By Dr. Aliyu U. Tilde
This article is about rule of law, not importation of rice.
Since his questioning of the rationale behind lifting the ban on rice importation by Nigeria Customs Service, Senator Adamu Aliero has come under virulent attack from some online supporters of the President. Messages are circulating on the social media, alleging that his concern, being a rice miller, is nothing but selfish. So he should shut up and allow Col. Hamid Ali (rtd) to “continue with his good service to the people of Nigeria.” To do this alone, all the bad things about Senator Aliero were listed, as done for Saraki before the on going screening of ministerial nominees started. To such supporters of the President, this is the best way to assist him on their platforms. I disagree.
Do such supporters of the President feel that we do not need a Senate at all? Or what purpose will it serve if it is only there to rubberstamp the actions of the President? Unless we can boldly call for the scrapping of the National Assembly, we must allow the legislators to do their work. The President has pledged to be the democrat who will respect the rule of law by desisting from any interference in the affairs of the other two arms of government. It does not serve such a president one bit for anyone to stand up and intimidate the National Assembly or its members. If such people truly love the President, they should allow his wish to be: recognise the constitutionality of the legislature and the judiciary and support the two in discharging their constitutional responsibilities.
Part of those constitutional responsibilities of the legislature is to probe what the executive is doing through different means that include summoning heads of executive units to the National Assembly to explain the actions and policies they undertake. This is not new. In the past sixteen years, hundreds of such heads of MDAs have appeared before different committees of the Senate and House of Representatives. Few, if any, among such heads declined to answer the summons. That is democracy, not a monarchy where one person is expected to do everything. My esteem brother, Col. Hamid Ali (rtd) has been summoned. Because he has nothing to hide, I know he will rather follow the rule than become the exception.
When he appears before the committee, he must convince the legislators on the rationale behind his decision to lift the ban on rice importation. This he must achieve in order to enable the lifting to remain. Otherwise, an unimpressed Senate can invoke its powers to reinstate the ban and my brother can do nothing but to comply with its order. We better understand that these are constitutional responsibilities of the National Assembly which we cannot bulldoze away simply because we love the President.
It is important to emphasize this note because it is something that will recur hundreds of times in the next four years. The President is forming his cabinet soon and each minister will swing into action. Policies will be unveiled, of which not all – like the ban on rice importation – may necessarily be correct. The committees in the two arms of our legislature will also swing into action. That is what we voted them for, precisely because we believe any system devoid of checks and balances will be subject to abuse. Not every minister or public servant may be of the high moral status of the President. As humans, and with our eye-serving majority public servants, the errors they commit must be checked as immediately as possible before their consequences descend on us.
Thus the legislature is our first guard against any fatal error that the executive arm of government may commit, while the judiciary is our last bullet. If the legislature ignores such errors or even commits some, the executive and we the citizens will rush to the courts, starting from the High Court and moving up until we reach the Supreme Court – or kotun Allah ya isa, as the President referred to it in 2003. But before we reach Allah ya isa, let us not block the avenues of correction. If we do so, we will soon find ourselves at the receiving end.
I strongly support the legislature in summoning the Customs Chief. His department has taken a decision of far reaching economic consequence for the nation in general and for the farmers, processors and marketers of the cereal in particular. The argument given by people opposed to Senator Aliero is that he wants to block the President’s effort to make food cheap for Nigerians. If it is to make food cheap in Nigeria, we the masses may end up being the losers. Let us not think that food is like fuel. That is why the legislature needs my brother to explain.
From the experts I have listened so far on the matter, not a single one has supported lifting the ban. Their first argument is that it will kill our local rice industry. The rice that will be imported will be cheaper, much cheaper than ours. That is why it is smuggled into the country prior to the lifting of the ban. Not only that, it may even be finer in processing and more elegant in packaging. Consumers will naturally gravitate towards it, abandoning the one produced by our farmers without any subsidy. What the farmers will do in subsequent seasons as the importation booms is to, where they can, walk away from cultivating rice to some other crops. Gradually, cultivation of rice will disappear. We will be left at the mercy of importers who will not hesitate to exploit the situation. And we will need billions in foreign currency before we can import what we can produce locally.
