Pa Aluko

Pa Aluko, Abachanomics and Memory

Renowned economist and social commentator, Professor Samuel Adepoju Aluko had news for us the other day. The late General Sani Abacha, he told the country, was a better manager of the economy than President Olusegun Obasanjo is.

Because he is a Nigerian and a celebrated economist, he should know what he is saying. But hoisted on shaky foundations, his argument failed to add up. What came through was not a patriot sounding an informed warning, but a diminished patriarch struggling with his grim autumn and a haunted intellectual toying with public memory and history for the purpose of his own rehabilitation.

At the second annual colloquium of the Ajasin Foundation, Professor Sam Aluko took a swipe at the Obasanjo administration. He justly accused the government of profligacy and ineptitude and lack of devotion and priority. "The government is embarking on the wrong projects" he said. "Our money has been so devalued to the extent that we can't feed well. The poor can't sleep because they are hungry and the rich can't sleep because the poor are awake."

He is on the mark on this score, though he merely re-echoed what many Nigerians know and say everyday. And there is nothing wrong with re-echoing popular perception. The fact that it is coming from a supposedly credible and informed source gives the message some weight. To be sure this administration and Nigerians will benefit if wastage is cut from government, if rulers sit at home to face the jobs they are elected to do and if they embark on meaningful projects rather than hare-brained and profligate ones.

But the former chairman of the National Economic Intelligence Commission went further. Abacha was a more prudent manager of the economy, he said. That comparative analysis too could have been useful if the professor was operating from the assumption that Abacha was bad enough. But for him, Abacha, who appointed him to a nebulous and feel-good position, was too good. Instead of seeing Abacha as a benchmark for mismanagement, he sees him more as a golden boy at the golden gate, a God-sent blessing to Nigeria's economy. That terribly undercuts his argument. And that is where I have some beef with him, for that Abacha and the revamped economy that he rhapsodized about are pure fiction.

The 72-year-old professor told the audience and Nigerians that Abacha was very disciplined and strict with the economy. "Under him, the exchange rate was stable. You had to defend any proposal you presented to him." He didn't stop here. He said Abacha couldn't have stolen all the money attributed to him. And then the bombshell: "Abacha never fingered with government money." This is tripe of the highest order and it is unfortunate that such could issue from an otherwise erudite and critical mind.

But this is not as new as it sounds. Professor Aluko has been telling anybody who cares to listen that Abacha was the best thing that ever happened to the Nigerian economy. While serving Abacha, he once told a publication that Abacha was disciplined, large-hearted and just misunderstood by many Nigerians. "I have been amazed", he had said. "General Abacha is sharp, incisive and has immense knowledge of the country. I have been surprised by his intellect and curiousity. Abacha is the most disciplined."

And since Abacha fell out of grace and out of life, the professor has been maintaining that Abacha couldn't have stolen as much as credited to him. His argument has always been that Nigeria didn't make as much during that period. Maybe there is something that the professor knows that the banks returning the Abacha loot don't know, that even the Abacha family that is reportedly cooperating in the loot recovery doesn't know. Maybe.

Or maybe the man is just being faithful to the man that gave him the best shot at public office. Here, he has good company in Alhaji Wada Nas and Alhaji Kaloma Ali. Or maybe he is just being grateful. The professor confirmed that Abacha was large-hearted by telling people recently that his son's name was removed from the security list when he made supplication to the highest quarters. Dr Mobolaji Aluko, who lives in Maryland, USA and is a son of the professor, campaigned vociferously against the Abacha junta in the US, even when his father was in advisory capacity to the same man.Under normal circumstance, the Abacha that we all knew would have asked the old man to call his son to order or face the music himself. But Abacha was magnanimous enough to remove the younger Aluko's name from security list. So if the older Aluko were to be a political adviser to Abacha, he would have said there was no human rights abuses in Nigeria, that there was free speech and the right to dissent in Nigeria and he would have used his own personal situation as a justification even in the face of phantom coups, state sponsored murders and executions, and political and press repression.

But thank God the professor has confined himself to working for and defending what is called Abachanomics. Warming up scripts from dictatorships in Latin America, Abacha and his henchmen had reasoned that they could get away with repression by growing the economy. But if there was any growth during the five terrible years under Abacha only they saw it, or it surely was of the brand called growth without development. For most of the time, schools were closed, people slept in fuel stations, and electricity was more remarkable by its absence. Nothing worked; except sycophancy.

What the Abacha men did constantly was to give illusion of movement and play with figures. They got business elites busy with a Vision 2010 commission. They always told us that unemployment and inflation rates were down, even when we all knew the opposite. They pointed to the growing foreign reserves, when people were starving, as indication of growth. And they practiced voodoo intervention with exchange rate.

But what some knew even then and has become clear to all now was that Abacha had turned the Nigerian economy into a private estate. His wife and children, his friends and his fronts in Chagoury and Chagoury had hands in almost every pie. But they went beyond mere nepotism to real stealing and were even not smart enough to cover their tracks possibly because they were too myopic and too carried away to contemplate a day out of power. They even took money directly from vaults of the Central Bank.

The professor might be right when he said Abacha scrutinized every proposal. But that wasn't because he was prudent. It was because he wanted to eat alone or at least make sure of his cut. Abacha had the reputation of receiving his bribes by himself, and sometimes counting everything to make sure he had not been short-changed. He lacked grace even in his specialty. His very close associates, however, found a way of snapping some crumbs by appealing to his paranoia. When they had proposals about marabouts and about NADECO, it usually received express approval.

Despite his bogus title, Professor Aluko was never an insider in the Abacha regime and might have not received express approval for his economic intelligence work. But why is he insulting us with his empty defense of the late dictator? Why would a man of his standing tell us that: "Abacha never fingered with government money"? So whose money did Abacha finger with? Whose money did he steal? And where did he get all that money from?

It is hard to say why, but we can hazard two reasons. One is that the professor has lapsed into revisionism. The unraveling of his stature is tied to the Abacha debacle. This man who earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the respectable London School of Economics in 1959 and has taught the same subject in renowned universities both at home and abroad, soiled his reputation by becoming the court intellectual for a depraved and thieving dictatorship. This respectable critic who has been writing about and advocating for economic development in Nigeria for almost 50 years became diminished at the twilight of his career. And having reviewed his trajectory he is pained by that tragic turn and should be. But the man may also have realized that there is no way he could reinvent himself without reinventing Abacha and touching up history. How would you say you are a good person but you worked for the devil?

Or it might just be that the old man from Ode-Ekiti, who is also religious, does not believe that human beings have capacity for such profound evil that Abacha perpetrated. Remember it is this supposed believer in humanity that told Nigerians that his son, Senator Gbenga Aluko, was a small boy who wouldn't know what to do with the kind of money he was accused of misappropriating. So the man might be too trusting. But this is a trust that borders on either naivety or senility. If this sharp mind has diminished to this level, then it is sad indeed.

December 2001