US President Trump has spoken on the $496 million paid for the Super Tucano fighter jets. How do you relate this to the plot to impeach President Buhari over the expenditure?
My understanding of parliamentary scrutiny is to ensure that no public resources and money are lost. The release of $496m for the purchase of Super Tucano by the President has shown that no money was lost; more especially when the President of the US, Donald Trump, in discussion with the president said the American government is in receipt of the money. That goes further to confirm that we didn’t lose money as a country.
So we really have not lost anything and I think this should give consolation to everybody because the fear will always be that someone took advantage and money was lost.
If you recall, during the previous administration, over $9m was found in a South Africa bound aircraft belonging to a Nigerian. Aside that, millions of dollars in cash were found with so many people at that time, during the PDP administration of Jonathan, but this is not the case now.
The situation now is that the president had to quickly take advantage of the window created by the new administration in the US which before now was unavailable. Before, we were not allowed to buy weapons from the US but now that we have this opportunity, we took it and the Americans have confirmed it.
I’m sure that the parliament will look at it from this point of view, that the president meant well and acted well because he did not want the country to lose the opportunity to buy those aircraft. I believe that we are coming to an understanding and even a close on this situation so that we face the real situation of fighting the insurgents to restore normalcy in various parts of the country.
With Trump’s remark, are you still going ahead with the impeachment motion as canvassed by some of your colleagues last week?
I’m not sure there was any serious motion for the impeachment of the President. If anybody did that, I’m sure the person misunderstood the entire process of parliamentary scrutiny. What I mean by parliamentary scrutiny is the whole relevance, importance of the prerogative of the National Assembly on appropriation.
The essence of what the president did was to catch the opportunity before we lose it and after that, the president of course wrote a letter. To me, I am of the view that yes, the president is not supposed to spend any money without appropriation as provided for in Section 80 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. But when something happens, we should look at its context, essence and then try to analyse whether by that action we have lost any money or there is any infraction in terms of diverting the fund for something else.
If there isn’t diversion of the resources and the money paid for the fighter jets has been confirmed, I believe that nobody should go beyond the normal thing that we should have had a better engagement.
If someone starts to talk about impeachment at this point, the person is totally out of touch with the essence of the section of the constitution; the reason we had parliamentary scrutiny. Though I was at my senatorial district last week, nobody came out in the Senate to say let us impeach the president. How can we impeach the president for taking action to save Nigerians? It has been confirmed that the money has been paid to the US government.
The Senate committee on Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters is expected to present its report on the $496m expenditure, going by the resolution of last Thursday. What do you expect from the committee with this new development?
I don’t know what the committee will report. I will rather guess but this committee is a representative of the Senate and indeed the National Assembly. So, since it has been confirmed that the money has been paid to the US treasury and President Trump has also confirmed it, I think this has laid the matter to rest.
But going forward, I will suggest that we should endeavour to continuously engage among the two arms of government, that is the executive and the legislature, so that these kinds of issues do not become controversial when they happen.
What is your general assessment of President Buhari‘s outing in the US?
The president did well. I want to also remind you that the issues the president discussed with President Trump were very genuine issues that are important to the country. In the fight against terrorism, in addition to the sale of the Super Tucano fighter jets to Nigeria, the American government has been supporting the country behind the scenes in terms of sending their military personnel to train ours and also sharing vital intelligence with our security agencies to help fight insurgency and banditry in Nigeria.
Also, you know that we have so much alleged embezzled funds in the US. The president took the opportunity to request that the American government help us recover our money stashed away in American banks. I’m sure that the American president will do something in this regard.
I believe that we will fight the insurgency better when we have more resources. If recovered, the huge amounts of money embezzled and smuggled into the US will not only help Nigeria recover economically, it will help us to fight the insurgency more efficiently.
The outing of Mr President was fantastic; the outing of Mr President was the outing we expected because it is not always that you have such opportunity. The president had an opportunity and he utilised it so well. I’m happy for Nigerians and I believe that going forward, Nigeria and Mr President will continue to be respected, drawing from the integrity that Mr President has brought into the affairs of the country.
I’m sure that is even one major reason that the American government decided to waive the ban on the sale of weapons to Nigeria; because now we have a leadership in Nigeria that is very transparent, committed and focused.
The 2018 budget has been hanging in the National Assembly since November last year when the president presented it. Why are you people delaying its passage?
My understanding is that the budget will be passed this week. In fact we were desirous of passing the budget a long time ago but then there were issues by heads of some MDAs who did not appear in time for budget defence. We are not going to waste any more time before we pass the budget.
I’m very optimistic that all of us in the National Assembly will ensure that this week, if we are able to get the report, we should be able to pass it. May (this month) is the lifespan of the 2017 budget and we don’t have to overstretch that. This is my prayer. The report will be laid before the two chambers this week.
