Is there a comic out there looking for a story that would make her (wink, wink: Helen Paul) viewers laugh so much they are still crying in the morning? Are you there, Basketmouth? Anyone?
I invite you to the presidential palace in Abuja where there is a tragedy of massive laughability brewing. It is the forensic auditing fable of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC).
Full disclosure: In July 2020 when President Muhammadu Buhari announced the adventure, I was one of those who dismissed it.
“I am sure the NDDC forensic audit thing was written as a joke,” I wrote on July 19. “The punchline: It will never happen, or be completed in Buhari’s time, or see the light of day.”
Well, last week, a report characterized as such an audit was submitted, allegedly to Buhari, about eight months after the activity got under way. But for the laughs to gather its historic dimensions, we must clarify what this is all about, and who.
The entire thing is to establish exactly why the Niger Delta, which is responsible for the oil on which Nigeria’s economy runs, has remained underdeveloped despite two decades of funds being pumped heavily into it. That would be a monumental achievement, the kind capable of presenting the government as a caring, credible one.
A government is nothing if it is bereft of public trust. Credibility wins elections and crowns statesmen. The Niger Delta presented the Buhari administration with a wonderful opportunity to rebuild its tattered image.
He seized it. His envoy: Senator Godswill Akpabio.
In August 2018, the powerful chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and former Akwa Ibom governor was the Senate Minority Leader. It was in that capacity that he welcomed defectors of the All Progressives Congresss (APC) to his party at a Transcorp Hilton Hotel dinner on August 1. The group included the then Senate President, Bukola Saraki.
What Saraki and the others did not know was that Akpabio was heading in the other direction. Within days, he had abandoned them and joined their former party, the APC. The ruling party, promising to forgive the “sins” of all PDP key figures who defected, had snagged a major fish!
Akpabio was big and ruthless. He had played the PDP game to the hilt, including exiting the governorship of Akwa Ibom after eight years by authoring the Akwa Ibom State Governors and Deputy Governors Pension Bill 2014. It would compel the state to worship him and keep him in luxury throughout his life.
In other words, because of that law, by the time he helicoptered into the APC he was double-dipping as a Senator.
Buhari, who claims to be a “corruption” fighter, appears to admire such men. He welcomed Akpabio by giving him control of the NCDC, and then the leadership of the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs.
Most of all, even as allegations exploded between Akpabio and his former federal legislator-colleagues in which he was accused of having been as dirty as anyone else, Buhari granted him total lordship of the forensic audit.
Akpabio was smiling. He knew that he who controlled the audit narrative controlled the future. Last week, he was wearing the same smile as he arrived to submit a report which was supposed to have been independent.
The media seemed to cooperate. They said Akpabio submitted the report to President Buhari. That was probably the original plan, but Buhari made himself unavailable just as he has made Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo irrelevant.
Mr. Osinbajo is now in the presidential doghouse reminiscent of the “Social Prefect” role of Mr. Goodluck Jonathan in the Umaru Yar’Adua days. Minister Akpabio saw no irony submitting the report to a colleague in the cabinet chamber: Abubakar Malami, the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice.
If there are officials of the Buhari administration who have some semblance of credibility, Malami is not one. He has demonstrated little understanding of law, and no commitment to issues of justice, or of transparency and credibility in government, as I have pointed out again and again and again.
Yet it was to Malami that Akpabio delivered what was supposed to be a credible forensic audit of the NDDC, in “17 Ghana Must Go” bags, one newspaper said, an event to which they invited the mass media.
Sadly, reporters had no access to the report, and sometimes unwisely reported information they could not verify. To begin with, some news outlets flaunted headlines which suggested they could not tell President Buhari from Minister Malami.
In that convoluted second-hand reporting method, Akpabio told the newsmen what he said the auditors had achieved: documenting the award of 13,777 contracts for projects and programmes between 2001 and August 2019 at a cost of over N2.2trn.
We know this to be problematic because Akpabio did not answer questions on the report itself, including when it would be available to the public. It was unclear if he had read it or merely looked at uncomfortable sections where powerful people in the party and government were named.
Will Buhari receive the report from AGF Malami and thus be compelled to undertake a literacy challenge? If so, will he have to run for a third term so he might have enough time to complete it? Who is the man that is strong enough to swim in the rivers and creeks of the Niger Delta, given that we are talking of nearly 14,000 contracts—if not actual projects and programmes—most of which certainly involve the two dominant parties and their governments in the past two decades?
That I could think of nobody brave enough to confront this challenge is why I said in July last year I could not understand the joke.
Because this is the very point at which we as a people come unglued. We are literally and figuratively a nation of uncompleted projects.
Among others, remember:
• Into those creeks of the Niger Delta vanished the $1 billion agreement signed between Nigeria and the European Union in 2009 to combat corruption and promote peace.
• Buhari has conveniently forgotten the foreign and local (Okiro) Halliburton reports in 2008 and 2010, a matter which in February 2016, the EFCC re-opened, reportedly at the instance of the new Nigeria leader.
• Buhari has forgotten the September 2010 KPMG report which unveiled monumental fraud and malfeasance at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, as he has the various presidential panels set up between 2010 and 2014 which he used in his election campaigns.
• Speaking of uncompleted projects, Buhari has forgotten that President Jonathan’s Projects Assessment Committee reported an astonishing 11,886 uncompleted projects in May 2011. Nobody was held responsible, and not one kobo was recovered.
We have indeed been here before. But the only joke which matters here is on the Niger Deltans themselves. Shame on you: those 13,777 projects (about 700 every year) were not abandoned or N2.2trn stolen without the collusion—at the very least—of some of you.
You could have made poverty history. Instead, you have made it perpetual.
This column welcomes rebuttals from interested government officials.
• @Sonala.Olumhense
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