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Pentascope Report: A Legislative Sanctification of Subterfuge Osita Chidoka
When I read of the life long ban from holding public office placed on Mallam Nasir El Rufai, the Federal Capital Territory Minister Mallam Nasir El Rufai, Federal Capital Territory Minister based on the report of a Technical consultant, a feeling of numbness and betrayal came over me. For days I wondered what was wrong with the black man that we cannot have sustainable authentic heroes. I consoled myself with the thought that human beings are complex creatures capable of living a lie, for what other explanation could there be for the fall of El Rufai? One had hoped that the political class, represented by the House, will realize the need to align with ardent political appointees like Mallam El Rufai in the bid to bridge the gap between the necessary populism of politics and the equally essential unpopular task of economic and social reforms. The announcement of the life ban was a rude awakening on the difficulties of creating that middle ground where politics and policy interact symbiotically. I was, however, happy that the fight against corruption has finally found anchorage in the legislature where it ought to emanate and sincerely hope the House will be in the Vanguard of the cleansing process.
Instinctively I went on the internet in search of the report to at least acquaint myself with the details of the horrendous malfeasance of Mallam El Rufai that warranted a life ban from Public Office. The search for the report was not successful so I requested a friend in Nigeria to mail a copy to me. To put this in perspective, it is pertinent to note that I have been a public ideological defender of a new leadership ethos, which finds muscular expression in Mallam El Rufai, that stand for transparency, intellectualism, courage and commitment to the ideals of modern efficient government. This paradigm, I believe, is exemplified, in the main, by the members of the President’s economic team. After briefly sojourning in Singapore and now in the United States I have come to realize the importance and need for strong and courageous Leadership; if we desire to build a modern nation. To that end I had espoused Strong views in support of these ideals and in defense of El Rufai in the media; hence my concern and interest on the consultant’s report.
As I skimmed through the report, I decided to find out more about the author Professor Augustine Odinma, I searched for him using MSN search to no avail. Further search excluding the Professor title resulted in some articles and the fact that he had a stint as a lecturer at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland where the school of engineering website recorded him as a Lecturer. I was now very curious. I looked up his resume attached as Appendix H of the technical report in which he claimed that he was a Professor at Benedict University in South Carolina, USA. A quick call to the university’s personnel department proved that he had indeed been on the faculty of the University from 1998 to 1999 as an Associate Professor, which is the equivalent of a Senior Lecturer or Reader in the British and Nigeria university system.
Noting that Dr. Odinma got his doctorate degree from a British University I couldn’t fathom why he boldly and misleadingly described himself as a Professor, after a one year employment as an Associate Professor. The term Associate Professor according to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia is “the mid-level position, usually awarded (in the humanities and social sciences) after the "second book" — although the requirements vary considerably between institutions and departments. Can be tenured or not. In most institutions, the position is tenured, however strictly speaking the position is related to a pay differential and can be awarded to non-tenured persons” Also recalling that it was an issue in the Senate screening of Dr. Femi Borishade who though a Reader at University of Ife allowed himself to be addressed as a Professor, I wondered why Dr. Odinma had to inflate his standing before the honorable House of Representatives.
With this at the back of my mind I delved into the report and it turned out to be a catalogue of self advertisement, illogical at best, barely concealed vendetta and a blatant display of bias. Dr Odinma is lucky that the information machinery of this administration is rudderless and devoid of appetite for engagement, otherwise this report should have been unmasked for what it was; an odious attempt to denigrate the reform agenda of the administration.
David Cash et al in their seminal work titled Salience, Credibility, Legitimacy and Boundaries: Linking Research, Assessment and Decision making defined credibility as “refer (ring) to whether an actor perceives information as meeting standards of scientific plausibility and technical adequacy. Sources of knowledge must be deemed trustworthy and/or believable, along with the facts, theories, and causal explanations invoked by these sources.” Reading through the report which was prepared by a “Technical Consultant” it became obvious that Dr. Odinma either took the intellectual standing of members of the House of Representatives for granted; or was careless in his use of terms, facts and theories; or both. The report fails the basic test of credibility in its entirety as few examples will show.
In the first chapter, Dr. Odinma gave definitions of companies in telecommunications without citing any industry authority for his novel typology. He creates a Type I and Type II consultancy firms which he defines thus “Type I consultancy is one owned by a major operator or innovator and is an integral part of the company. Using the services of Type I consultant is synonymous to using the parent company. An example of Type I consultancy Company is TDC or BT Teleconsult…” He went on to define the Type II “The Type II consultancy is a stand alone company, with limited consultancy skills and liability. An example is Pentascope and such company is unsuitable for full scale management of large companies such as NITEL. Type II consultants are only suitable for ad-hoc services and for specific function and not for full scale management as was envisaged for NITEL.” This is unbelievable from a PhD holder! Dr. Odinma not only created his own typology of consultancies but engages in the worst form of academic fraud by creating an implausible and technically inadequate foundation for his report. Let us dissect his definition of type II consultancy which is the basis of his opinion about Pentascope.
