By Wale Bakare
The debacle of the recent court judgement awarding a kingly sum of $9.6B against the country (people seem to forget that this judgement is not against a government but against us, the people of Nigeria) is embarrassing, to say the least. It highlights the lack of transparency that permeates the way deals and agreements are entered into on behalf of all of us. It also brings into stark relief the impunity and lack of consequences for wrongdoing in Nigeria. We just do not punish failure to act in the best interest of the country.
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This lack of transparency and high-level corruption, which appears to be the life-blood of governance in Nigeria, is not a monopoly of the Federal Government. As a matter of fact, it is much worse at the state level where the governors are de-facto emperors and the houses of assembly mere rubber stamps of the governor or the godfather holding sway in the state if they are not one and the same person. This state of affairs is not tempered by the level of sophistication of the citizenry of the state or the level of poverty that ravages it or even the political party in power. Not at all. Corruption is an equal opportunity franchise in Nigeria. Everybody is a thief. It is the one that is caught that is ‘barawo’! So whether it is in Lagos where 15% of the state revenues are paid to a private company and a rail line that costs $1.4m/km in Rwanda is awarded for $5.4m or Imo where a “hand of god” that could have been erected for N10m, is awarded for N850m, the people are the victims. It matters not whether it is Kano where the governor has to wear specially designed Babanriga to house the proceeds of kickbacks or even Ekiti where N1b is spent on a poultry where the chickens don’t s**t (thanks OBJ), it’s all fair game. In fact, there is a subsisting court judgment like no other in the entire world in Rivers State that prohibits the police from investigating or arresting a former governor forever!!!
I wrote an article in 2015 when Nyesom Wike became governor of Rivers State. It was indeed the first time that an incumbent governor and party would have no hand in the emergence of the incoming governor. As a matter of fact, Wike and Rotimi Amaechi (his predecessor) were sworn enemies and Wike had levelled several grave allegations against Amaechi while in office. I advised Wike to now use the extensive powers his office had to investigate and prosecute Amaechi. He had access to the books, he had the instrumentality of the state judiciary. He had a pliant and supportive house of assembly. Most importantly, Amaechi no longer had immunity. It’s been five years and total silence from Wike. I guess there’s something to be said for ‘honour amongst thieves’! That’s why I advise Akinwunmi Ambode not to be unduly distressed about the impotent gyrations of the Lagos State House of Assembly’s charade of investigating him about those buses. Nothing dey happen, as 2face would say. The house cannot afford a singing Ambode who has helped bury more skeletons in his time than the gravediggers at Ikoyi cemetery.
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Now back to this P & ID nonsense. A most unpatriotic and probably corruption-driven agreement was signed in 2010, binding the country to a patently defective contract for 20 years by an agency of government that had no powers to do so. Aside from agreeing to terms that it had no potential to fulfil (like the supply of raw gas since it did not own or produce gas), said contract was not vetted or approved by the minister of justice at the time whose office ordinarily should have done so. How does a sovereign country sign an agreement with a private company and agree that arbitration in the event of a dispute would be in the company’s home country? Which tail was wagging the dog in this? Who was the bigger party in this contract? P&ID or the sovereign state of Nigeria?
Now, for whatever reason (and I suspect it was so designed ab initio), the contract failed. Nigeria did not build the gas pipeline which was supposed to bring gas to the location of the plant in Cross River. I have still not heard a plausible reason for this except that the economy did not make it feasible to build one. It should be noted that we have also never been told that P&ID even turned the sod and did a photo-shoot (as is the custom here) that they were beginning the building of a gas plant. They claim to have invested $40m on equipment and FDI in the country which there is no trace of and for which they have not produced any evidence. I think I know into what the $40m was invested. And I think they wouldn’t have been keen to prove it if we had diligently addressed the matter. In actual fact, P&ID has invested nothing in this scam beyond what it cost them to come to Nigeria to sign this bogus contract. No money, no equipment, no plant. Nothing. And they want to walk away with $9.6b! That is almost 20% of our foreign reserves. This to a company that has never seen $9.6m in one place at a time!
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No matter how much Abubakar Malami tries to extricate himself and this government from responsibility for this fiasco, he cannot wash himself clean of accusations of crass sloppiness in his handling of the matter from the minute it was brought to his attention. His excuse that he came into office after the award had been given does not explain the length of time it took to respond to every development. While I do not expect the government that came into office at the start of a recession to have happily gone to hand over $850m to anybody as settlement, there should have been a more robust response and rejection of the award and a more vigorous rejection of the validity of the initial contract itself. We also should not forget (as a lot of us seem to be doing) that the payment of $850m which is what was on the table in 2015 was not payment for any service rendered to Nigeria or for fertiliser or medication for children. It was money that was meant to have been handed over to this company for doing nothing. As we rightly condemn Malami and the Muhammadu Buhari government for allowing the matter degenerate to this level, we should also be asking questions of those whose actions and omissions led us here in the first place.
Finally, let the government sound it loud and clear to the international community that we will not pay anybody $9.6B. We will obviously have to pay something for the corruption and ineptitude of our own people. It, however, should never be anything near the amount in dispute, with almost half of it going to end up in the British treasury as taxes. There comes a time when you say “if it will tear, let it tear” (to paraphrase a Yoruba saying). Any government that pays that kind of money out in a situation like this will greatly increase the poverty and suffering of a people that are already heavily burdened and runs the risk of putting a big question mark on its own legitimacy.
