PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

 

PTDF: between Ndoma-Egba and Tsauri

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

The other day a reader sent me an email in Hausa wondering what favour Vice-President Atiku had done me that I should defend him over the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) scandal the way I did on these pages on December 27, 2006. The email arrived against the background of the report of the Senate Ad-hoc Committee on the PTDF under Senator Victor Ndoma-Egba, SAN, a report which indicted the vice-president for abuse of office and recommended that he should be sanctioned but which absolved President Obasanjo of the same in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

           

The reader in question pleaded with me not to defend the vice-president any further in view of the Ndoma-Egba report, lest I tarnish whatever reputation he believed I possessed. The vice-president, he said, had never denied that he was guilty as charged by the EFCC which first investigated the PTDF. Rather the vice-president has merely countered the EFCC report by pointing fingers at his boss, among others.

 

Obviously this reader believed the Ndoma-Egba report was an accurate and balanced reflection of the culpability or otherwise of the president and his deputy for the PTDF scandal.

 

It has since become abundantly clear that the Senate did not share my reader’s assessment of the Ndoma-Egba report from the way its distinguished members promptly rejected it and set up another committee under Senator Umaru Tsauri to review its findings and recommendations.

 

The main charge against the Ndoma-Egba report was that it indulged in double-standards in indicting the vice-president while at the same time giving the president a clean bill of health. Ndoma-Egba himself has been quick to reject this charge. The vice-president, he argued, was directly in charge of the PTDF and he benefited directly from certain transactions of the fund whereas the president did not do so even where he violated its objects and its rules and regulations.

 

However, the Tsauri Committee that reviewed the Ad-Hoc Committee report has sustained the charge of double-standards. Both the President and his deputy, said the Committee, have abused their charge. Both should therefore be referred to the Code of Conduct Bureau for further action.

 

Not surprisingly, the presidency and the ruling PDP have rejected the Tsauri report. Whereas a presidential spokesman, Malam Uba Sani, has called it a “hatched job”, the Secretary-General of PDP, Chief Ojo Maduekwe, has dismissed the Committee as an “alliance of the aggrieved.”

 

I have read both the Ndoma-Egba and the Tsauri reports and I find it impossible not to conclude that the Tsauri Committee was, by far, the more unbiased umpire in the PTDF manifestation of the long hot war between the president and his deputy.

 

With few exceptions, the findings of both committees have been the same, the most notable exception being the testimony before the Tsauri Committee by Otunba  Fasewe, the most important actor in the PTDF saga, bar the president and his deputy. The difference between the two reports has been only in their conclusions and recommendations. In this the Tsauri committee, by far, showed more consistency with the facts than the Ndoma-Egba committee.

 

And what are the facts of the case? But first what are the issues? Going back to the initial EFCC investigation into the matter, the broad issue was that there was, in EFCC’s words, “a conspiracy, fraudulent conversion of public funds, corrupt practices and money laundering by some public officers and other persons.” According to the EFCC the main offenders were the vice-president and Fasawe, the president’s estranged bosom friend.

 

No sooner did the president receive the EFCC report than he constituted a panel of his ministers to produce a white paper on it. Not surprisingly the panel returned the same verdict as the report, a verdict which the president promptly sent to the Senate in the hope, vainly as it turned out, that the Senate would use it to sack the vice-president. Predictably the vice-president and Fasawe defended themselves by going to court to seek protection from the presidential indictment. They succeeded in their defense.

 

Outside the courts the vice-president sought to establish in the public mind that there was nothing he did at the PTDF which did not have the president’s approval. Here too he seemed to have won the battle.

 

The reason for his success in the courts and in the public arena is pretty obvious. And it is not that the vice-president was not guilty of some of the charges levied against him. Even his most loyal supporters cannot, for example, deny that the vice-president committed an illegality by diverting monies meant for a number of PTDF projects into deposits in a couple of banks. True, the monies were never lost as the vice-president’s traducers would want the world to believe. But the issue was not about the loss of the monies. Rather it was about adhering to financial rules and regulations.

 

However, while the vice-president stood guilty of several of the charges against him, the fact, first, is that he could have gotten away with it all if he had not challenged his boss over the notorious Third Term agenda. After all there are today PDP stalwarts who have been implicated in far worse financial scandals and have been strutting around the political landscape as if they are as the greatest thing to happen to Nigeria’s politics.

