AWAITING THE POWERS OF SUPER TUCANO JETS
Agratifying renaissance seems to have visited the Nigerian security architecture. The wave of kidnappings, killings, rape and other crimes that dominate the tabloid have cast a gloomy shadow on the landscape. Citizens are flummoxed on how territories especially in the northern parts of the country have been reduced to killing fields where bandits and insurgents have assumed the statuses of Lord of the Manor having to be appeased with insensate ransoms added with motorcycles to ease their criminal enterprise against innocent citizens, mostly women, school children and security agents.
However in the midst of this narrative, the recent heavy clampdown on bandits in Zamfara where 40 bandits were killed in one fell swoop and dozens of abducted men and women were released elicited a signal of hope in an otherwise despondent atmosphere.
All these were achieved without the use of the newly acquired Super Tucano military hardware. The Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano, also named ALX or A-29, is a Brazilian turboprop light attack aircraft designed and built by Embraer with top speed of 593 km/h.
The Super Tucano is built as a workhorse combat air platform, equipped for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and for precision air-to-ground strike missions.
The chief of army staff exhilarating right from the theatre of the Zamfara clearance operation enthused a sustained platform position against the criminal denizens and promised that the aggressive military operation would dismantle all the camps and criminal hideouts in due course.
Complimentary to the ascendancy of the Nigerian army, the blockage of communication and restriction of movement in Zamfara was punctilious and right on the button. The novel strategy which set the insurgents into disarray disrupted the value chain of informants and the supply chain of food and other harbingers of criminal shuttle. Kudos to both the military and the state governor for this ingenious blueprint which when adopted in Kaduna and other troubled spots would put paid to the deranged activities of the insurgents.
A food for thought driven home by this piquant renaissance is the fact that solution to the myriads of challenges bedeviling Nigeria cannot be driven by hackneyed strategies that have become antediluvian and are prone to failure.
Asymmetric challenges in the cauldron of insurgency and allied criminality would always require lateral thinking to solve and a paradigm shift in policy envisioning and delivery. If painstaking thought process is applied to most of our teething problems, incredible results are achievable in much more abridged timelines.
One area that requires urgent and timeout paradigm shift is our crepuscular public finance that is hemorrhaging on account of depleting revenue in the face of ballooning expenditure profile across national spectrum.
To continue to use 90% of revenue to service foreign and domestic loans and calibrate perennial budgetary estimates on acquisition of more debts is to insulate lateral thinking from public administration and policy formulation.
The same thinking process that provides silver lining on security can change the narrative on the economy. A good example of the low hanging fruit staring the federal government in the face is the political will to demand an audit of all federal parastatals in line with the Nigerian constitution.
Credible authorities puts leakages pursuant to lack of audit of MDAs at a staggering proportion. Recent reports about federal ministries, departments and agencies explain how fiscal malfeasance and poor oversight have combined to deprive the Nigerian government of its legitimate revenues and impoverish the country.
The revelation by the Auditor-General for the Federation that MDAs failed to account for N4.97 trillion in 2019 and the disclosure by the House of Representatives Committee on Public Accounts that 65 public agencies had never been audited since they were established is really befuddling and validates the question as to whether ministers under whose watch this larceny is given fillip are fit to remain in office.
If Joint Admissions And Matriculation Board, NNPC and other amorphous government outfits can suddenly be turning in profits, it shows that the construct to borrow rather than blocking revenue leakage through global best practices is a misguided and a misanthropic policy choice.
The debt pandemic hanging on Nigeria as it were and impoverishing greater majority of the populace could be one singular deciding metric for extrapolating the legacy of President Muhammadu Buhari and his government.
It is no brainer that the basis for the bourgeoning foreign and domestic loans would become unjustifiable when the infrastructure at which the loans are targeted are being foreclosed by China and other creditors due to the insouciant disposition of supervisory authorities to keeping tab on revenue receipts.