Where Has All The Money Gone? —Olufemi Ogundipe   

Published on August 9, 2010 by TheNEWS   ·   2 Comments

Olufemi Ogundipe

I am writing you this letter with some trepidation because of your oft-stated pronouncement that you do not demean yourself by reading Nigerian newspapers, although I hasten to observe that you have been more than willing to grant interviews to foreign news outlets and arguably you do enjoy doing this. Could this be some kind of Olympian delusion of grandeur on your part? Among the foreign media that you have spoken to in the past two to three years are the Financial Times of London (Thursday, 19 April 2007), the BBC current affairs programme HARDtalk (19 March 2009) with Stephen Sackur, during which you were palpably very uncomfortable when the subject was raised of widespread and systemic corruption in the civilian government you headed as president of Nigeria. Recently in Johannesburg, South Africa at a Forum on African Development (you were the Great Lakes representative on behalf of UN Secretary-General Bank Ki-Moon) in May this year, there was an outburst, a rant from you in the full presence of the international press. During the event, you weighed in on the complex subject of homosexuality, displaying your utter lack of humility and abysmal ignorance of the scientific evidence accumulating on that complex human behaviour. You talked about homosexuality as being an “abomination” and as being “unbiblical”. I wonder why you don’t consider as a much bigger “abomination”and quintessentially “unbiblical” the large-scale corruption in the regime you headed between 1999 and 2007.

Indeed, “where has all the money gone?” In directing this question to you, I will restrict myself to the eight-year period between May 1999 and May 2007 during which you served as the “selected” civilian president of Nigeria. This was a period of very robust earnings from oil. A detailed and most incisive article was written in the July/August 2007 issue of the highly respected, scholarly and high-brow publication, Foreign Affairs by Professor Jean Herskovits of the State University of New York, Purchase, New York. That article was appropriately titled, “Nigeria’s Rigged Democracy.” A treasure trove of information existed therein! Alas! in a large measure, it provided a lot of, but by no means all, the details of the systemic corruption that was the hallmark of your presidency. Yet, Nigeria had the mixed blessing of earning from oil alone, $223 billion during your presidency. Let me put this in perspective: Absolutely no government in Nigeria since January 1914 when Sir Frederick Lugard crafted Nigeria, has had anything near the sum of $223bn available to her in any eight-year period. Between 1970 and 2009, Nigeria earned a total of $520bn from oil, according to the Standard Bank. So the $223bn earned from oil during the eight years of your civilian presidency is 43 per cent of all oil earnings for the country from 1970, when the Nigeria-Biafra War ended, to 2007, the year your government ended. The logical and legitimate question for you is: Where Has All The Money Gone? Especially when we realise that most of our national debt to the West was forgiven? The answer, I submit, is not “blowing in the wind”. It is to be found essentially in the gargantuan corruption that was the hallmark of your regime. You have a big question to answer to the ravished and impoverished Nigerians, 100 million of whom lived on one dollar a day during those years of infamy, 1999 to 2007 and beyond.

In the words of Professor Jean Herskovits, during those eight harrowing years of your misrule, “Electricity is scarce, and clean water is rare. Despite vast sums of money supposedly spent on federal roads, those roads have continued to deteriorate. Some 70 per cent of Nigerians must get by on $1 a day. The UN Development Programme’s 2006 Human Development Report ranked Nigeria 159th out 177 countries studied. In 2004, mortality rate for children under the age of five averaged 217 deaths per 1,000 births, higher than anywhere in coastal West Africa, apart from war-torn Liberia and Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, absurdly, the government built a new stadium in Abuja for more than the combined budgets for health and education for 2001 and 2002.”

These are surely inconvenient truths for you. There was absolutely nothing edifying in your record of service in which kleptocracy was the guiding principle of statecraft despite your nauseating and hypocritical pontification about fighting a war, a rather selective war, against corruption. You did not hear the voices nor saw the faces of the 100 million impoverished Nigerians living on 1-2 dollars a day. If that inconvenient figure of 100 million impoverished Nigerians bothers you, so be it. Put up or shut up! As the Yoruba say: Otito koro (truth is bitter).

