The Bola Tinubu Orchestra : Cesspool Of An Mda – Emmanuel Oyebamiji
It was against the run of play that the presidential candidate of the All-Progressives Congress (APC) ran a race of his life. The first trouble was the seeming reluctance of the sitting President, Muhammed Buhari, to back him. Scores of high-ranking officials seemingly trusted by the taciturn leader picked up the nomination forms to run for the ticket. The apex banker introduced a currency exchange policy that was seen as detrimental to the candidacy of the man whose turn had come. Even the man himself at the apex bank offered himself to run. Yet, he continued to get the protection and support of the taciturn former President.
It was also against the run of electoral level playing field when the highly experienced political organizer and fighter stood to run on the platform of the incumbent leader who had literally destroyed Nigeria through actions and inactions that preached anti-corruption but elevated sleaze to unfathomable heights; who had been reputed as a dogged military fighter and strategist but nurtured an era festered by insecurity and destroyed the very fabric of the Nigerian state; and who had ascended the throne with tremendous goodwill of both the incumbent President he ran against conceding defeat to him and opting not to challenge his loss in court and the populace who yearned for him, but ended up introducing dual policies across board in business, just to benefit his cronies, elevated nepotism to ridiculous heights by virtually handing over the entire managerial strata of the petroleum sector and the security apparatus to his kinsmen, and allowed his tribesmen roam about the entire country with the dreaded AK-47 military rifle while busy either proscribing the militia groups of rival tribes or curbing their operational freedom and efficiency.
It was against the run of play when the political maestro ran against two formidable foes in the political tsunami of our time, Peter Obi, and the dogged politician that metamorphosed from the political dynasty of the Shehu Musa Yar’adua machinery and had built tremendous goodwill upon the throne as the first Vice President in the present civilian Republic, Atiku Abubakar.
Regardless of all the negative runs of play and despite several legal hurdles that stared at his face after the race, the man triumphed and became President. He inherited a collapsing economy, a stratified country with disjointed loyalties and a political dispensation that was tipping towards implosion. It was therefore not surprising that he named a Cabinet full of political fixers and devoid of seasoned technocrats needed to fix the rot. For, the greatest institutions teach that a man must first survive to achieve and must first live to be able to fight.
The diehards still placed their hope in him for many of the political fixers in the Cabinet were already loaded to the hilt with financial resources beyond imagination and had occupied high offices with legislative and executive power and so did not have to pilfer the public treasury. Moreover, the Commander-in-Chief is a man of unimaginable means who solely financed his elections and could not be swayed like a reed. He was already a godfather and national leader before he ascended the throne. When, therefore, he began to take the hard decisions even the predecessor retired General dreaded to take, a la dismantling the petroleum subsidy and floating the currency at almost the same space of time, it was obvious to the initiated that the man on the beat was never to be cowed or taken for a ride.
The people had witnessed the seeming worst times in the recent past when stranger things continuously happened before their eyes – planes of a foreign airline being repainted and launched as the new Air Nigeria; billions of public funds being misappropriated under the guise of feeding school children when all schools were shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic protocols; millions of public funds being misappropriated as logistics expenditure by several public parastatals at the same time when the nation was under lockdown, etcetera.
It is against the reality of a seasoned political warrior that has firmly etched on the presidency with the requisite authority that this time has become bemusing to the observers. There is a rat race by his appointees to outsmart each other in punishing the people they rule. Prices keep going up and nobody seems to care except to justify it as necessary sacrifice. The exchange rate kept going up until recently when it miraculously started a climbdown, and with it the attendant inflation. Ditto the pump price of petroleum products which has been dangling based on the apron strings of the Aliko Dangote refinery boardroom permutations! The applicable tariffs on electricity, telecommunications, vehicle licenses continue to soar! Even the tax rates are going up. Cable television rates have gone up. Just name it!
