For a long time while growing up in the village, I had assumed that the title of this piece is a Yoruba saying and before you accuse me of ignorance, please hear me out. In those days, whenever some old men were engaged in an animated discussion and you hear one say in a solemn manner, “Oba mewa, igba mewa”, it is most likely to be followed by this response from another: “Sarki goma, Zamani goma”.

What I didn’t know at the time is that the two expressions, (one Yoruba, the other Hausa) mean the same thing and were usually said in such fashion simply for emphasis: Ten Kings, Ten epochs! It basically means that the tenure of each incumbent would be defined by its philosophy and style, its priorities, its character, and by the historical and sociopolitical dynamics and issues that dominate the person’s period in office. The incumbent could be a local government chairman, a corporate CEO, an editor of a newspaper, a church pastor, a traditional ruler, head of a governmental department or agency, a governor or a president.

However, nothing exemplifies this saying, of recent, more than the tenures of two public officers who, by fate, have now become antagonists of each other. President Goodluck Jonathan and the suspended Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Mr. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi have differed substantially, in many respects, from their predecessors, and the net effect of their policies, actions, inactions, priorities, personalities and styles may have serious and long-lasting effects on our society.

While one is still in office with opportunities for re-invention in areas of failings, the other is out and can now only reflect on what might have been. But before I proceed further, it is important to examine whether indeed the president had the power to suspend Sanusi from office given the letter and spirit of the CBN Act, 2007. Since the matter has been taken before the Federal High Court by Sanusi, we await the outcome. Even at that, I am one of those who believe that what Sanusi demonstrated was an act of gross insubordination. No matter the rightness of his course, for Sanusi to tell the president that he cannot remove him (and then begin to publicly make song and dance about such effrontery) is nothing but utter recklessness.

In my first intervention on this crisis at a time it was still just brewing, I had concluded that any attempt to force the CBN Governor out of office before the expiration of his term would be illegal (.http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/sanusi-s-letter-jonathan-s-burden-/168368/). I am not so sure anymore, given my readings in the last couple of days. Since we are practising the presidential system of government patterned exactly after that of the United States, there are interesting parallels to draw. The ultimate lesson, however, is that the president, as the symbol of federal authority, has tremendous power when it comes to hiring and firing within the executive branch, as demonstrated even in the US some 152 years ago.

In 1865, Vice President Andrew Johnson became president following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and two years later, he removed from office Mr Edwin M. Stanton, then Secretary of War who evidently did not accord him much respect apparently because he (Stanton) owed his appointment to Lincoln. But the removal (also by way of suspension) was done in defiance of the “Tenure of Office Act”. Passed by the Congress in 1867 (but repealed 20 years later in 1887), the controversial legislation had restricted the president from sacking any member of his cabinet without the express approval of the Senate.

Incidentally, President Johnson had requested Stanton to resign and it was after he declined that he ordered his suspension and announced a replacement. But that was just the beginning of the drama as Stanton refused to hand over and actually ordered the arrest of the man who was directed to take over from him by the president. Within a matter of days, the Senate waded in by passing a resolution calling on President Johnson to rescind his decision on Stanton. With President Johnson ignoring the resolution, the House of Representatives commenced the process of his impeachment.

By a vote of 126 to 47, the House eventually resolved to impeach President Johnson on grounds of “high crimes and misdemeanour” with the most serious of the charges being: “Dismissing Edwin Stanton from office after the Senate had voted not to concur with his dismissal and had ordered him reinstated.” However, by the end of the impeachment proceedings, President Johnson was acquitted because his traducers could not secure the extra one vote to reach the two-third threshold needed to remove him from office by the Senate.

It is noteworthy, however, that many American scholars today hold the view that President Johnson’s position that he had the power to sack Stanton has been corroborated by the 1926 Supreme Court ruling in the Myers v. United States case which affirmed the power of President Woodrow Wilson to remove from office (without congressional approval) Mr Frank S. Myers, a First-Class Postmaster in Portland, Oregon, notwithstanding a federal law that “Postmasters of the first, second, and third classes shall be appointed and may be removed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate.”