I will now shed some light on your lacklustre record in the strategic area of power generation, or rather lack thereof, during your eight-year rule of infamy. At the start of your administration, the generation of electricity was near collapse at some 2500 megawatts a day. This was the situation you met on the ground and, therefore, was not your fault. However, the situation remained unchanged eight years on, at the time you left office reluctantly after an unsuccessful attempt to prolong your tenure through a change in the Nigerian Constitution. It wasn’t lack of money to improve the situation. No, not at all! Your government had the fortune and opportunity of having a very robust income from the sale of oil. What it completely lacked, however, was probity. More on this in a little while.

At the start of your new administration in 1999, you appointed as your Minister of Power, Chief Bola Ige, a scholarly attorney and former governor of Oyo State. Ige was the new magician who was to turn “stone to bread”. Within a very short time, the entire system of electricity production had a near-death experience nationwide in very suspicious circumstances. Ige was programmed to fail and fail he did. The mafia of generator importers had won and won big, and a country of some 150 million people had been rubbished by a cabal. As a result, the country now has more than 60 million imported electricity generators. To complete the absurdity, you awarded the sole authority to import the diesel fuel to power these generators to one of your minions, thereby creating a monopoly. You yourself took over the Ministry and reassigned Ige to the Ministry of Justice. Some years later, while still serving in your government as Attorney-General of Nigeria, Ige was gruesomely murdered in his bedroom, a murder that remains unsolved till this day.

On Thursday, 19 April 2007, while on your way out of office, you gave an interview to the Financial Times of London, after the charade of a national election, universally condemned as fraudulent and violent, with over 300 Nigerians killed. In that interview, you were asked about the parlous state of electricity generation in Nigeria. To keep you honest, I will quote your answer. It was: “When we came in, we didn’t know how deep the rot was. I thought once you remove the first layer of people in NEPA (National Electric Power Authority) that would solve the problem. My minister… I had to remove him from that ministry because one year on and he did not know his right from his left. That was how bad the situation was. We removed the second group. And until very close to the end of my first term, I did not get to the depths of the rot.”

First, your reference to the murdered Chief Ige as not knowing his right from his left was rather tasteless, graceless and crude, and very much vintage Olusegun Obasanjo. You conveniently neglected to mention that you subsequently put yourself in charge of the ministry of power and so, I would like to assume that ‘you knew your right from left. Yet, you, an all-knowing man, could not turn things around despite billions of US dollars expended.

Some details now. Again, I will use words from your own very mouth from an interview, conveniently given by you in another country with another foreign journalist of CP-Africa (Celebrating Progress-Africa.com) in June 2010. You were once again asked about the failure of your government to make progress on electric power generation. For your information, this interview is available on YouTube and you can easily get it yourself from the internet. You answered that between 1999 and 2002, your “government” was pressuring the oil companies to use the gas associated with oil production for electric power generation. Poor, helpless and hapless President Olusegun Obasanjo, only AGIP heeded your plea. As we say in Yoruba: O ma se o! (meaning, what a pity!). You will agree with me that foreign companies can size you up and decide if you can be respected.

Nigeria is a country where the government leaders are in bed with the oil companies which will identify oil blocks for them to divvy out to a disgustingly corrupt, rapacious, greedy, parasitic and idle small elite. One prominent member of your military syndicate, a retired General, in February this year, underwent a mea culpa, and stated he was a recipient of an oil block from yet another member of your military syndicate, a General, now departed. This, according to his tale, he sold for US$1 billion. That was misleading, for he actually sold it to the Chinese National Oil Corporation for US$2.3bn. The government you headed was so corrupt and so thoroughly compromised that oil companies would simply ignore you. I frankly do not think oil companies would be disrespectful of a democratically-elected president like Barack Obama, a credible role model for a future Nigerian president who would see his office as one of service to the people.