 

Second, guilty as the Vice-President is of several charges against him, there was nothing he did which the president did not know of or should not have known of if he was not conveniently ignorant.

 

The most conclusive evidence in this respect is the fact, as inadvertently revealed by the Minister of Information and Communication, Mr. Frank Nweke. Jnr, in an advert last year, in which he sought to impugn the vice-president’s integrity. In that advert the minister revealed that the then Minister of Finance, the straight-laced Malam Adamu Ciroma, had written a letter to the president, dated April 10, 2001, drawing his attention to the fact that the Interim Management Committee which the vice-president had constituted about a year earlier to run the affairs of the PTDF was illegal. In spite of Ciroma’s warning, the IMC continued to run the affairs of the PTDF for more than four years.

 

However, instead of the minister blaming the president for turning a blind eye on the clear case of illegality, Nweke, Jnr, obviously echoing his master’s voice, chose to blame the vice-president. Any fair-minded person could see that there was no way the vice-president could have sustained such an illegality for one day, never mind for over four years, if he did not have at least the tacit support of his boss.

 

The basic fact of the PTDF case is simply that both the president and his deputy treated the fund as their personal piggy bank, at times jointly, at other times severally. In the latter case, just as the vice-president committed an illegality in depositing PTDF funds meant for certain specific projects into a couple of banks, his boss committed an illegality by paying his personal lawyer an outlandish 250 million Naira for merely incorporating a government company, which, in the first place, was absolutely superfluous. Some of my lawyer friends tell me that the highest the best lawyers can charge for such a service is 3% of the share capital of a company.  At the official exchange rate of 120 Naira to the dollar, Chief Afe Babalola, SAN, the president’s personal lawyer, was paid over 40% of the 5- million-dollar share capital of the company, Galaxy Backbone Plc, he incorporated for the PTDF. He had sent in a bill of 50% of the share capital. This was simply indefensible.

 

And then came the haymaker. The vice-president had all this while alleged that the MOFAS account into which he was said to have diverted a considerable sum of PTDF’s monies was used partly to run the affairs of the ruling party and to finance some of the president’s personal projects. The president and all his men had consistently denied the vice-president’s allegation. After Otunba Fasawe testified before the Tsauri Committee that the president gave him 700 million Naira to sustain the account after he had overdrawn it in the service of the PDP, and after he also challenged the EFCC to publish details of the transactions in that account, it is now clearly impossible to sustain the lie that the president knew nothing of the MOFAS account.

 

Without going into the sordid details of the PTDF scandal it is as clear as daylight that both the vice-president and his boss are villains of the piece. Therefore for the Ndoma-Egba panel to have exonerated the president and blamed it all on his deputy was blatantly one sided.

 

Little wonder then that both the Senate and public opinion rejected its report. To its credit, the Senate set up the Tsauri review committee which did a proper job in apportioning blame. Unfortunately, the same Senate seems to have now dodged its responsibility for considering the Tsauri report. First, there was an attempt to stop the committee from laying its report, an attempt which prompted the committee members to threaten mass resignation, a threat that the Senate leadership thought was a bluff and called it. Then when the Committee members showed they meant their threat and resigned, their resignations were rejected and their report was allowed to be laid.

 

However, instead of considering the report after it was laid, the Senate chose to go on recess and would not be resuming until after the April elections. This cop-out is bound to reflect negatively on the Senate. The consolation, however, is that it is now on record that a committee of the Senate has recommended both the vice-president and his boss to be referred to the Code of Conduct Bureau for action.

 

This may sound like a rap on the knuckles instead of a much more severe punishment both the vice-president and his boss seem to deserve over the PTDF scandal, but as Senator Tsauri observed, the National Assembly , under Section 88 (2)(b), has no powers to sanction anyone. It can only “expose corruptions, inefficiency or waste in the execution or administration of laws within its legislative competence and in the disbursement or administration of funds appropriated by it.”

 

Both the Ndoma-Egba and Tsauri Committee have done a fairly good job of that. Any fair-minded person can see which, between the two, reached the conclusions which were consistent with the sordid facts that they exposed.