Given the foregoing, I don’t think anybody can predict what the outcome of the court case will be. In the US, the Fed Chair as the Central Bank Governor is also insulated from presidential interference as he reports to Congress but even at that, the U.S. president is not so powerless given the debate in the campaign leading to the 2012 presidential election when the stewardship of the then Federal Reserve Board Chair, Mr. Ben Bernanke, became an issue. One article I find most interesting is by Eric Black of the Minnesota Post titled “Could President Gingrich fire Fed Chair Bernanke?”

Published on November 18, 2011, the writer stated and I want to quote extensively:

“...among the promises Gingrich routinely makes of things he would do as president, is to fire Federal Reserve Board Chair Ben Bernanke, to whom Gingrich assigns substantial blame for the economic meltdown and the failure of the economy to bounce back more strongly. Herman Cain also says he would fire Bernanke. Mitt Romney has managed to skate by without a clear statement on ‘firing’ Bernanke, saying he ‘wouldn’t keep Ben Bernanke in office,’ and would ‘choose someone of my own,’ which might mean he would make the change when Bernanke’s current term expires in 2014.

“I have no strong opinion about Bernanke’s record or his competence, but I have wondered whether presidents are really authorized to fire the Fed chair, because I have so often heard it described as an ‘independent’ agency, and the chairmanship (unlike, for example, cabinet members) serves for a fixed four-year term which does not coincide with the presidential term...I turned for guidance to St. John’s/St. Ben’s economist Louis Johnston (who also writes an economic column for MinnPost). Johnston told me that no Fed chair has ever been fired by the president. The Federal Reserve Act establishes both 14-year terms for members of the board and four-year terms for the chair and adds: ‘each member shall hold office for a term of fourteen years from the expiration of the term of his predecessor, unless sooner removed for cause by the President.’

“It’s not clear what that ‘for cause’ language might mean. It’s never been tested. It implies to me that the president is supposed to have some ‘cause’ other than disagreement over monetary policy, although it’s not really clear, hasn’t been tested, and I almost can’t imagine a Fed chair fighting to stay in office if a president was trying to dump him. But bear in mind, the president doesn’t need to establish a ‘cause’ to fire most of his appointees, and the language is probably intended to underscore that the Fed chair is different from, let’s say, a cabinet member.

“Johnston said it sounds like the president can, at least technically, remove a fed chair under this language but he added: ‘My guess is that firing the Fed chair would provoke big gyrations in the financial markets. Central bank independence has, for better or worse, become the norm throughout the world and an attempt by the president to fire the chair would certainly be perceived as a threat to the Fed’s independence.’”

However, while I believe Sanusi erred, I am not in any way suggesting that the president should be allowed to operate outside the law or to take a decision just to salve his ego. As we have seen in the last one week, there are practical, and indeed enormous, costs to the removal by a sleight of hand of a Central Bank Governor and that perhaps explains why it has never happened in the United States even after 238 years of democracy. In the last one week, people have lost about half a trillion Naira at the capital market, the national currency was on a free fall before it was halted at a cost we may never know and foreign investors are still jittery. The image of the administration has taken a battering at home and abroad. And all these just to prove a point, when the president could have waited for three months. But there are also issues in the Sanusi saga that go beyond just a mere power struggle. They border on accountability, transparency and (mis)management of scarce public resources, and they go on both sides.

I have read the charges against Sanusi and while they should not be glossed over, I have also read on a blog an interesting piece credited to Akin Oyebode. I hope it is the same Akin Oyebode, the former University of Ado Ekiti Vice Chancellor and renowned professor of International law who taught me when I was doing my Masters at the University of Lagos. I commend the piece to readers because it answers some of the salient questions being raised in the allegations against Sanusi by both the presidency and the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN) which, by the way, is no more than another government parastatal under the Ministry of Trade and Investment: http://omojuwa.com/2014/02/the-case-against-sanusi-lamido-sanusi-akin-oyebode/.

At this point, it is important to stress that there are conspiracy theories on both sides. There are those who believe that Sanusi has been sacrificed because he blew a whistle on the monumental corruption in the NNPC for which this administration is unwilling to act. That is the most popular narrative in the country although there is also a counter-narrative within government circles that Sanusi actually “blew his whistle” to cover up for his alleged infractions. There is also merit in that allegation.

