They are reviewing the nation’s budgetary process for the period August 2009 – August 2013. At a point, President Jonathan poses the question: “Who is now the President?” to which the CBN Governor responds: “You still are the one, sir”.

Like in the case of the teacher and Comrade Oshiomhole, the CBN Governor is just being polite and he also knows that he has a duty to respect the Constitution of the land. Besides, Sanusi cannot claim not to know that there is a difference between a defacto and a dejure President.

True, the nation’s President is regarded as the Number One Citizen but on issues of revenue and expenditure, he is everywhere in chains. The President cannot spend one kobo without legislative approval and authorisation.

On the revenue side, every money that the nation earns must be kept in one common purse as spelt out in Section 80(1) of the 1999 Constitution: “All revenues or other moneys raised or received by the Federation shall be paid and form one Consolidated Revenue Fund of the Federation”.

On the expenditure side, the Constitution provides in Section 80(2): “No moneys shall be withdrawn from the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the Federation except to meet expenditure that is charged upon the fund by this Constitution or where the issue of those moneys has been authorised by an Appropriation Act or Supplementary Appropriation Act.”

Section 81 goes further to specify that the President must make an advance request of the proposed expenditure for any financial year: “The President shall cause to be prepared and laid before each House of the National Assembly at any time in each financial year estimates of the revenues and expenditure of the Federation for the next following financial year”.

Even after all these, the President must still sit down with members of the Federal Executive Council, FEC, to determine the mode of disbursement. These are all legal entanglements around the President.

But there are no such encumbrances around the Governor of the CBN.
He has no spending limits, as it were. He does not need anybody’s approval to spend any amount. A few concrete examples here will suffice: In August 2009, the CBN pumped N400 billion of public money into bailing out Afribank, Intercontinental Bank, Union Bank, Oceanic Bank and Finbank. The CBN single-handedly decided which of the commercial banks manifested distress signs and how much to give to them – without recourse to any legislative approval.

For Jonathan to spend, he must first wait for those who went to market to sell our oil to ascertain that the money is available in the till. But the CBN Governor does not need that. Where the money he needs is not immediately available, he heads for the Nigerian Printing and Minting Company to reel it out as probably happened during the bail out of the selected banks.

Apart from dishing out the bail out funds to the banks, Sanusi dismissed their Chief Executives. Let the President try this and see if the volume of strikes and impeachment threats will not overwhelm him, plus the fact that his chances of lifting a finger towards the 2015 contests shall have been greatly diminished. In the face of the enormous powers in the hands of Sanusi, which powers are not available to Jonathan, the inevitable question is: Who is now the President?

At the beginning of the Boko Haram madness, Sanusi visited home and found that victims of the Kano bomb blast needed assistance. He immediately dished out N100 million to the victims. That was when it started to dawn on people that the CBN Governor has no spending limits and that the provisions of Sections 80-82 of the 1999 Constitution, which deal with powers and control over public funds have no meaning to him. He heads the Republic of the CBN – a Republic within a Republic.

The biggest question that agitated people’s minds was why Sanusi was turning the CBN into an Emergency Relief Organisation when it was Kano’s turn whereas several other areas had suffered worse devastations in the hands of the Boko Haram and nobody cared.

This is not the only ethnic bent to Sanusi’s actions. The ones we know could be tips of the iceberg. As we speak, watchers are pointing to the N10 billion which CBN has just dished out to Usman Danfodio University, “as part of the bank’s corporate social responsibility… and it is meant to build the manpower capacity of Nigerians to effectively run the economy of the country”.

Not even the National Assembly has a hold on the CBN Governor. Is anyone hearing anything anymore about the National Assembly demand for him to produce the 2013 budget of CBN for legislative perusal? The Governor has since bluffed his way through.

What we see here is a tale of two Republics. It would have been alright to invite Charles Dickens (1812-1870) to provide a befitting conclusion for this essay as he did in his Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”.

Here, we have never had it so good; but we have never been this confused!

 

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Read this article in the Vanguard Newspapers