Sun(Set) for $2.35 Billion Scam

Olusegun Adeniyi In October 2023, Nigeria won its case against Process & Industrial Developments (P&ID) Limited which had been seeking enforcement of a fraudulent $11 billion judgement debt in its favour. The Commercial Courts of England and Wales affirmed the claim by the federal government lawyer, Mark Howard, that the company obtained the contract “by telling repeated lies and paying bribes to officials.” But Justice Robin Knowles also said something instructive about the political/business environment in Nigeria. “This case has also, sadly, brought together a combination of examples of what some individuals will do for money. Driven by greed and prepared to use corruption; giving no thought to what their enrichment would mean in terms of harm for others,” Justice Knowles said before defining the ‘others’ he was referring to. “Others that in the present case include the people of Nigeria, already let down in so many ways over the history of this matter by a number of individuals in politics and administration whose duty it was to serve them and protect them.” Last week, an International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) tribunal in Paris dismissed the $2.35 billion compensation claim against Nigeria made by Sunrise Power and Transmission Company Limited (SPTCL). The company’s promoter, Mr Leno Adesanya, according to the ICC tribunal, had masterminded a “corrupt deal” with some public officials and private individuals to scam his country. While I have no time to read the entire 619-page judgement, flipping through the pages is revealing enough. As I wrote in the past, what some of these businesspeople do is target a thriving sector, procure some civil/public servants (not only with cash but also ‘bedroom services’ as former presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, revealed in his Monday column, How and Why Sunrise, Leno Lost in Paris – THISDAYLIVE), get them to sign some dubious ‘contracts’ that are skewed against Nigeria and when they fail (as they are designed to), approach the courts for enforcement. That’s how many idle billionaires have been created in the country. If there is anything that the failed P&ID and SPTCL scandals have exposed, it is that in the Nigerian deep state, public sector corruption is most often enabled by private sector operators. That explains why Nigeria has over the years paid billions of Dollars on spurious judgement debts. These high rollers are quite aware that the incentives for corruption and related crimes are high because it is a low-risk, high-reward enterprise. But perhaps more importantly, even in instances where such dirty deals blow open, private sector kingpins most often go unpunished. Afterall, a former Minister of Power, Mr Saleh Mamman is currently serving a 75-year jail term for laundering $24.7 million and £18.5 million in a scandal associated with these same power projects. I have always believed that any serious interrogation of corruption in Nigeria must look at the role of the private sector. An X user who goes by the name ‘Arthur of Camelot’ recently shared a story which I find instructive because the character involved could be the son of one of those businessmen who point fingers simply because they don’t hold public offices even when they contribute a lot to the corruption in the system: “My friend was going on about ‘if Nigeria was working, this would happen and that will happen’ and another friend interjected saying, ‘bros, if Naija dey work, your papa go dey prison by now’…that put a dampener on festivities and we started separating a fight.” Meanwhile, one of the interesting aspects of the Paris judgement on the SPTCL scandal is the issue of business culture in Nigeria. It reads like an intellectual engagement between a witness brought by Adesanya, Prof Sope Williams (described an anti-corruption expert) and my friend, Ebenezer Obadare, a senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in the United States, who testified for Nigeria. This is the way the tribunal framed their exchanges: “The Tribunal fully appreciates that the thrust of Prof. Williams’ evidence is that the facts underlying Nigeria’s corruption allegations should be considered against the background of the specific Nigerian cultural context, while the essence of Dr. Obadare’s evidence is that Nigerian culture cannot be used to justify the alleged acts of bribery and corruption.” I find the arguments of both Williams and Obadare quite fascinating, but there is also a context to it that many may not even be aware of. It is a notorious fact that many Nigerian businesspeople tell their foreign collaborators that securing contracts in Nigeria involves bribery. And in the process, they sully the image of our country. Interestingly, that ‘culture’ matter also surfaced in the $182 million Halliburton bribery scandal. French court papers revealed how British lawyer, Mr