The sequence of events, according to a very impeccable government source, is: On February 26, 2013, Sanusi sent to President Jonathan the audited accounts of the CBN for the year ended December 31, 2012; on April 12, the president sent the report to the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN) for examination and advice; on May 4, the president wrote Sanusi asking him to explain some of the issues raised following the report by FRCN; on June 29, while responding to Sanusi’s request for his (the president’s) consideration and approval for the CBN to renew the appointment of external auditors for the bank, President Jonathan minuted: “Please KIV (meaning keep in view). I am still looking at the audit report…”

On July 23, 2013, in his letter to Sanusi, the president wrote: “Please be informed that I remain unsatisfied with the CBN audited financial statement for the year 31st December 2012.” On September 17, while finally approving the renewal of the external auditors proposed by the CBN, President Jonathan again wrote: “Please note that this is without prejudice to the eventual outcome of my analysis of the financial report for the year ended 2012.” Exactly eight days later on September 25, Sanusi wrote a letter to the president alleging that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) failed to remit a whopping sum of $49.8 billion to the Federation Account within a period of 19 months between January 2012 and July 2013.

However, whatever may be the misgivings about Sanusi and regardless of his motives, I am one of those who see merit in his allegation about NNPC remittances to the Federation Account not only because I had been in government but also because it is part of the interesting exchanges in the report of the 2012 House of Representatives Ad Hoc committee probe into fuel subsidy. However, I am also of the view that there are two critical charges against Sanusi that I find indefensible: one, refusal by the CBN to comply with the Public Procurement Act in the award of contracts and two, Sanusi’s propensity for playing Father Christmas by donating scandalous amounts of public money all over the place. I do not believe anybody should have the power to dispense with huge public resources without any oversight as Sanusi did. But these are institutional failings which can, and indeed should, be remedied by the National Assembly by amending the CBN Act to state, like that of Fed, that all their profits, outside their expenses, be returned to the treasury.

Notwithstanding those shortcomings, what is not in dispute is that Sanusi helped to clean up the banking system and set a standard by which current and future operators can no longer fiddle with depositors’ money without consequences. He also brought inflation to a single digit and enunciated several other positive policies. For sure he made his mistakes and there will be questions about his stewardship and whether he could not have done certain things differently. Yet we cannot deny him his successes. However, much more importantly, I also believe that his greatest contribution may be that he helped to beam searchlight into our opaque oil and gas industry where things can never remain the same again.

The Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI) of which I am a founding member is ten years old this month yet despite all its efforts and the institutional backing, it has never succeeded in getting the NNPC to render any account as it has been doing in recent weeks following Sanusi’s intervention; and by so doing opened the much-needed debate about the corruption and waste that the subsidy regime has come to exemplify. That ultimately may be what defines Sanusi’s legacy when the history of his era as CBN Governor is written in the future. It is something for which Nigerians owe him a world of gratitude.

Paradoxically, that also is where President Jonathan has a challenge because as the Yoruba would say, when you mention the name of the dog, you also have to identify the pot with which it was cooked. Most Nigerians believe that a huge sum of money running into billions of Dollars cannot be accounted for by the NNPC and that is the challenge of the moment for the president who has a historical opportunity to reform the oil and gas sector in the manner none of his predecessors had because all the issues are now out in the public arena. The Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB), the corruption of subsidy regime and the perverse incentives it has created, the (mis)management of the Federation Account, etc. Okay, this is an election season but only recently, the president himself made allusion to Thomas Bobinton Macaulay’s famous quote: “Timid and interested politicians think more about the security of their seats than about the security of their country”.

Whatever may be his other failings, Sanusi, as far as the public is concerned, will go down as the CBN Governor who saw the rot in the oil and gas sector and refused to keep quiet and it really doesn’t matter what his motivations were. Will Goodluck Jonathan be the president who would ignite the revolution to put an end to such abuses and recklessness? Will he reform the sector, make it more transparent and accountable and reposition it for the challenge of the future? Whatever the choices he makes, the president should know that history will be the final arbiter when some old men in some villages gather together in future to discuss his stewardship and one mutters: “Sarki goma, Zamani goma!”

•This piece by Adeniyi (shown in photo) originally appeared in his column “The Verdict” in today’s edition of ThisDay under the title “Sarki Goma, Zamani Goma…” Adeniyi can be reached via olusegun.adeniyi@thisdaylive.com

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