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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
The PTDF Scandal: In Defence Of The Vice-President
Last Saturday’s sack of Vice-President Atiku Abubakar by President Olusegun Obasanjo would have surprised few Nigerians. From the moment, not very long ago, that the president openly accused his deputy of disloyalty, things were more likely than not to get worse. And they did get worse. Matters got to a head three months ago in September when the president added the more damaging charge of corruption to that of disloyalty against the man. Atiku Abubakar, he charged, presided over the (financial) affairs of the Petroleum Training and Development Fund (PTDF), the highly liquid parastatal under the ministry of petroleum, with reckless abandon.
The president’s charge was based on an investigation into Abubakar’s supervision of the Fund by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), under the controversial Nuhu Ribadu. To make the charge stick, the president quickly presented the EFCC report to the Federal Executive Council. The council, to no one’s surprise, promptly endorsed it and sent it to the National Assembly as a basis for initiating impeachment proceedings against Abubakar. Somehow the Assembly failed to oblige the president.
Predictably Abubakar counter-attacked. And his counter-attack was highly devastating to the president; it seemed to have exposed him and his men as a bunch of hypocrites who preached transparency and accountability but practiced the opposite. It was the president, not himself, Abubakar said, that used the PTDF to patronize his relations, friends and paramours in total disregard of all the rules of transparency and accountability. To buttress his point, the vice-president released cheques that were issued in several of the alleged presidential patronages.
Not content with making a counter-charge, Abubakar upped the ante by calling on the Senate to conduct a public investigation into the affairs of the PTDF. He was, he said, prepared to appear personally before the Assembly, thus indirectly daring his boss to do the same. The president, through some of his spokesmen, picked up the gauntlet and said he would. However, as the days and weeks passed by it became increasingly evident that Aso Villa was not exactly comfortable with the prospects of the president’s personal appearance.
One solid evidence that with the PTDF Aso Villa picked the wrong weapon for its fight against the vice-president was an advertorial reacting to his allegation that there had been an attempt by Aso Villa to “sanitize” the financial records of the PTDF ahead of the Senate investigations. This, the vice-president said, was through “a rush to get the Federal Executive Council to retroactively approve certain memos involving massive expenditure.” The Minister of Information and National Orientation, the youthful Mr. Frank Nweke Jnr., signed the two-page advertorial which appeared in several newspapers early November.
That advertorial indicted Obasanjo more than it damaged the Vice-President, if indeed it did any damage to him. Among other things, the advertorial accused the vice-president of imposing himself on the PTDF. “The PTDF,” the minister said, “is a parastatal of the Ministry of Petroleum Resources under the supervision of the Minister of Petroleum Resources who in this case is also Mr. President.
In other words for more than five years the vice-president broke the law establishing PTDF and the president did nothing to stop him. And this in a system where all powers and responsibilities devolves from the president. Worse still, the president did nothing for four years after the custodian of the nation’s treasury had drawn his attention to the breach.
In the circumstance it can be argued that the president was, at best, criminally negligent of his responsibilities and, at worse, was a willful accomplice before and after the fact. Either way, it was simply disingenuous of the minister of information to have cast the vice-president as the villain of the piece. But then perhaps the minister had never heard of the famous phrase about the buck stopping on the table of the boss, which in this case is Obasanjo.
The minister’s disingenuity revealed itself again when he distorted the vice-president’s allegations about Aso Villa’s attempt to “sanitize” the PTDF’s records. “The main reason memoranda are brought to the FEC,” the minister said, “are to engender robust debate and informed policy alternatives and not to cover up.”
This was a clear case of attempting to put words into someone else’s mouth. Abubakar never generalized about why memos are taken to the executive council. He spoke specifically about how memos on PTDF transactions were allegedly being railroaded through the Federal Executive Council for retroactive approvals. The minister did not deny that the memos were indeed for retroactive approvals. On the contrary he confirmed that they were presented to the President in Council merely for “noting, approval and ratification.”
Not only that, only three of the sixteen items the minister listed in his advert had much to do with the PTDF’s mandate. Several of the items, including appropriations for car ownership by soldiers and the police and computer acquisition scheme for public servants, were completely irrelevant to the objectives of the PTDF.