Jeffrey Tesler, served as the conduit between Halliburton’s subsidiary KBR and the officials responsible for approving the $6 billion turnkey contract for the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) project in Bonny, Rivers State. Following his conviction in 2015, Tesler also made allusion to this ‘cultural’ thing that Adesanya’s witness was trying to sell in Paris. “There is no day when I do not regret my weakness of character. I allowed myself to accept standards of behaviour in a BUSINESS CULTURE (emphasis mine) which can never be justified. I accepted the system of corruption that existed in Nigeria,” Tesler lamented. “I turned a blind eye to what was happening, and I am guilty of the offences charged.” Now that another multibillion-dollar scam against Nigeria has been foiled abroad, there are certain lessons we should not ignore. One, we must change the ‘culture’ by which some Nigerian business people believe it is okay to dupe their country or pay bribe to secure contract. Two, we must put in place a well-articulated National Arbitration Policy that makes it difficult for those who devise these crooked schemes. Three, all pending arbitrations against Nigeria should be thoroughly reviewed and seriously challenged, if they are suspicious. Four, we must institute measures to ensure that Nigerian public officials who sign contracts on behalf of the rest of us are not those who would sell the country cheap. Tying Nigeria to scandalous obligations is the kind of action that would normally attract capital punishment for erring public officials in some countries! Finally, the anti-corruption measures must be strong enough to bring to justice corrupt private sector actors. Until authorities in the country begin to expose and prosecute these traitors, they won’t desist from their nefarious activities. But beyond that, we must also begin to build a new culture of ethics in both the private and public sectors in Nigeria. Death and the 37 Miners In February this year, a police officer attached to a joint Mining Marshals patrol was killed by artisanal miners at a site linked to Millennium Metals Mining Company in Katcha Local Government in Niger State. The Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Mr Oladele Alake, who set up the Mining Marshals, vowed then that offenders would face “the full wrath of the law,” and the federal government indeed responded by strengthening the unit’s operational capacity. Seven months after one avoidable death hardened a crackdown, 37 young men were arrested for engaging in ‘illegal mining’ in the same state. They died in circumstances that can only be described as very cruel. Last weekend, the Northern Senators Forum issued a strong statement on the miners’ deaths. While they may have overstated their case with allusion to what happened at Auschwitz (the largest concentration camp operated by Nazi Germany during World War II) I agree with them that history “has taught humanity how horrifying confinement can become when helpless people are deprived of dignity and treated as though their lives have no value.” Stripped of all pretensions, we all know that those young men died not because of the ‘crime’ they committed but rather because of their social status. Meanwhile, this has been a brutal year for artisanal miners in Nigeria. In February, a gas leak at an illegal site in Zurak, Wase Local Government Area of Plateau State, killed 37 people and hospitalised 20 others. In August, an abandoned tin pit collapsed at Kassa, Barkin Ladi Local Government Area of the same Plateau State, killing seven. And on the very day the dead were still being counted in Niger State, more than 20 miners, among them, women and children, were reportedly buried alive at Mayo Kam in Taraba State’s Bali Local Government Area. Add these together, and a pattern emerges: Desperate miners are dying in droves, sometimes killed by the ground they dig, and now, unforgivably, killed by the state that claims to regulate them. I am aware that the Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo (who remains one of the bright lights of the current administration), has moved quickly to suspend the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) Niger State Commandant Siyaka Aniviye, who made a reckless statement after the tragedy. Tunji-Ojo has also constituted a ten-member independent committee to investigate the deaths. But to the extent that this is yet another episode in a declining national psyche that treats human lives as no more than mere statistics, I won’t be surprised if nothing comes out of the investigation. We have been on this road several times before. On Saturday 15th March 2014, for instance, more than half a million jobless university graduates were herded to stadia and other venues across the nation to write aptitude tests for about 4500 openings in the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS). And