April 26, 2010
All our military heads of state were largely insensitive, corrupt, almost illiterate, self-appointed tyrants who seized their stripes of honour (dishonour is probably more appropriate) through coups rather than the rigours of formal training, experience or war. Each one of the military heads of state simply got up from bed one chosen morning, pistle on the hip, jackboots on the ready to besmear our constitution to loot our treasury to their hearts content. Of course, they soon made up on the job for their lack of proper war or soldiering experience by detaining, tear gassing, shooting and bombing citizens protesting against their high-handedness and misrule. Everyone of our coup Generals aspired to be the richest lazy fool in the world sitting like an over-fed baboon atop the tallest tree in our devastated and rotting vineyard, savouring their exploits amidst squalor, hunger and decaying corpses. General Muhammadu Buhari was one of such military head of state.
On the 31st December, 1983, Buhari struck, under the cover of the political commotion that trailed the Presidential election results of the time. In reality, power was seized for the opportunity to destroy documents relating to the NNPC’s missing US$2.8 billion oil money, and punish all those involved in unraveling the scam. Politicians and critics, including Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, notorious for clamouring for the exposure of the oil money rogue Minister of Obasanjo’s military epoch, were locked up without trial. Buhari’s regime had a penchant for incarcerating all and sundry. Satire saved my neck at the time.
Not much is known about Buhari’s family background. Not a great deal has been heard about his educational qualifications either. As head of state, he was a recluse to the core. At least, that was the image he portrayed. His deputy, the late Gen. Idiagbon, was considered by most Nigerians to be the star of Buhari’s regime. It is to Idiagbon that any credit due to that regime is generally attributed. Idiagbon was the defacto head of state. He was honest, upright, disciplined, and like Murtala Muhammed before him, he succeeded briefly in introducing order and sanity to our lives.
Nigeria was already a failed state economically when Buhari seized government from Shagari in December 1983. We had a staggering foreign debt load of US$18 billion, so Buhari stopped all further borrowing, and in defiance of the IMF and World Bank, pegged the exchange rate of the naira at one to the US$1.50. He put a ceiling on the amount of foreign exchange earnings to be used in servicing foreign debts, and after sorting out and rejecting the dubious foreign debts in our portfolio, paid off nearly 50% of the genuine debts by the end of his regime in 1985.
Buhari’s regime maintained a vibrant foreign policy with Africa as its principal focus, and it strongly resisted the IMF. The regime’s fight against corruption is exemplified by the crating of Umaru Dikko to airfreight back to Nigeria from London.
Buhari generally had no agenda for leadership but vendetta against those he called critics and rabble-rousers. After consigning the vexatious matters that brought him to power, to administrative oblivion with the help of Shinkafi, his Secret Service guru, Buhari announced his readiness to quit office.
Idiagbon, as Buhari’s lieutenant, naturally insisted on taking over as head of state from his apparently prematurely retiring boss. Babangida, who was Chief of Army Staff at the time and a member of the Supreme Military Council, insisted it was his turn to rule because he had been involved in virtually every military coup up to that time. The quarrel split the Supreme Military Council members almost equally behind the two principal combatants and eventually led to the overthrow of Buhari’s regime.
Abacha rehabilitated Buhari with the chairmanship of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF) before he (Abacha) died in 1998. When Obasanjo returned to power in May 1999, he found that over 2.5 billion naira had not been properly accounted for in the PTF and that there was not much on the ground to show for the colossal expenditure the agency was claiming. On the day Obasanjo announced the scrapping of the PTF, a non-staff brother-in-law of Oga, allegedly serving as his conduit on some PTF projects, died suddenly from what appeared to be heart failure.
Buhari has no respect for democracy. Under his behest, the ANPP humiliated five highly respected South-Eastern Presidential aspirants at their primary for the 2003 presidential election despite having Dr. Okadigbo as Buhari’s running mate. Buhari definitely was not a sellable presidential candidate across Nigeria. What happened was that the incumbent ANPP governors needed a Buhari to help them hold on to their states on religious grounds. After rigging his party’s primary to become its presidential candidate, Buhari felt he was on moral grounds to preach election morals to the world. He ignored the South-West completely in his campaigns, as if it did not exist, and offered the South-South, the unattractive, legally diminished constitutional option on derivation. To rob salt into injury, he threatened to swap NDDC with PTF. If he wasn’t playing with words, he betrayed his selfish ethnic agenda because we all knew what happened in his PTF. The little he achieved was focused in his backyard.