From all this it should be clear to even supporters of the president that with the PTDF he picked the wrong weapon to fight his vice-president, more so considering the recent dismissal of the EFCC report in question as null and void by a Lagos high court.
And as if to press home his apparent advantage in the propaganda and legal war between himself and his boss, the vice-president finally appeared before the senate committee penultimate Monday. His testimony was even more damaging to the image of the president as a crusader against corruption than the salvo the vice-president fired at his boss at the beginning of his counter-attack.
Without going into the details of the testimony and the rapid response from the president’s men, including from the immediate past boss of the PTDF and now the PDP governorship candidate for Yobe State, Alhaji Adamu Waziri, it is apparent that the vice-president has put his boss even more on the defensive than was the case three months ago.
When, for example, Waziri in his testimony before the Senate, penultimate Tuesday, decided to preface his testimony by drawing attention to the fact that the vice-president chose to affirm rather than swear on the Holy Qur’an before giving his testimony, it seemed, to me at least, that Aso Villa was responding to the vice-president’s charges from a weak position. “The Vice-President,” Waziri said, “did not swear on the Holy Qur’an. I swore on the Holy Qur’an. Malam Nuhu Ribadu swore on the Holy Qur’an and other persons swore on the Holy Qur’an.”
The vice-president may not have sworn on the Holy Qur’an but surely Waziri knows as much as any one else, if not even more so as a politician, that swearing on any holy book has never stopped some people from lying through their teeth or generally keeping bad faith in the deals they make. Conversely merely making affirmations cannot be enough evidence of an intention to lie.
Even more tellingly, when Waziri admitted that there were moles in the PTDF that fed the vice-president with documents, albeit in a selective manner, he was inadvertently saying there were some truths in the vice-president’s allegations. Waziri did not help matters when he made it look like Chief Afe Babalola, the president’s personal lawyer, did PTDF and Nigeria a huge favour by accepting a payment of 250,000,000 Naira, down from a bill of 300,000,000 Naira he had presented to the PTDF, for services which were never specified.
The truth, if the president and his men care for it, is that Vice-President Atiku Abubakar’s crime is not corruption, even though he seems to have a case to answer in his supervision of the PTDF. His crime is simply that he has been “disloyal” to the president. First, back in 2002/2003 he dared to think of challenging his boss for the ruling party’s presidential ticket. Then three years later he played a critical role in frustrating his boss’s Third Term Agenda.
As I said on these pages last week it seems for Obasanjo disloyalty is the ultimate crime. Anyone who doubts this should read his response to the letter sent to him by former military president General Ibrahim Babangida on why he decided, early this month, to withdraw from the PDP’s presidential primary. “This decision of yours” he told Babangida in his reply, “is a clear indication of your good-naturedness and your character of loyalty to a cause and to friends, dead or alive. THIS IS ONE ATTRIBUTE I HAVE FOUND TO BE UNCOMMON IN SOME QUARTERS WITHIN THE POLITICAL ARENA IN THESE DAYS. IT THEREFORE MUST BE APPLAUDED BY ONE AND ALL WHENEVER AND WHEREVER IT IS FOUND. I SO APPLAUD YOU.” (Emphasis mine).
The president did not name names but anyone with even half an eye can see who his jibe about disloyalty was aimed at. His rather precipitous sack of the vice-president last Saturday shows how far the president can go to punish disloyalty. It shows clearly that he thinks nothing of precipitating a constitutional crisis just to make the point that anyone who messes with Obasanjo does so at his own peril.
There are people, lawyers and laymen alike, who think the president has the power to sack his deputy. There are others, including this writer, who disagree. Only the courts can say which side is right. But whether or not the president has the power to sack his deputy is beside the point, which is that it is, to say the least, reckless to exercise power simply because one has it.
The big irony of all this is that for someone who seems to cherish loyalty as the ultimate virtue, Obasanjo’s acts of bad faith each time he strikes a deal with friends and foes alike has become legendary. Ask the Northern leadership which pressed him back into service in 1999. Ask the Yoruba leadership which gave him a free ride to massively rig the 2003 election, especially in the South-West. Ask even the leaders of the South-South who he cajoled into demanding for the presidency in 2007 as a non-negotiable right only to force them out of the primaries at the very last minute. If his vice-president has become disloyal it is precisely because he could see that his boss could never be trusted to practice what he preached.
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