watch has been twisted to empire building do not strictly apply to the current legal controversy which pertains to the interpretation of the CBN Act; nonetheless they should be kept on the burner as the nation seeks to learn the lessons of the Sanusi suspension saga.
But there are other issues involved especially political ones. This writer invited a howl of protests from Sanusi's sympathisers on the Freedom of Information Coalition listserv by suggesting that even though Sanusi had sensationally exposed the rot and corruption in the system, a desirable moral enterprise, no government in the world would tolerate its being indicted repeatedly by a high ranking state official who has access to privileged information. Was I arguing that Sanusi should have kept quiet in the face of the monstrous drain pipe which the NNPC has become? The answer is no; but as Femi Falana (SAN) has recently admonished and I believe from the point of view of decorum, Sanusi ought to have taken the option of resignation which was extended to him by the president rather than hanging on in the manner of a whistle blower to rebuke the system from inside.
Let us factor that although whistle blowing by disaffected insiders within a system as well as protection for whistle blowers are becoming increasingly important in the global fight against corruption the odds even in the advanced democracies are still immense. President Barrack Obama of the United States has acquired a reputation for carrying out a crackdown on whistle blowers by prosecuting them under espionage charges. Indeed, when Edward Snowden blew the lid on the massive surveillance policy of the National Security Agency last year, he famously told a reporter from the Guardian as he was escaping to exile that he did not expect to see his homeland again. In short, for all the progress made towards the protection of whistle blowers it remains everywhere a high risk undertaking which in some tragic cases have resulted in the death of the whistle blower.
That said, it should be remembered that not all whistle blowers decide to go public. Recall for example, that it took 30 years before the world got to know that the 'Deep Throat' that leaked information to two Washington Post reporters causing an uproar which resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in the 1970s was none other than W. Mark Felt who was billed to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) but was bypassed by Nixon in preference for a political ally. Even in our own political culture whistle blowers have flourished underground. In the course of my academic research about a decade and a half ago into the phenomenon of the guerrilla media I was astonished to discover that several leaks were made to the personnel of the media by top level insiders within the Abacha administration but who of course for obvious reasons had to remain anonymous.
To get back to Sanusi, he had a choice of being a less voluble reformer within the system or that of resigning to indict the administration using evidence that he had gathered during his tenure. In choosing to stay on to, as Tunde Fagbenle put it in the Sunday Punch (February 23, 2014) "continually poke his finger into the eye of the government he belongs to and dug his finger into the president's mouth daring him to bite him if he could" Sanusi chose a course in Nigeria's highly criminalised polity that was fraught with immense dangers. That scenario becomes even more vivid when taken in the context of Sanusi's own lapses not just those observed by the FRCN some of which are serious but those earlier revealed by such media as the Sahara Reporters.
All of this however, is only one side of the story. The other perhaps more important aspect is that Nigerians and the entire world are watching what will become of the severe irregularities and apparent daylight swindles to the tune of $20 billion revealed by Sanusi. It is a good thing that President Goodluck Jonathan promised in his media briefing on Monday that he would get to the bottom of the perennial short changing of the nation by the conglomerate. But we can't just leave it at that considering that several such promises in the past have gone unfulfilled.
Civil society should exert pressure on the presidency to ensure that the rape of the nation by the NNPC which has gone on for long is brought to an end. Of course it must do this in conjunction with the National Assembly which has the power of oversight on the Executive as well as with reformist insiders of a quiet bent within the administration.
The bottom line however should be that the nation should not return to the morass that the NNPC was and continues to be before Sanusi blew the whistle on it.
Prof Olukotun is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Entrepreneurial Studies at Lead City University, Ibadan. ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com 07055841236