Even in the area of public debate, Buhari was not articulate or detribalized and he lacked charisma. He ignored all entreaties to explain his programmes to the ‘bloody civilians.’ Arrogant and condescending, he was unable to climb down from his high horse as a former military dictator. Infused with the moribund myth that Nigerian leadership was the sole property of his ethnic group, he assumed he could cow the rest of us with a jihad. If that failed, some said, military coup was a possibility because a kaferi must not continue to rule. He concentrated his campaign (if it could be called that, because he said very little at every stop), in the North-East and North-West of the country. The little he said, was only in the Hausa language to titillate the warrior nerves of his jihadist gang.
As for ABUBAKAR ATIKU, the accusation in 1999/2000 that the president’s deputy, Atiku Abubakar, privatized Nigeria Incorporated to himself was not investigated because Obasanjo’s third term ambition was not strong at the time. Atiku denied ownership of African Petroleum (AP), which in the end turned out to be a bobby trap, laced with huge hidden debt, and was re-acquired by the government through the NNPC. However, Atiku was seen as a product of the Nigerian corrupt system. He retired as a boss of the Customs several years ago, an agency of government that reeks with corruption. There were some spats over contracts for the communications garget for the 8th All African Games in 2003, in Abuja, and the issue of bunkering crookedness, and illegal rents collected on crude oil lifting, which Obasanjo largely scuttled in the heat of his tenure elongation project in March 2006.
In August 2005, and early 2006, we heard of US security operatives raiding Atiku’s home in Washington, USA, over allegation of involvement with Mr. William Jefferson, a member of the US Congress, in a US $500,000 bribe over a telecommunications deal in Nigeria. In mid May 2006, the FBI claimed in a US court to have found US $90,000, of the bribe money concealed in a freezer in the office of Mr. Jefferson. Mr. Jefferson who at the time was claiming to have been duped by some Nigerians, had, in fact, collected $6.5 million from one Otumba Oyewole Fasawe, the Nigerian behind the Netlink Digital Television (NDTV) private business that Jefferson was contracted to supply with technology and failed. Jefferson had with great difficulty, and after a lot of pressure, managed to refund only $1.7 million of the $6.5 million he had received, at the time he was screaming foul-play against his swindled Nigerian partners. Mr. Vernon Jackson, Jefferson’s agent on the NDTV scam, was jailed in the USA in September 2006, for seven years over the deal.
The Petroleum Development Trust Fund (PDTF), under the supervision of Vice President Atiku, had apparently been used to finance the NDTV business and Globacom. On May 31, 2006, the US government, in reaction to public speculation in Nigeria, denied having cleared Atiku of involvement in the NDTV fraud. Early in June 2006, Atiku was again alleged in a US court, where further hearing was continuing, to have been involved in the bribery scandal. In mid July 2006, the EFCC went to a bank and collected statements on Atiku’s current accounts.
On Thursday 7th September 2006, the Senate President read in the Nigerian Senate, a letter from President Obasanjo accompanying some documentary evidence, alleging conspiracy, fraudulent conversion of funds, corrupt practices, and money laundering, against the Vice President. The submission, which was for the information of the Upper House, claimed that the President, acting on information received from the USA government, set up an administrative panel to investigate the allegations against Vice President Atiku.
The report of the panel, along with the findings of the EFCC, claimed that the Vice President utilized for private purposes, funds put in a fixed deposit account for the Petroleum Development Trust Fund (PDTF), a department of government under his care. In essence, the Vice President was acting as money lender with government money for personal profit. US$10 million of the US$125 million fund was clearly used as collateral in support of a loan of N1.2 billion granted to Otumba Oyewole Fasawe by the Trans International bank in Lagos.
The financial gain made by the Vice President from Fasawe over the loan was paid into Atiku’s Campaign Organization account with Bank PHB. Umar Pariya, Atiku’s aide, acted as the go between on the transaction. The balance of US$115m of the PDTF money was transferred in April 2003, for reasons unconnected to PDTF activities, to Guarantee Trust Bank belonging to Dr. Mike Adenuga, the Vice president’s friend and Chairman of Globacom. The fund’s transfer, like the US$10 million withdrawn from it earlier, was done without the required recourse to the Federal Executive Council (FEC). Argument by the Vice President that the US$115m was put in Adenuga’s bank eight months after Globacom’s operating license was paid for or that no money was lost, does not alter the fact that the fund was moved without FEC’s awareness and for purposes unrelated to PDTF projects, including possible attempt to cushion Globacom over an urgent business deal or external debt repayment pressures for personal profit.
