President Muhammadu Buhari came into office for the
second time after he served as a military junta’s ruler and he rode on the
popularity of the anti-corruption mantra to win with fifteen million votes as
against the incumbent President Dr. Goodluck Jonathan who netted in 12 million
votes.
The emergence of Muhammadu Buhari with a sing song of
waging relentless battles against corruption seems to have turned out as a
blessing in disguise for news reporters concerned about development oriented
genre of the news reportage because these sets of journalists now frequently
stumbles on mind blowing accounts of how different categories of public
officials’ right under the nose of President Buhari are engaged in the bonanza
of looting.
The discovery of a culture of looting during
this dispensation also enabled researchers to dig deeper into the recent
history and the outcome of this simple calculation of cumulative past financial
misdeeds has turned up a huge collection of tales of how different layers of
public office holders have embarked on riotous bazaar of outright heist of
public fund.
The naked culture of looting going on now and
the others that went on during the immediate past political dispensation has
given Nigeria a dirty name as the looting Republic of Nigeria.
There is therefore the urgency of the now to
make it known to all and sundry around the world that Nigeria does not run a
Republic of looters whereby certain classes of public officials have the
operational licences to loot public resources and enjoy the immunity from
prosecution simply because they are now on the right side of the corridors of
power.
There is the obvious reality that the
Economic and financial crimes commission is practically selective and the
operatives of this anti-graft agency seems to have some powerful presidency
officials that dictate to them the targeted looters who should be brought to
face the full wrath of the law whilst the favoured looters are shielded and
afforded official protection and cover.
Recently, from the South East of Nigeria
alone, over one dozen former members of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) marked
down for investigation over their roles in spending the presidential campaign
fund of PDP were granted soft landing because they cross carpeted to APC.
The erstwhile powerful secretary to the government of the
Federation was linked to series of scams in the alleged mismanagement of huge
funds budgeted for relief materials in the Boko haram devastated North East of
Nigeria, but this gentle man is walking the corridors of power and still
wielding political influences.
A former PDP governor who is facing
corruption charges was recently captured in photos circulated unabashedly in
the media having elaborate dinner with the President and the next day in court
the lead witness of EFCC against him disappeared and has since refused to
reappear.
In the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, there are
uninvestigated contract scandals running into $25billion but this sleazy story
is being swept under the carpets.
As if these scandals are not enough, a
serving minister was caught buying a choice housing assets in Abuja worth
several hundreds of millions but when interviewed by whistle blowers he claimed
to have collected bank mortgage to make this unpardonable purchase of an exotic
mansion in a time when 100million Nigerian families can’t afford 1 good square
meal per day.
The climate of looting is so pervasive to an
extent that an agency like the Nigerian Refugees Commission was caught pants
down pilfering donated food reliefs that Saudi Arabia sent to North East for
the internally displaced persons.
Today, the looting train landed in the National Emergency
Management Agency when it is being alleged that N19Billion meant for relief
materials was stolen by the current management.
All of these lootings going on are only being revealed by
the National Assembly because both the ICPC and EFCC are busy chasing allegedly
corrupt members of the nation’s leading opposition PDP.
The House of Representatives has just mandated its
Committee on Emergency and Disaster Preparedness to probe the National
Emergency Management Agency, NEMA, over looted N19.4 billion relief materials
funds for victims of disasters.
House of Representatives Committee on Works ordered
the acting Rector of Federal School of Survey, Oyo, Surveyor Joshua Olushola
Omilabu, to give adequate account of how N87.5 million spent on the
construction of an administrative building in 2017.
The NEMA issue was based on a motion promoted by Benjamin
Wayo, under matter of urgent public importance on the floor of the House.
The funds, according to the lawmakers, were for hunger
intervention in the North East and food intervention across the country.
The lawmakers noted that the funds were illegally
siphoned by officials of the agency through dubious award of contracts without
delivering relief items to the victims.
Explaining the breakdown of the funds, while leading
the debate on the motion, Wayo said the agency has received more than
N10 billion from the 20 percent National Ecological Fund in the last one year.
Other funds on the radar of the lawmakers are the N5
billion for hunger intervention in the North East, about N2 billion for food
intervention across the country and the N2.4 billion the Director General of
the agency, Mustapha Maihaja, allegedly awarded to the companies he has
interest in.