According to you, in that interview, beginning around 2003 and with the rise in oil prices, you had the money to spend for power generation. So you launched what you called IPP (Integrated Power Project) and with this, the country was poised to go to a production of 10,000 megawatts of electricity by the time you left office in 2007, a quantum jump, I would say, from the 2,500 megawatts at the start of your stewardship. Alas! the 10,000 megawatts never came to life because, according to you, the government that succeeded you, the Yar’Adua administration, stopped your good work. Olusegun Obasanjo, this is palpably unbelievable and, to put it mildly, shamefully dishonest. You knew very well that there was unfathomable corruption in the IPP project.

All manner of people, many with zero expertise, were awarded contracts by your putrid government. Many of the contracts were so egregious that they could only have come from a very sick administration completely lacking in probity. One member of your military syndicate formed a company he had registered for N2,500.00 (about US$16). That comrade of yours, a retired General, was unable, like many others awarded multimillion dollar contracts by your government, to execute the jobs. There was also the case of a German company that won one of those contracts. Your daughter, a sitting senator in Nigeria’s federal parliament, had fiduciary and financial interests in that German company and it was rather amusing that she had so many combinations and permutations of her name to fool the unsuspecting. A most bizarre and tasteless act! Olusegun Obasanjo, you truly took Nigeria to a new low.  In a country with a robust rule of law, you and your accomplices would have been indicted and tried in a court of law. But in Nigeria, you are one of the proverbial ‘Big Men’ who live lives of inscrutable impunity and are always above the law. Let me firmly warn you: the day of reckoning and judgment shall surely come! All human power is temporary and fleeting. Food for thought for you.

I will now talk about the corrupt, disgusting, immoral, criminal spoils system designed to benefit a tiny putrid elite, a scheme called OIL BLOCKS. Truth be told, you were not the originator of the corrupt scheme. It was another member of your renegade military syndicate who started this sinful scheme. Alas! it was General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. But you operated it big time. You made yourself the minister of petroleum for the first seven years of your rule of infamy and positioned yourself strategically to divvy up oil blocks to all manner of people, including many unsavoury characters. In so doing, you contributed in no small way to the rise of a tiny, corrupt and parasitic oil block elite that included PDP (Peoples Democratic Party, your political party) governors, favoured members of your greedy and lawless military syndicate, party stalwarts, some so-called traditional rulers (some of whose ancestors sold our people into slavery during the dark days of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade starting from the 17th century). Others were just mistresses and girlfriends.

Billions of dollars of Nigeria’s wealth have been shared out to a rotten, idle, parasitic oil block elite, who have come by stupendous wealth that they did not work for. Since you like quoting the Holy Bible, Olusegun, do you recall from the Bible the admonition which states that, “In the sweat of your brow you will eat.” (Genesis 3:19). Powerfully, this statement commands the necessity of work ethic. It is the blessing of the power of work. “God fainteth not, neither is weary.” (Genesis1; Isaiah XL 28). Olusegun Obasanjo, can you, in good conscience, say that your evil oil block scheme is in accordance with the ethics of Christianity, a religion that you are always so ready to remind us publicly that you embrace? Also, have you ever stopped to think that you and your fellow travelers are doing incalculable damage to the younger generation of Nigerians, demonstrating to them that they don’t have to work for what they own? I say all this with a very heavy heart as someone who shares with you the same age bracket and the same time span of finishing our secondary school education some two to three years before Nigeria’s independence in 1960.

On January 2, this year, you attended an interdenominational open-air service on the palace grounds in Ile-Ife to mark the 80th birthday of the Alayeluwa Oba Okunade Sijuwade, the Ooni of Ife. You were accompanied by your new and current bride. The preacher at that service was the Most Reverend Peter Jasper Akinola, Primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria. Said