By Babatunde Jose
“Honoré de Balzac may after all be right when he said that behind every great fortune for which one is at a loss to account there is a crime.” Justice Khosa: Panama Case Judgment.
Some authorities claim that corruption started with the ‘court interpreter’ system in the early days of colonialism: With all his antics and shenanigans. The interpreter gained the reputation of being the intermediary between the town folks and the ‘Whiteman’; he collected bribes and other such tolls to facilitate an audience with the Oyibo. The legend of the famous ‘Natrik’ in Okposi in the Eastern region easily comes to mind.
Since then corruption has spread like wildfire: From the pimping ‘ocho passenger’ at the motor park, to the flinching tramp who begs for money, to the girls who follow men for money, to the wives who covet their husband’s rich friends, to the man of God who relish in carnal knowledge of the women in their congregations, to the father who is happy at his child bringing home loads of clothes when he is not a washerman, to the children who cannot vouch for the source of their parents wealth, to the leaders who cannot keep their hands off the common purse; when the social atmosphere is tainted, the whole fabric of society becomes rotten and everybody is corrupt.
When on January 15, 1966, the ‘Five Majors’ struck, the editorial of the Daily Times Newspaper of that day argued thus: ‘With the transfer of authority of the Federal Government to the Armed Forces, we reached a turning point in our national life. The old order has changed, yielding place to a new one… For a long time, instead of settling down to minister to people’s needs, the politicians were busy performing a series of seven-day wonders as if the act of government was some circus show… still we groped along as citizens watched politicians scorn the base by which they did ascend… ‘
And that was putting it mildly if viewed in retrospect. Today we look back at the military era and shake our heads in shame at the rape of a nation under military rule.
A catalogue of corruption stories in the Nigerian press, is enough material for a doctorate thesis.
Former Chairman of EFCC, Ms Farida Waziri was quoted as saying at a symposium that: “The war against corruption like terrorism is a special kind of war. It admits no conventional methods. It is a war against human selfishness and greed. It is a war against rapid and senseless primitive capital accumulation. It is a war against decadence of mind, ethics, and morals.”
Unfortunately, that war was truncated and today corruption reigns and wears a beaded crown. Most of the high-profile corruption cases were never conclusive and the culprits walk the corridors of power with impunity. There was a country!!!
An orgy of looting as catalogued by inimitable Femi Falana is a reader’s digest of a holocaust of corruption.
1. Diversion of N40 billion from Federation Account: A company, Continental Transfert Technique, had been hired by the Ministry of Interior to collect the Combined Expatriate Residence Permit and Alien Card (CERPAC) Fee of $2,000 per annum from every expatriate in Nigeria. The revenue from 2019 comes to an average of N40 billion per annum. This collection, which violates Section 162 of the Constitution and provisions of the Immigration Act 2015, is then shared on percentages of Federal Government, 30, Interior Ministry, 7, Immigration Service, and Continental Transfert Technique, 58 per-cent. This illegality was challenged at the Federal High Court and the case was won. The court directed the NIS to collect the funds henceforth and remit the same to the Federation Account. But the contractor and the federal government appealed against the judgment and have continued to share the N40 billion per annum. Maybe Tinubu will stop it.
2. Outstanding royalties of $62 billion: In campaigning for the amendment of the Deep Offshore and Inland Basin Production Sharing Contracts Act, Falana requested the Federal Government to collect outstanding royalties payable by the International Oil Companies under the Act. The Federal Government admitted that the country had lost a whopping sum of $60 billion. But the demand for the collection of the huge fund was ignored. The governments of Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Bayelsa States then approached the Supreme Court which on October 20, 2018, ordered the Federal Government to collect the royalties for the past 18 years. The Federal Government confirmed that the outstanding royalty withheld by the IOCs is $62 billion but has refused to collect it. Maybe the current administration would collect it.
3. Sale of public assets and enterprises: Successive regimes have been selling assets and enterprises owned by the Federal Government to members of the ruling class in the name of privatisation. The buyers turned round to engage in asset stripping. According to the Bureau of Public Enterprises, between 2004 and 2020, the federal government sold 142 public enterprises to members of the ruling class. The 10 per cent shares reserved for the staff of every privatised enterprise have been cornered by the so called “core investors” contrary to the provision of section 5(3) of the Privatization and Commercialization Act.
4. $7 billion fixed in 14 banks: Sometime in 2006, the CBN yanked off $7 billion from the nation’s foreign reserves and fixed it in 14 commercial banks in Nigeria. The deposit and the accrued interests were not recovered from the banks. The CBN claimed that it had forgiven “the forbearance”.
5. Sale of Heritage Bank, Keystone Bank, Union Bank and Polaris Bank by CBN: The CBN took over Heritage Bank, Keystone Bank, Union Bank and Polaris Bank, spent trillions of Naira to revitalise them only to turn round to sell them under the table. For instance, CBN invested N1.3 trillion in Polaris Bank but sold it for N50 billion! This week the matter came to a head with the new CBN sacking the entire boards of these banks.
6. Theft of gold and other solid minerals: The theft of the nation’s mineral resources is not limited to crude as solid minerals are equally smuggled out of the country by highly placed criminal elements. It is estimated that $9 billion is lost to illegal mining and smuggling of gold annually. Senator Orji Uzor Kalu disclosed that Nigeria lost close to $54b from 2012-2018 due to illegal smuggling of gold.
7. Indiscriminate import duty waivers: A few privileged members of the business community buy dollars at an official rate while they are allowed to import all manners of goods into the country. In the last 5 years, import duties worth N16 trillion were waived for them.
8. N10 trillion diverted by CEOs of Government enterprises: The Buhari government revealed on December 19, 2018, that government enterprises including the CBN owed about N10 trillion in unremitted operating surplus as at August 2018. The details were provided. The said sum of N10 trillion remains unpaid.
9. N6 trillion unpaid ground rents by buyers of Government properties: On March 29, 2023, the Senate noted that since 1992, over two million houses across the 36 states and the FCT had been built and allocated to beneficiaries by the federal government without evidence of payment of ground rent on the properties. Consequently, the Senate set up an Ad Hoc Committee to recover over N6 trillion unpaid ground rents from property owners in the country.
10. Oil theft of N16.25 trillion: The Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) revealed that between 2009 and 2020 Nigeria lost 619.7 million barrels of crude oil valued at N16.25 trillion ($46.16 billion) to oil theft.
The security forces have not been able to stop the stealing and smuggling of crude oil from Nigeria.
Between 1993 and 2016, about $6.065 billion on the so-called turn around maintenance and rehabilitation of the four refineries at various times. It is public knowledge that the turn-around maintenance of the refineries were not carried out. Therefore, the contractors should be invited by the EFCC and compelled to refund the said sum of $6.025 billion.
These are some of the reasons why we remain poor as a nation, and which has kept our people impoverished.
Will the present administration rekindle our hopes and aspirations? We hope the budding ‘Amazons of the corruption industry’ will be tamed as soon as possible.
However, for the perpetrators, let them remember that ‘we come with nothing and will leave with nothing’.
Barka Jumuah and a happy weekend
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