PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

 

The Press, NICON and Jimoh Ibrahim

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

 

“Journalism”, an American professor of the profession once said, “is more than just a way to make money or provide entertainment. It serves a public trust.” William Woo, the professor at Stanford University said this in an article in the February 2003 edition of Global Issues, an electronic journal of the American State Department.

           

Accordingly, said Woo, journalists have come to regard themselves collectively as a Fourth Estate, “independent of public and private power centers… Their vision was disclosures; their cannon, objectivity; their discipline, verification; their credo, the peoples’ right to know.”

 

Even the most casual examination of the press coverage of the controversy that has trailed the November 2007 sack of the Mr. Jimoh Ibrahim as principal owner and manager of NICON, Nigeria’s biggest insurance company, will convince the observer that the Nigerian press has done anything but serve the public interest.

 

The way it has gone out of its way to portray Mr. Ibrahim as a brave little David fighting off a bullying government Goliath can only lead one to the conclusion that in this particular case the newspapers have failed in their mission to disclose; they have betrayed their cannon of objectivity; they have undermined their discipline of verification; and they have failed in upholding the public’s right to know.

 

The insurance industry is, in a way, a public trust just like journalism. Because it is based on the principle of trust it cannot be just another way of making money like, say, selling commodities or non-financial services. Not that trust is unimportant in transactions in these other areas. It is important. With insurance and other financial services, however, trust is paramount. Without it the whole insurance business is as good as useless.

 

Yet the way the Nigerian press chose to swallow and peddle Ibrahim’s story of the NICON controversy hook, line and sinker, one will be forgiven the conclusion that what is at stake is merely the right of the principal owner of a company to do what he likes with it and not the very survival of a critical sector of the economy of which NICON, as the sole insurer of government assets, is the main pillar.

 

The first time I wrote about the controversy on these pages on April 16, I received a call from Ibrahim on the Glo line displayed at the bottom of my column in The Nation. I was driving on a street in Abuja at the time and for safety reasons, if not for the law, I do not pick my mobile phone while driving. This time however, the persistence and frequency of the calls forced me to park and pick the phone. It turned out to be an unfamiliar number and an unfamiliar voice. The voice then introduced its owner as Mr. Jimoh Ibrahim, the subject of my column that morning.

 

For nearly thirty minutes, the gentleman talked about how one-sided my article was since I did not speak with him before writing it. He spoke at length about what a wonderful job he was doing at NICON before some faceless enemies in the corridors of power tried to snatch the company from him. Not unusual with those on the defensive, the gentleman also tried to play the sectional card on me. Through the instrumentality of NICON, he said, he had saved an airline owned by some Northerners which had virtually gone under. Not only that, he has retained the services of some leading insurance professionals of Northern origin on the top management of NICON.

 

The man would have gone on and on if I had not pleaded with him that I was already running late for an appointment. We ended the call with a promise from me to phone him next time I was in Abuja.

 

I did not call him before writing this piece. It was not, however, in breach of my promise. I tried to call him when I read the news in several newspapers last week that his long drawn dispute with the Federal Ministry of Finance over the ownership and management of NICON was about to be settled finally out of court. It was then that I discovered that either I did not save the number he called me with or I had accidentally deleted it when I changed the phone I was using the Glo line in.

 

Upon this discovery I called a mutual friend he had sent to persuade me that my editorial judgement on the issue was flawed for his number. My calls didn’t get through. Consequently I sent my friend a text. I had not heard from him as at the time of writing this piece.

 

However, even without hearing from Ibrahim, one can safely take a position on the controversy because anyone reading our newspapers can see that they have turned themselves in to his megaphones in their news pages and editorial columns.

 

Reading those newspapers you will be pardoned the conclusion that often their stories were re-written versions of handouts from those handling Ibrahim’s public relations. For instance I noticed that Thisday and The Nation of May 8 duplicated each other word for word in one paragraph in their template-like stories about the final settlement which was then impending between him, on the other hand, and the finance ministry and the National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) on the other. “Sources at the presidency,” the two newspapers said in exactly the same words - Thisday on page 70 and The Nation on page 38 – “hinted that the government is favourably disposed to a quick settlement of the dispute which has lingered on for about six months now.”