As cultivation of rice disappears, poverty will become further entrenched in our rural communities, more youths will become unemployed, and more factories will close. Worse still is the opportunity the nation will lose from investors. It will not only be the Alieros that will close their existing mills, but I also doubt very much if a potential investor like Dangote will go on with his plan to open mega farms of the cereal in Niger State and other parts of the country as he planned. When he calculates the opportunity cost between trading and production, he will be foolish not to prefer trading. Giving the opportunity of that calculation can be one of the greatest disasters the country would face economically.
The Customs can as well lift the ban on importation of textiles, if all that is needed is to make available cheap products to the population such that our textiles will continue to remain closed. The greatest incentive to any industry, farming inclusive, is the market. Destroy the market and sit back to enjoy watching the industry fall like a pack of cards.
That certainly is not the intention of Col. Hamid Ali (rtd) and his department. They must have a reason behind lifting the ban which defies conventional economics. They may have thought that it will undercut the smugglers of the commodity. They may have reasoned that there is the need for a quick importation of the cereal in the short term to forestall impending scarcity, after which the ban will be restored. And so on. Unfortunately, they have not revealed their reasons sufficiently to the public in this era of democracy under a President who has pledged to lead a transparent government. Transparency does not only stop at accountability; it goes beyond to other provinces of public administration like consultation.
Before lifting the ban, has the Customs Service, for example, consulted with the National Assembly, rice farmers’ associations, millers, importers and other stakeholders in the commodity? If it has not, then it has committed a serious blunder by violating a cardinal principle of a transparent government. So, in order to convince Nigerians, the Service must explain, post mortem unfortunately, its rationale to both the stakeholders and the general public. If the public is not convinced – and particularly the legislature – the ban runs the risk of being rightfully restored by the legislature. That is democracy. That is how it differs from monarchies and dictatorships.
Before I conclude, let me address the residual issue of the alleged ulterior motive of Senator Aliero. Now everybody knows he has investment in rice processing and lifting the ban will make him one of its key victims. Does that prevent him from crying out as an individual? Does that prevent him, as a Senator who has first hand knowledge on the effect of lifting the ban, from querying it? No.
No, in the sense that the issue of rice importation goes beyond the motive of a single person. It is a national issue which the National Assembly has every right to question. After all, we should be lucky having industrialists like Aliero in our legislature because in trying to protect their benefits, we may in a case like this one stand to gain collectively. The students of economics know very well the strong argument of Adam Smith regarding the baker and the bread on our table. Smith argued that it is due to the baker’s self-interest – not his benevolence – that we get bread daily to buy at an affordable price. To him is the profit, and to us the bread that we can afford. Block the profit, and he will have no incentive to produce; then bread will become scarce and too expensive to buy for most.
So Senator Aliero is not committing a crime by milling rice. Neither is he committing a crime by summoning the powerful and popular Customs Chief. That is his economic duty; and this a legislative one – and in both he is right. In the same vein, the Customs Chief is also doing his duty not only by lifting the ban, assuming that he has sufficient reasons to do so, but also by responding to the summons of the legislature to explain why he did so.
Finally, how does the politics of demonising other politicians help the President in achieving good governance? There is no way it will assist him. It will only destroy him in the long run. That is why I was quick to caution that the lie against the Senate President prior to the screening of ministerial nominees was not only unnecessary but unrealistic. At last, those of us who took that stand were vindicated. In no way did he block anything. In politics it is good to be on cautious but it is bad – terribly bad – to be hysteric.
Hysteria may push us to discharge our barrel against a friendly force. The more we adopt that as a strategy of war, the more we weaken ourselves. In the end, we may end up with no friend at all. The campaigns are over. Please let us permit our public servants to work peacefully in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Only with that licence can we correct them when they err and support them on what is right.
On the issue of rice importation in particular, between Senator Adamu Aliero and Col. Hamid Ali (rtd), our duty as citizens is not to support one at the expense of the other in the discharge of their national assignments. It is to support both.
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