Wayo noted that the agency was the only federal agency
that had an Air Ambulance, adding that the Ambulance had been turned into a
commercial one without the financial proceeds remitted to government coffers.
The lawmaker explained that the mandate of NEMA was to
coordinate the management of disasters across the country and to assist victims
of such disasters, but added that in spite of the core mandate, several cases
of disasters across the country had not been given necessary attention.
“The hunger issue in IDP camps in the Northeast; the
farmers/herdsmen conflicts; fire disasters victims and many other such cases
across the country have been neglected. “The agency has received more than N10
billion from the 20 per cent National Ecological Fund in the last one year, N5
billion for hunger intervention in the Northeast, about N2 billion for food
intervention across the country,” the lawmaker said.
“These funds were illegally siphoned by officials
of the agency through dubious award of contracts without delivering relief
items to the victims.
The Director General of the agency also awards contracts
to companies he has personal interests in, and has violated his approval limits
by awarding contracts to a single firm without due process.
“Example, one company called Olam Nigeria Limited got a
contract of N2.4 billion, which is against the agency’s approval limit as
stated in Section 16 subsection 1 of the NEMA Act. It should be made clear that
the section pegs the approval limit at just N30 million,” the lawmaker said.
He, however, said that the incapability of the NEMA DG to
manage the affairs of the agency.
At the National Health Insurance Scheme, whereby the
Executive Secretary Alhaji Yusuf was indicted for large scale alleged theft of
public fund running to nearly N1Billion was reinstated back to his duty by
President Buhari because he is from Katsina State.
To confirm the notorious status of Nigeria as the looting
Republic, the Human rights lawyer, Mr. Femi Falana (SAN), has listed 10 alleged corruption cases that
can fetch the Federal Government not less than $74.5bn and N2.5trn if
prosecuted.
The lawyer said without resolving these
high-profile corruption cases in which the funds were trapped, it would seem
that the Federal Government was chasing shadows in its anti-graft war.
Falana listed the 10 cases in a paper titled, “Promoting
Transparency and Accountability in the Recovery of Stolen Assets in Nigeria:
Proposals for Reforms,” which he delivered in Lagos at a seminar organized by a
human rights advocacy group, Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project,
in collaboration with the Ford Foundation, USA.
Top on the list of the cases, Falana said, was the alleged diversion of $20.2bn from
the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.
He said the details of the alleged fraud were
captured in reports by the National Extractive Industries Transparency
Initiative covering 1999-2012.
According to him, NEITI concluded that the
$20.2bn fraudulently ended up in the hands of some oil companies and agencies
of the Federal Government as opposed to being remitted into the Federation
Account.
Falana said the alleged $20.2bn fraud at the NNPC and
nine other monumental frauds worried him enough that he had had cause to write
a petition to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission calling for the
probe of the alleged frauds.
He said, “Convinced that the Federal
Government was chasing shadows in the fight against corruption, I have had
cause to petition the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to open the
allegations of corruption which border on crimes against humanity. In the said
petition, I alleged as follows:
“From five cycles of independent audit
reports covering 1999-2012, the National Extractive Industries Transparency
Initiative revealed that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, some oil
companies and certain agencies of the Federal Government have withheld $20.2bn
from the Federation Account.
“In 2006, the Central Bank of Nigeria removed
$7bn from the nation’s external reserves and placed same as a deposit in 14
Nigerian banks. In 2008, the bank gave a bailout of N600bnn ($4bn) to the same
banks. Up till now, the CBN has failed to recover the said sum of $11bn from
the banks
“On September 6, 2016, the NNPC announced
that arrangements had been concluded to recover the sum of $9.6bn in
over-deducted tax benefits from joint venture partners on major capital
projects and oil swap contracts. The NNPC is said to have recovered the said
sum of $9.6bn but has not remitted same into the Federation Account.”
Falana listed as number four, the alleged outstanding sum
of $1.9bn “which ought to be recovered from Mobil Oil Producing Nigeria
Unlimited and paid into the Federation Account.”
According to him, the $1.9bn is the
outstanding sum out of the $2.5bn which Mobil ought to pay the Federal
Government for the renewal of three oil blocks.
