PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Beyond “Lagos Boy” George’s Conviction

ndajika@yahoo.com

These are hardly the best of times for Nigeria’s ruling party, the self-styled biggest party in Africa. First, its attempt to conduct the primaries for the election of its candidate for the governorship election due in Anambra in February ended in fiasco because of an attempt by its top hierarchy in Abuja to impose Professor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, whose five-year tenure as governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria is now hanging fire, as the party’s candidate. The courts have since dismissed the imposition null and void making the prospects of the party’s success in the elections very bleak indeed.

Second, last Thursday, the courts annulled the election of Chief Iyiola Omisore as a senator from Osun State. Omisore had been elected a senator while in prison as a suspect in the mysterious murder of Chief Bola Ige, the country’s Attorney General and Minister of Justice inside his Ibadan home in December 2002. Even more controversial than his legal status at the time of his election, Omisore reportedly won the votes in the Ige’s home village of Esa Oke by a landslide.

The biggest setback for PDP, however, is, without doubt, the conviction, penultimate Monday, of “Lagos Boy”, Chief Olabode George, the immediate past Deputy Chairman of the party, for sundry crimes, including corruption involving tens of billions of Naira, as chairman of the Nigeria Ports Authority (NPA).

First time I knew of the conviction penultimate Tuesday, I was incredulous. Olabode George jailed? For corruption and sundry crimes? The larger than life scourge of the country’s opposition parties, particularly in his South-West regional constituency? Olabode George, deputy chairman of a party that has become a past-master at sweeping even the biggest heap of dirt under the rug?

It turned out all the newspapers that carried the news, mostly as lead, were not merely hallucinating. However, anyone who has followed the story of George’s conviction from when his chairmanship of the board of the NPA was first investigated would understand why the conviction would be greeted with so much incredulity.

The News magazine which was probably the first to break the story about George’s self-aggrandizement back in August 2005 predictably ran George’s conviction as its cover story with the picture of the man behind bars wearing a puzzled look.

The headline read “The Fall of Boy George” a play on the well known British transsexual pop star, Boy George. In a country like Nigeria where memories can run so short that headline may yet turn out to be premature gloating. But this is another subject for possibly another day.

For now there is no doubt that the conviction of George along with the NPA’s chief executive and several other directors is a huge set-back for PDP, if only because some of those jailed along with him are the party’s kingpins in their respective pivotal states of Kano (Aminu Dabo, the managing director), Sokoto (Abdullahi Aminu Tafida), and Borno (Zanna Mai-Deribe).

The road to their conviction began not, as The News reported, with the audit report of JK Randle and Company in 2004. Trouble for George and Partners began much earlier when President Obasanjo appointed Malam Omar Farouk Ibrahim, then managing director of New Nigerian but presently director of public affairs of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), to investigate the accusations and counter-accusations of corruption between George and the Dr. Ojo Maduekwe, then minister of transport, NPA’s supervisory ministry. This was in June 2002. Ibrahim submitted his report in January 2003 a little over three months behind his initial deadline.

Ibrahim’s digging found enough rot to indict both parties, but by then the president had gone too far in pursuit of his Third Term Agenda, an agenda in which both board chairman and his minister were key instruments. Not surprisingly Obasanjo consigned the report to the presidential dustbin.

However, like a cork the case simply refused to be supressed. The findings of the Ibrahim report led to the more damning J.K. Randle audit company which was even more professional in its investigation.

Even when he was confronted with the Randle report Obasanjo refused to take any action against George. Instead, he appointed another committee, this time under Engineer Mustapha Bukar, then a director in the office of head of service, to conduct further investigations. Bukar’s committee not only confirmed the findings of the Randle report, it unearthed even more corruption against George and Partners.

Still, the president did nothing. Yet this was the same man who had said again and again that his war on corruption would know no sacred cows much less spare them. “I have asked the question,” he once said in an interview with African Economy (September – November, 2004), “who is that highly placed Nigerian that is above the law? I don’t know of any one. Our dragnet to the best of my knowledge spares no one.”

One answer to his rhetorical question about sacred cows was right under his nose staring him in the face in the name of one Olabode George, a Deputy Chairman of his party. But for obvious reasons the president refused to see it. Instead, he decided to reward George with one of the country’s highest national honours – Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON) – “for excellent services to the country”- or words to that effect - as George would boast in a most cynical attempt to whitewash himself.

Now that the almost impossible seemed to have happened and a high PDP chief has been jailed for corruption, what next? Before we all roll out the drums in celebration of this victory of the war on corruption – a celebration which, of course, is in order - we should remember that this is just one battle in a war that is far from over. We should remember that even though George and his co-travelers are down, the tens of billions that they looted which would have made a difference in the lives of millions of Nigerians is probably lost to the country for ever. We should remember that George and Partners may yet shed their prisoner status, possibly sooner than we think, to enjoy what they stole.

We should also remember that while George and his co-travelers are down, there are several even more venal and villainous rogues in politics, in business, in sports, in the professions, in the academia, you name it, who are not only roaming our streets free. They are right inside the corridors of power calling the shots on who becomes what in our political-economy.

No doubt the jailing of Olabode George and the others for corruption as a movers and shakers of politics in Nigeria is a cause for hope that the war on corruption is far from dead and buried. But, at the risk of sounding like a damp squib, I must point out that the fight against corruption can never even begin in earnest until each and every one of us sees himself as a shepherd who has one responsibility or the other to discharge at his own level in the society or community in which he lives.