The Vice president’s defense at the time sounded like: “I am guilty but I shared my illicit gains with the President and my party, the PDP.” The Vice President, now politically dead, alleged that the President’s profits from the messy deals included N3 billion directly; their joint billions of Naira campaign fund; N100 million made to the president’s IBAD construction company; N11 million given to his Bell Comprehensive High School to buy buses; N200 million used to clear some of the president’s debts; N100 million contributed to his campaign fund; ugly arms deal scams; funds given to his African Leadership Forum and to buy cars for women (married or not), he was ensnaring to his bed etc; N500 million made available to the campaign chest of the PDP….
On Tuesday October 3, 2006, Chief Dan Etete, a Petroleum Resources Minister in General Abacha’s regime, opened a can of worms on the Vice President’s ugly oil deals, and how INTELS, (a company in which the VP had substantial interest and shared ownership with two Italians, Messrs Gabriel Volpi, and Angello Perruzi, and a Switzerland based lawyer called Lugano), sold a piece of land on the water front in Port-Harcourt to Shell for US$100m. The VP, using INTELS, and (Pecos Nigeria Limited, a business front of Otunba Oyewole Fasawe), blackmailed and pounced on 50% of Malabo’s oil bloc 245. Then with the connivance, treachery, and crookedness of Shell, the Anglo Dutch Oil giant, stole the entire bloc 245 from Malabo at US$210m profit to the Vice president and his business cronies. Using similar tricks, the VP’s INTELS and Associates cornered 20% stake in oil bloc 247 belonging to another party.
The VP’s defense was that Atete should not be taken seriously because he was in exile after “supervising the collapse of Nigeria’s refineries…. and that Etete stole over US $5bn from the public treasury and allocated the oil bloc in question to himself when he was Minister of Petroleum Resources.” That during the scam in question and since, the Petroleum Ministry has been under the firm grip of the President, “all by himself, these last seven and half years. Every Nigerian is literate to the fact that all enquiries on oil and related matters go to the president’s desk….. When the big masquerade behind Etete is courageous enough to come out, the Vice president will respond.” What this means in essence is that others not mentioned in Etete’s report profited along with the VP from the loot. Atiku, a political prostitute without ideology, principles or discipline, peddles his selfish personal ambition without qualms back and forth in political parties, pushed on by a handful of mucking cheerers hoping he would realize in good time that his nuisance value is only being tolerated.
The way forward for Nigeria’s development and success, is for Goodluck Jonathan to become president, come 2011, if he performs well as acting president because Nigeria is in dire need of good leaders. We need to marry the rotational presidency principle with some amount of merit or laudable performance in office. The PDP, which is currently in power, should limit the rotational concept to the first term in office. The second term should be thrown open to competition between the incumbent and candidates from the alternative geopolitical zone, in party primaries. Two terms in office would then no longer be guaranteed and would largely depend on performance in office the first time. Opposition to the second term in office of a leader who has performed well in the first term, is likely to be muffled. This is because all party members ride on the goodwill of the masses enjoyed by such a good leader, to win their respective elections.
A good leader has no hiding place in society. Take Gov. Fashola of Lagos State currently, for instance. Only a fool from within his own party
would seriously try to undermine his return for a second term because all members of his party stand to gain by his success, to win elections. For any of the two geopolitical zones to enjoy two consecutive terms in office as a result of this arrangement, therefore, each zone would begin to go out of its way to put its best brains forward every time. Second term in office would then become a reward for good performance, both for the incumbent and for his or her geopolitical zone.
This would mean that if Jonathan performs well in the next couple of months as acting president, he would deserve to have a short at the presidency in 2011 on a rotational presidency basis. His second term in 2015 would not be guaranteed and would be thrown open to competition between him and candidates from the northern zone. If he wins his second term, it would mean he has performed well in his first term and the rotational principle would come into force again after that. That way, the friction between merit and rotational presidency would be greatly reduced and a geopolitical zone that fails to get a second consecutive term in office would have its self and its candidate's performance in office to blame. The beauty of this arrangement is that the best candidates would begin to be thrown forward to rule and move us forward as a people. Let’s call this the Romerit principle.
NAIWU OSAHON Hon. Khu Mkuu (Leader) World Pan-African Movement); Ameer Spiritual (Spiritual Prince) of the African race; MSc. (Salford); Dip.M.S; G.I.P.M; Dip.I.A (Liv.); D. Inst. M; G. Inst. M; G.I.W.M; A.M.N.I.M. Poet, Author of the magnum opus: ‘The end of knowledge’. One of the world’s leading authors of children’s books; Awarded; key to the city of Memphis, Tennessee, USA; Honourary Councilmanship, Memphis City Council; Honourary Citizenship, County of Shelby; Honourary Commissionership, County of Shelby, Tennessee; and a silver shield trophy by Morehouse College, USA, for activities to unite and uplift the African race.
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