Where in telecom peer reviewed literature do we find a term like Type II consultants? How does being a stand-alone company become synonymous with “limited consultancy skills and liability”? Can a company with limited skills truly be referred to as consultants? Dr. Odinma provides no evidence that links Pentascope with “limited consultancy skills and liability.” Assuming we accept the technical definition of our telecom guru, who cites no authority to back his assertions, is it true that stand-alone consultancy companies does not provide full scale management in the telecom industry? Swedtel, a Swiss telecom consultancy company now owned by Worldtel provides management service to telecom operators. Recently it signed a three- year management contract with Reltel, Nigeria. Swedtel is also providing full scale management services to Omantel in Oman to position the company as a world-class telecoms operator. Yet our telecom expert proclaims with pulpit certainty that stand-alone consultancy firms (or did he mean Pentascope) are not suitable for full scale management of an operator.
With this false and embarrassingly poor academic premise, Dr. Odinma proceeds to rehash the contents of an article he had earlier written to condemn the BPE approach to the management contract. On this count alone, any honest and self respecting intellectual would have excused himself from this technical report considering that he had been a public opponent of Mallam El Rufai’s nay BPE’s approach to the privatization of NITEL. Dr. Odinma rather than including caveats and disclaimers to contextualize his report unprofessionally quotes himself as authority in a technical report. He makes no effort to use industry literature to justify his assertions. In the entire report Dr. Odinma makes no reference to any academic article published in a journal under his name or to any other peer reviewed essay on the issues he is investigating. Rather he embarrassingly cites his newspaper articles as authority.
We turn our gaze to the legitimacy of the report. Here legitimacy as defined by Cash et al “refers to whether an actor perceives the process in a system as unbiased and meeting standards of political and procedural fairness. Legitimacy involves the belief that S&T systems are “fair” and consider appropriate values, interests, concerns, and specific circumstances from multiple perspectives. Audiences judge legitimacy based on who participated and who did not, the processes for making those choices, and how information is produced, vetted, and disseminated.” The report shows definite signs of illegitimacy; it is very low in political and procedural fairness. The report did not consider issues from multiple perspectives. An example will suffice here on page 10 of the report; Dr Odinma in very uncharitable language avers that “it was pathetic and shameful to hear the former BPE DG, Mallam El Rufai say that he got our President to call few operators’ CEO in order to get them to be interested in NITEL. ……It was shameful for BPE to get the President to degenerate to CEO management level….” Again we ask Dr. Odinma on which authority does he rely on to make such value judgment about the activities of a President?
Former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in his autobiography talked about how he made personal contact with American businessmen to setup shop in Singapore. Recently the CEO of Intel, spoke of increasing pressure from Chinese President and Singapore government to build factories in their countries. According to CIA fact book using the purchasing power parity, Singapore has a GDP per capita of US$ 27,800 while China’s GDP per capita is US$ 5,600 compared to Nigeria’s US$1000; what is shameful about our President speaking to CEOs of multinational companies? Dr. Odinma in his effort to elevate falsehood to new levels of absurdity ignores the most rudimentary rule of academic inquiry- evidence.
Still on the legitimacy of the technical report we look for signs of how information is produced, vetted and disseminated. In the report we read on page 19 “but such observation makes me feel that the former DG (El Rufai), irrespective of the position he is handling now, did not grow through the normal ladder of senior management experiences in a well run large company before he started handling high-level management positions.” Reading further on page 34, Dr. Odinma informs his presumed gullible audience that “…the former DG of BPE, Mallam El Rufai had prior relationship with the leadership of Pentascope as an employee of AT&T in the early to mid 90s.” This is the kind of expert the House of Representatives based their judgment on; in one breath El Rufai has no experience in a well run large company and in another he worked with AT&T.
To show how Dr. Odinma gather and process information we look at Appendix D1, a letter from KPN addressed to him and a response to an enquiry from him. The letter says “With reference to your e-mail of 27 February 2005, I can inform you as follows. Mr. Marten Pieters resigned from KPN on 2 October 2002…….KPN has done some research. We have not found in our archives a copy of the letter, which you have sent to KPN. The letter, which you have sent to us, does not correspond with the reference number (2002-U-00190-RvB) in our records. What does our learned expert make of this information? He quickly summarized that “the letter by Mr. Pieters has been confirmed to be a forged document.” How could Dr. Odinma reach such a conclusion based on the aforementioned letter? First, Mr. Pieters was still a staff of KPN at the time the contentious letter was signed on March 6, 2002, did Dr, Odinma make any effort to contact Mr. Pieters to verify the letter? Secondly if KPN now disowns the letter by carefully saying the reference does not match their records, did our forensic expert subject the statement of KPN to any third party verification? Again we see another evidence of careless extrapolation. How does the KPN letter quoted above lead to the conclusion of forgery?
Not done with his insidious parroting of street knowledge as expert opinion he finally zeros on his target on page 21 titled who is to blame. The leadership of NITEL under Dr. Chinwuba is exonerated because “…in my professional judgment since they acted so much on falsified information and threat to their jobs, NITEL Board under Dr. Chinwuba cannot be blamed for Pentascope management.” Here our expert exonerates NITEL Board under Dr. Chinwuba for lack of due diligence on their part in verifying information in this internet age. He did not wonder why they could not subject the documents before them to simple verification process.
