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AZ ZUBAIR TESTIFIES BEFORE THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY

First an update on this story.

Amina Az Zubair testified before a hearing at the House of Representatives to defend her Office's efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. The federal republic has, apparently, spent $6.93 billion (=N=1.04 trillion) since 2006 on achieving the MDGs.

Hajia Az Zubair reeled out quite an impressive list of achievements but there is no way of knowing if these achievements are real.

Before you get on my case for being a cynic, you know that our government officials generally invent fictional statistics to support whatever they want to say that particular day.

In fact, given the way we do things, even if the statistics are true, there is no way to know for suif re the improvements are attributable to the MDG programme, or if something else caused it.

Again, before you pillory me for being an incorrigible critic, lets not forget that our officials are forever taking credit for things they did not do. In the 1980s, the Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure would put up a sign on an existing road, announcing that they had just built the road. A primary school that was standing in my village when my father was a school-age boy was "launched" during the Fourth Republic by the state governor, as a school he had just built (sadly, the villagers played along witht he charade because the governor had promoted one of our townsmen to a high office in his administration). Here are Delta State youths complaining their governor is taking credit for roads built by Shell Petroleum Development Company.

And there are still people who insist that the return of civilian rule in 1999 and the policies of the Obasanjo II administration were responsible for the strong growth our economy experienced in the first decade of the 21st century, when in fact our good fortune was driven exogenously by the impact of China and India on commodity prices ... a phenomenon that drove growth in lots of countries, Brazil and Australia inclusive, that were unaffected by anything Obasanjo or the Fourth Republic civilians ever did.

Look, $7 billion is a lot of money, and while I do not trust the National Assembly, I am not about to give Amina Az Zubair (or any other government official) such unquestioning trust as to believe everything they say even when they don't present any concrete proof or evidence.

OUR POLITICAL PARTIES REMAIN MEANINGLESS

The Progressive Peoples Alliance, a political party created as a sole proprietorship to advance the economic and political interests of former Abia State Governor Orji Uzor Kalu, has more or less ceased to exist.

After the (s)elections of 2007, the party took control of two states, Imo and Abia. Since then, the Imo State governor (Ikedi Ohakim) has decamped and rejoined the Peoples Democratic Party, the Abia State governor (Theodore Orji) has fallen out with his godfather (Orji Uzor Kalu) and joined the All Progressives Grand Alliance. Given the unchecked, unaccountable, unquestioned, near-imperial power wielded by state governors in Nigeria, these two carpet-crossing incidents more or less moved the entire states out of the PPA column.

And now the coup-de-grace .... Orji Uzor Kalu himself has decamped from his own party to rejoin the Peoples Democratic Party. From within the PDP, Kalu will no doubt plot the fall of his erstwhile godson, Theodore Orji, in next year's (s)elections.

Elsewhere, Alphonsus Igbeke, the All Nigerian Peoples Party candidate who recently (following the verdict of a court case) replaced Joy Emordi of the PDP as federal Senator for Anambra North, has decamped from the ANPP to rejoin the PDP. Like Bauchi Governor Isa Yuguda, Senator Igbeke was a PDP member who left the PDP to join the ANPP purely becuase he failed to get the PDP nomination to contest the 2007 elections. Igbeke lost the PDP ticket to Emordi (knowing the PDP, there was probably nothing "democratic" about its primaries), ran under the ANPP flag, lost the (s)election according to the official results, won the seat in the courts, and is now rejoining the PDP ... just like Isa Yuguda.

We don't really have "political parties" in Nigeria. We have machinery for winning elections. This machinery can take whatever name it needs to take to meet basic legal requirements. Some machinery are effective, and some are ineffective; the strength of the PDP lies in the fact that it has absorbed the vast majority of these machines, and the role of the "party" is to moderate the distribution of largesse and patronage to various machines to make sure they stay on board.

Our politicians shop around for a machine willing to support their ambitions. The most ambitious shop within the PDP first, find a machine, cut a deal with the man or men who lead the machine (people like the late Lamidi Adedibu) and first try to win the nomination within the PDP (i.e. get the other machines to acquiesce to yours being in charge of largesse-distribution). If that fails, they try the other machines that have remained independent of the PDP, largely because there is a market (literally) for their services; there is money to be made serving as one of many independent machines that can be temporarily rented by a politician and his financial backers.

Nobody knows what polices these candidates support or oppose ... and nobody cares.

That isn't the point of Nigerian politics.