 

The story behind Ibrahim sack as owner and manager of NICON is a simple one. He was sacked because he failed to recapitalize NICON in line with the government’s policy of raising the capital base of insurance companies. He was sacked also because NICON under him failed to settle the claims of many of his clients. I have it on good authority that among these unhappy clients are those in charge of the presidential air fleet.

 

Even more damning than these failures, if only for its symbolism, is the fact that since Ibrahim took over NICON about two years ago, he has neglected to insure its own assets, including its headquarters in Abuja. Why, one may then ask, should any one have faith in it as an insurance provider? After all isn’t there an African proverb which says if someone promises to give you a gown you should look at the one on his back?

 

However, not only had he failed to recapitalize and settle claims and insure even the assets of his own company, there is this affidavit before the authorities by some members of the Assurance Acquisition Ltd, the consortium that included Ibrahim’s Global Fleet Ltd, which originally sought to buy NICON before he outsmarted them in the bid. In this affidavit, the aggrieved parties alleged that he acquired the company under false pretences, to begin with, and that since then he has been stripping it of its assets and registering companies parallel to it.

 

These allegations are in the public domain but you will search in vain for any story about them in all our newspapers. Yet they are allegations that scream for investigation. For example to prove that they are not being frivolous in their allegations that Ibrahim acquired NICON under false pretences, they provided the authorities with evidence from the forensic department of the police which showed that a signature on the Memorandum of Understanding used as a basis of his acquisition of NICON was a forgery.

Ibrahim’s reactions to all this and to government’s seizure of NICON was to head for the courts with the counter-charge that these are all the fabrications and actions of unsportsmanlike losers. In this, he seemed to have gained the support of not only the press but the Attorney-General of the Federation and the Minister of Justice, Mr. Michael Aondoakaa(SAN) as well. This is obvious from his truly puzzling over-zealousness for a settlement of the case out of court.

 

Such was his over-zealousness that last March he entered into terms of settlement with Ibrahim without any input from either the federal ministry of finance as a 30% share owner of NICON or from NAICOM as the regulator of insurance industry.

 

That Ibrahim’s story, which has apparently been bought by the press lock, stock  and barrel, is as watertight as a seave, can be seen from the new terms of settlement that he has agreed to but which are completely at variance with the earlier one the attorney-general almost succeeded in rushing the federal government into.

 

For example whereas in the earlier settlement there was talk about recapitalization no longer being in contention, this time Ibrahim has accepted to “take immediate steps to maintain investments in specified instruments, as required by sections 17(1) and 24(1-2) of the Insurance Act and to maintain the register of same at their principal places of business.”

 

In plain English Ibrahim has thus now accepted that NICON under him never met the new “recapitalization threshold” that would have qualified it for a license as a composite insurer. Now he seems to have accepted that 17.3 billion Naira will be needed for NICON and 7.3 billion for Nigeria Re-Insurance to bring both companies to the new recapitalization threshold. Among other things he has also accepted to settle all “genuine” claims and outstanding liabilities owed all other NICON creditors.

 

What all this goes to show is that in this NICON/Ibrahim saga, the press, far from being society’s watchdog, has behaved no better than Ibrahim’s lapdog. This is truly sad if not tragic because the press, as our Professor Woo once said, exists to serve the public interest and not merely to make money or to entertain.

 

                                                    Correction

The editor of Leadership, Malam Ibrahim Sheme, has drawn my attention to my mistake last week when I said his newspaper carried a reaction to an article by his editor-in-chief, Mr. Sam Nda-Isaiah, by Malam Nasir el-Rufa’i, former minister of Abuja, in its edition of February 27, 2002. This was not possible as Leadership did not exist at the time. El-Rufa’i’s article in question was published in the Daily Trust of the same date not in the Leadership. The error is regretted.