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(Editorial) PenCOM and its ethnic polemics-Editorial

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When Mrs. Chinelo Anohu-Amazu was appointed Director General (DG) of the National Pension Commission (PenCom) in September 2014 several people had thought the move to be prescient. Anohu-Amazu started at the Commission as its pioneer secretary/legal adviser and worked with a formidable team of technocrats headed by the Commission’s erstwhile Chairman Fola Adeola. On being appointed DG she laid out a carefully crafted agenda to consolidate on early gains on the introduction of a unified contributory pension (UCP) scheme by growing pensions under administration from N2.9 trillion in 2012 (when she was acting DG) to N6.5 trillion, or 124 per cent, as at the time of her removal. Anohu-Amazu’s offence was therefore, not apparently her performance, but something she had no control over, her ethnic origin.

As at the time of her exit, Anohu-Amazu had another two years left of her five year tenure. She was appointed DG on 30th September 2014 and her tenure would have expired on 29th September 2019. A curious dimension to her removal is that the regulation setting up the agency requires that if an incumbent DG is to be removed or cannot for any other reason continue his or her tenure, a person from that individual’s geopolitical region must replace him or her as the new DG. In the instance of Anohu-Amazu’s removal, she was initially replaced by Alhaji Aliyu Dikko, from the North Western part of the country, the same zone as the President. Indeed, it has been alleged that Aliyu Dikko is a cousin to the President’s Chief of Staff Abba Kyari. To be sure, Dikko is a bright professional, a onetime banker and chartered accountant with sterling professional antecedents, but constitutionally he was wrongly appointed. The same holds true for the subsequent appointment of Mr Funso Doherty from the South West of the country. Apart from the shallow and ethnically-motivated protest of the Arewa Youth Consultative Forum over the removal of Dikko (who should not have been appointed DG in the first place for the added reason that he held a board-level relationship with Premium Pension Limited, a local pension fund administrator), the Acting President Yemi Osinbajo’s appointment of Funso Doherty as the replacement DG of PenCom is an equally horrible and embarrassing abuse of office. The fact that the Acting President is a Professor of law and a onetime Attorney General and Commissioner of Justice in Lagos State makes the flagrant violation of the Pension Reform Act’s (PRA’s) section 19, 20 and 21 even more distressing.

Business Hallmark insists that a nation cannot possibly mature into a viable and progressive democracy if its principal public officers deliberately violate the country’s own laws. Where do we draw the lines between the laws we should obey and those we should ignore? Who should decide when judgments are clownish pronouncements of courts of competent jurisdiction and when they are binding statements of learned adjudicators? Flagrant disrespect of the country’s laws, regardless of the persons or institutions involved, can only lead to chaos.

The Acting President has one of two courses of action he could steer to try (even if lamely) to repair the damage to this administrations integrity that the Anohu-Amazu debacle has caused. The first option open to him to remedy this abuse of the constitution is to void the recent appointment and reinstate the erstwhile DG and allow her complete her term or appoint a new DG from the South Eastern zone of the country consistent with the constitution. Not taking any of these paths of honour, would underscore the correctness of the agitation of the South East about its marginalization from positions of prominence in government. The three-legged tripod upon which the delicate structure of Nigeria’s democracy stands cannot in the foreseeable future hold up against such blatant discrimination and savage treatment of a region that has produced some of the country’s finest professionals.

The Presidents visceral dislike for the Igbo people should not be translated into state policy. The Acting President, Osinbajo, has a date with history; it is his decision to fulfill the grand opportunity that God has given him to reset Nigeria along a course where everybody regardless of tribe, religion or creed believe that they matter and that they are unequivocally protected by laws that are respected by all. Alternatively he could choose to ride history like a donkey and pursue a destructive course of deepening the growing divide in the country.

But beyond ethnicity, the trite and highhanded manner in which a consummate professional like Anohu-Amazu was treated could easily lead to other professionals refusing to join government to build institutions for national rebirth for fear of being similarly treated as cattle to be barbecued at the altar of simmering ethnic politics and self-centered bigotry.  French President Charles de Gaulle once noted that ‘’patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people others than your own comes first’’.

President Buhari and Acting President need to decide today who their ‘people’ actually are and whether both of them are patriots or ethic nationalists. The answer would undoubtedly decide the fate of our febrile nation.

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