because of overcrowding and shoddy arrangement, there were stampedes leading to the death of 19 people, including expectant women. It was a tragedy aided by a combination of desperation and impunity. Drexel Nigeria Limited to which the contract was outsourced had asked each of the candidates to pay N850 as “application charges” and N150 as “transaction charges” making a total of N1,000 to be eligible to apply for a job in a government agency in their own country. Because all that concerned these ‘consultants’ was the money involved, there was no real plan for these applicants. Nobody perhaps captured that tragedy as succinctly as Dr Mohammed Hakeem, a brother to one of the deceased. A lecturer at Federal Polytechnic, Nasarawa State at the time, Hakeem said his late sister, who had previously been defrauded of N150,000 while seeking the same job, died for nothing: “I make bold to say that the (job) slots for which my sister has been used as a sacrificial lamb had been allocated to those that matter in Nigeria.” Following that tragedy, an investigation was ordered by the federal government. But as usual, nobody was held accountable. Five years later, the Minister of Interior who hired the consultants that presided over the death of those innocent Nigerians was elected to the Senate. And he has since then—following reelection in 2023—been making laws for the rest of us! So, what should accountability actually require on this current tragedy? First, Nigerians deserve to read the pathologists’ findings themselves so as to ascertain what exactly happened. Second, if negligence is established, in the size of the cell to which the miners were camped, the hours it took to notice them dying of suffocation, or the conditions of the arrests themselves, the consequence must go beyond reassignment. And it must reach not only Commandant Aniviye but whoever sets detention capacity and medical provisioning across NSCDC facilities nationwide, since Minna is unlikely to be the only cell with such problems of poor ventilation and overcrowding. Third, families of the deceased deserve more than condolences. There must be a prompt, dignified release of their dead, and some form of restitution that acknowledges the state’s role in this tragedy. And fourth, because a raid-and-detain posture toward mostly poor artisanal miners has now become fatal, Alake may need to keep his own counsel on the issue. When a gold mine collapsed in Sudan’s West Kordofan two weeks ago, Alake, who is currently the chairman of the Africa Minerals Strategy Group, declared that “human life must always supersede resource extraction.” Reacting to a collapse that killed more than a hundred miners in the Central African Republic some weeks earlier, Alake said much the same, warning that such tragedies must not become statistics the continent mourns today and forgets tomorrow. Now, his charity must begin at home. Everything must be done to help these poor Nigerians not to continue dying (including from health hazards) while chasing a living. On the immediate issue of 37 miners who lost their lives in Niger State, we must ensure that those whose commission or omission led to the tragedy are held to account. Only then can we reclaim our collective humanity as a nation. Aig-Imoukhuede at 60 For almost a decade (until I left in April 2024), I was a member of the Leadership Advisory Board of the African Institute for Governance (AIG). Chaired by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, it is a subsidiary of the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation promoted by Access Bank co-founder and current chairman, Mr Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede. The Not-for-profit, private sector-led AIG started in 2014 with the annual award of scholarships to six high-potential public sector leaders (Grade Level 13 and above) from Nigeria and Ghana to study at the Oxford University Balvatnik School of Government. Then it collaborated with the Office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation (OHCSF) to organise locally designed executive training programmes for participants in Lagos and Abuja. With the overall aim of building the capacity of civil servants across the continent but focusing more on Nigeria, the foundation has extended its reach beyond government ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs) to academic institutions, civil society and private sector entities. Over the years, Aig-Imoukhuede and his wife, Ofovwe have committed tremendous financial resources as well as their time and energy to the idea of transforming the public bureaucracy in Nigeria for efficient service delivery. It is a profound national service. As he therefore joins the Sexagenarian Club today at 60, I can only wish Aig-Imoukhuede a happy birthday, long life and good health. • You can follow me on my X (formerly Twitter) handle, @Olusegunverdict and on www.olusegunadeniyi.com