Against the backdrop of the sorry state of the masses the people did not want to see more. At least, not the one that will mock their sensibilities from an ordinarily appointee old enough to be a grandfather. And that is why the continuous episodes that reel out of the Nigerian Content Development & Monitoring Board should never have been tolerated by the Bola Tinubu spin masters. Or even by the President himself! First, the National Assembly Committee oversighting the agency produced a classic tale of the unbelievable in a one-hour video release that detailed how public funds can be looted. The basic fallout was that US$35 million was just simply looted from the treasury of the agency under the guise of partnering a private company to build a petrochemical plant in the hometown of the former Minister of State for Petroleum Resources and former Executive Secretary of the agency. It seemed unbelievable that public officials could pay out US$35 million, amounting to about N16.1 billion at the time at the exchange rate of N460/US$1, to a company just formed less than a year before the transaction and so having no goodwill. Yet, the payout was for 40% of the shares of that company which amounted to just N4 million, given that the authorised, paid-up share capital was only N10 million. Hence, N16.094 billion was paid out as premium for nothing. The macabre dance then started! Like Fela sang in the years of yore …N2.8 billion oil money missing; they set up panel of inquiry; the Head of State declared that nothing was missing; the panel of inquiry was shut down… Nobody knows what happened but the Hon. Boma Goodhead Committee that started a good work and made people know how our money was being plundered suddenly shut shop. Every accused person went home. The presidency did not even raise an eyebrow.
Then the second macabre episode erupted. The agency got two Chairmen to head the Governing Council – a Chairman and a Co-Chairman. As the music maestro Fela sang again in those years of yore: confusion break bone… double wahala for dead body and the owner of dead body… Even the appointment was in contravention of the relevant provisions of the enabling Act governing this agency. Who was doing this to this important agency to local players and stakeholders (both local and foreign) in the Nigerian oil and gas industry? Why has the President been quiet? Was the invincible hand playing from the seat of power itself?
It is then amazing that the latest report erupted from Sahara Reporters that the sum of N7.75 billion was misappropriated in a transaction that was not even a transaction. How can you pay a consultant to recover money from another government department duly charged with managing the resources of the country – the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation? How can the Executive Secretary superintend the approval of such humongous amounts, broken into N5.05 billion and N2.70 billion, as two of the three payments to the consultant? What is the sanction for recklessly hijacking power not given to you to approve payments, especially when such power resides with the Federal Executive Council headed by the President himself? What is the value of the third payment to the same consultant? How much did the consultant recover? How did the Central Bank of Nigeria make such payments? Who is the so-called former employee of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Miscellaneous Offences Commission named Fateemah Mohammed that abused her former role to mastermind this heist? How could the Executive Secretary have possibly installed the said Fateemah Mohammed, Ifeanyi Ukoha and Mubaraq Zubair on sensitive roles to facilitate such illegality without undergoing relevant Government approvals, as alleged by Sahara Reporters? Who is responsible for appointing officials into high management positions in the public service? What other crimes could have been happening there? Questions! More questions!! More confusion!!!
And yet, there is also the rider of N580 million being spent on a single trip to London to hold a stakeholders’ engagement. What has happened to all the remarkable places in Nigeria where meetings can be held? The agency has locations in such prime meeting places like Eket, Oguta, Port Harcourt, Abuja, Lagos and Warri. Moreover, the Federal Government announced a freeze on official foreign trips earlier last year, and the engagement was approved by the Top Management Committee of the agency, comprising all the Directors of the organization in June 2024. Hence, the directors ignored the significance of the Presidency’s order freezing international official engagements outside Nigeria. Even the rebuttal by the organization only seemed to add more fuel to the fire as it never denied the consultancy or the trip. It rather justified it as a biannual event of the agency, without indicating the authority upon which it defied a presidential order freezing official trips outside Nigeria. It also failed to address that it did not have a legal Tenders Board approval to back up an expenditure of that amount which involved an external consultant.
For once, the Bola Tinubu orchestra must stop the silence. For once, the documents attached to the Sahara Reporters needs to be verified for its authenticity. If fake, requisite sanctions need to apply to the popular online publication. If true, then the entire mess needs to be cleared immediately. The Office of the Accountant General of the Federation must explain its role in this heist. The Central Bank of Nigeria must explain how such payments could have been made without Federal Executive Council approval when the amounts fall within the approval threshold of the Council. For if the approval limit of the Council can be breached, then we may wake up one day and hear that someone, not even the President or in the corridors of the Federal Cabinet has sold Nigeria. The President must therefore address this travesty now as the beginning of the rot happening in all the other agencies. The continued silence of the Bola Tinubu administration and the Presidency will simply signal the tragedy of the so-called reformist agenda and imply the drums of the corruption in NCDMB is being beaten from inside the corridors of power.
Emmanuel Oyebamiji is an investment and political analyst based in Lagos, Nigeria