Instead of paying $2.5bn, Falana said, “Curiously, the $600m paid by Mobil was
accepted by the Federal Government,” sometime in 2009.
He also tasked the Federal Government to
demand accountability on the over $4bn recovered out of “the estimated $5bn
stolen by a former military ruler, the late Gen. Sani Abacha.”
“The office of the Accountant General should
be asked to account for the recovered loot. Furthermore, the moves to recover
the remaining loot of about $800m are being frustrated by Swiss and United
States governments,” the lawyer said.
He also called on the Federal Government to
forthwith comply with the judgment obtained by SERAP at the Federal High Court
which ordered the Federal Government to account for the spending of the
recovered Abacha loot under the regimes of ex-Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, the
late Musa Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan.
Next on Falana’s list was “the $470m contract awarded to ZTE (a
Chinese company) in 2009 by the Federal Government for the construction of CCTV
cameras in Abuja and Lagos.”
He asked, “Since the contract was not
executed, what then has happened to the $470m?”
Falana also wants the Federal Government to take steps to
recover the N2.5trn allegedly paid as subsidy by the Central Bank of Nigeria,
to a cabal of fuel importers
“Although the EFCC has charged some suspects
to court, the whole fraud ought to be revisited as the investigation into the
monumental fraud was compromised by the Jonathan administration,” he said.
Again, he urged the Federal Government to
take action towards the recovery of $12.7bn from some oil companies, being the
value of 60.2 million barrels of crude oil which the oil companies allegedly
stole, “shipped from Nigeria and discharged at the Philadelphia port in the
United States from January 2011 to December 2014 and were not recorded locally
recorded.”
He said, “The EFCC ought to be directed to
recover the $12.7bn from the shipping and oil companies that carried out the
fraud.
“If the investigation of the stolen crude oil
can be extended to other ports in the United States, China, India, France,
United Kingdom etc., Nigeria may be able to recover not less than $200bn during
the same period.”
Finally, the human rights lawyer said the
Attorney General of the Federation, ought to recover the sum of $13.9bn which
telecommunication company, MTN “illegally transferred” out of Nigeria.
“The huge fund should be recovered while the
economic saboteurs involved in the illicit transfer should be prosecuted,” Falana said.
He stressed that “it is imperative for
the EFCC to conduct an investigation into the colossal fraud and recover the
huge proceeds of the economic and financial crimes to the states’ coffers.”
He also tasked the government on the quick
passage of relevant laws that would aid the Federal Government in its effort to
recover funds looted by corrupt public officials.
One of such laws, which must be urgently
passed, he said, is the Proceeds of Crime Bill.
When passed into law, the bill, according to
him, will address the problem of “absence of a forfeiture law in a distinct
legal framework in Nigeria.”
A little peep into the immediate past administration
showed just how from one agency a whooping N62 billion at the National Social
Insurance Trust Fund, a parastatal of the Ministry of Labour and Productivity
was stolen.
But this government has dabbled into the arena of
politics by setting up the nine-man panel to probe the diversion of the cash
and bring the perpetrators to book in line with the anti-corruption posture of
the administration.
Similarly, the panel, is to establish the roles played by
the last Chairman of the board of the NSITF, Ngozi Olejeme, the ex-Managing
Director of the fund, Alhaji Munir Abubakar, the four executive directors and
two directors, who served under the chairmanship of the embattled woman.
The Minister of Labour and Productivity, Dr. Chris Ngige,
who inaugurated the nine-man panel in Abuja on Thursday, said the Federal
Government was worried that the finances of the strategic government parastatal
had been left in a mess over the years, making it possible for huge cash to be
looted easily without any restraint.
The minister lamented that those who looted the cash had
made it impossible for the accounts of the NSITF to be audited for more than
four years by relevant government agencies as stipulated by law establishing
it, thereby creating a conducive atmosphere for them to turn the place into a
cash cow for themselves.
The truth is that this "Cash cow" called
Looting Republic of Nigeria will die prematurely unless we take objective steps
to bring all looters to justice irrespective of their political persuasions.
*Emmanuel
Onwubiko is the Head of the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria
(HURIWA) and blogs@www.emmanuelonwubiko.com
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