He finds the NITEL Board under Mr. Vincent Maduka guilty for the colossal failure of Pentascope yet in the sentences leading to his conclusion he says “the (management) contract took away the powers of the board to checkmate the activities of Pentascope top executives in real terms.” He further stated that “there were seemingly some financial improprieties during the tenure of this board, not necessarily by the Board,…” Again we see the confusion fuelled by prejudice that emanates from our expert. He seeks for every avenue to reach his pre determined conclusion including ignoring his own words, in an effort to link the management contract to every failure.
The leadership of BPE under Dr. Julius Bala is also exonerated because El Rufai did not handover properly to him! The job of BPE DG under Dr. Bala suddenly becomes an “enormous task” his failure to monitor Pentascope is excused in Dr. Odinma’s professional opinion “after reviewing the appointment process …. Particularly when its (Dr. Bala’s) predecessor has left no plans (sic) or machinery to monitor Pentascope.” This sickening level of idiocy masquerading as professional opinion cannot be allowed to be decorated with the integrity of the House of Representatives. Dr. Odinma actually claims to have reviewed the process of appointment of DG of BPE! What were the boundaries to this report? Did he have a term of reference?
In apportioning blame solely to the BPE under the leadership of El Rufai Dr. Odinma again betrays his warped mind and reveals the target of his expert opinion. He exonerated others for not exercising due diligence but crucified El Rufai for the same offence. In his words “while we do not expect BPE to have specialist knowledge about all the companies that was expected to be privatized, it is incumbent upon them to seek second opinion or further help where necessary. They supervised a process where the advice PWH (Price Water House) provided was porous and incompetent. The BPE under Mallam Nasir El Rufai are obviously to blame...” The confusion that pervades the report rises to ludicrous level here. If Dr. Chinwuba led management is exonerated for relying on misleading information from BPE what is the basis for blaming the El Rufai led management at BPE for relying on the advice of a competent consulting firm like Price water House? In a Freudian slip we now see that Dr. Odinma’s grouse and unconcealed prejudice is a product of the spurning of his Greek offer of assistance. For not bringing him on board as the guru of NITEL privatization, El Rufai must be blamed for the failure of Pentascope.
Due to Space I cannot fully dissect the falsehood that is packaged as technical report however I will point out a few issues for the House of Representatives to ponder on lest they lose their credibility before Nigerians. First, contrary to the impression created by the consultant that Pentascope is not a KPN affiliate and has limited skills, an internet search from a third party source Commonwealth Telecommunications Organization shows Pentascope as one of their partner organization and in the profile attached mentions the affiliation of Pentascope to KPN. Also through the same website http://www.cto-ict.org/inc/partners/pentascope/40.php we learn that “Our (Pentascope) expertise in the field of implementation services shows in the substantial contribution Pentascope International offered, as KPN International Consultancy, (1996 – 2001) n the OPUS project at the incumbent operator in the Czech Republic. This project involved the major modernization, reorganization and strategic development of this operator.” Why Dr. Odinma did not include a profile of Pentascope which is the subject of his enquiry in his report remains a mystery to me. Does his audience know that Pentascope has executed or executing consulting and management projects in Czech Republic, Hungary, Egypt and Bulgaria?
Secondly the allegation of forgery as stated by Dr. Odinma cannot stand based on the evidence before him. At best the House can order more probe to find out if Mr. Pieters did sign the letter or not, forensic experts can assist here. Thirdly, the fact that Dr. Odinma against the ethics of professional conduct forwarded the report to the President with a handwritten note reveals his bias and despicable self advertisement. It clearly shows that he is not a disinterested party. Fourthly from the few examples I showed it must be obvious to the House of Representatives that this report does not meet the minimum standards of academic enquiry. Finally, the curious silence of the report on the partnership between ECORYS, financial experts, VW Netwerk Bouw, the independent KPN network integrator and Pentascope supports the allegation of fraud against the consultant and casts a long shadow on the report.
No amount of cant, disguised vendetta and libelous vituperations will diminish the untiring efforts of Mallam El Rufai, and other high flying members of this administration, to create a new paradigm of leadership in Nigeria. El Rufai and other reformers, warts and all, have a following that will not be intimidated by the mob or defrauded by intellectual thugs masquerading as consultants. We will be at the barricades to defend and constructively criticize their actions as public servants; but when we see the dubious intentions of elements with frustrated ambitions, packaged as objective reports, we shall confront them measure for measure.
Dr. Odinma and his ilk can freely use the newspapers, as he has done extensively, to advertise himself and demonize Mallam El Rufai, however when he attempts to fraudulently enroll officialdom in his nefarious activities we will always be there to match him with the truth. The House of Representatives, as an honorable assembly, should reverse itself on the life ban on Mallam El Rufai ostensibly inspired by a report that is at best intended to mislead. Throwing the enormous weight and integrity of the House of Representatives behind this dubious report will amount to a sanctification of subterfuge.
Washington DC
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