|
One of the many revelations that emerged in the ongoing shouting match between the president and his vice president is how lucky one could be to be one of Obasanjo’s mistresses. The VP told us that some of the president’s girlfriends, mistresses and sleeping partners have benefited from the bazaar that their government has turned Nigeria into. Some of the women received Peugeot 607 cars. Now, a Peugeot 607 car costs more than N6 million. It will be difficult to know how many women benefited from this bounty but, at the last count, Obasanjo had been linked to 32 women and more than 70 children, even though he denies the paternity of about 10 of them.
Articlew Onyiuke/Obasanjo/Transcorp
Standing before the Senate Committee on the Capital Market, last week, Madam Ndidi Okereke-Onyiuke, the director-general of the Nigerian Stock Exchange who is now more popularly known as the chairman of Transcorp, finally told us what we had always known: President Olusegun Obasanjo, indeed, owns a chunk of Transcorp. But even in answering the Senate committee’s questions, this lady still spoke as if Nigerians are dunces and so gullible. There are two points she made which clearly show that those who rule over Nigeria today still believe that there are different sets of rules for different citizens. She stated she did not believe that Obasanjo committed any crime, because he announced his intentions to acquire the stocks beforehand and, secondly, that he had sold off the shares and therefore divested his interests in the company.
The president appears to have his own custom-made definition of what constitutes a crime. Simply because he had announced to the world that he was going to commit a felony before committing it does not in any way vitiate his culpability. We used to have cases of daredevil armed robbers informing their victims before hand that they would be visiting. This is precisely what Okereke-Onyiuke told us the president did. The president told us beforehand he was going to be corrupt. She appeared to suggest that because he showed us respect by informing us he was going to commit the crime -- and probably also because he (Obasanjo) should be considered a sacred cow who should be allowed to graze freely with impunity in the family vegetable garden -- we should count ourselves lucky.
This Transcorp that Mrs Okereke-Onyiuke is talking about, of which the president owns 600 million shares (not 200 million shares as consistently reported by a section of the media), went ahead to pick up choice oil blocks, Abuja Hilton Hotel and NITEL belonging to the Nigerian people. This is why what Obasanjo has done is not just an ordinary crime but daylight armed robbery.
The reprieve Okereke-Onyiuke sought for the president when she said that he had sold off his shares is even more ludicrous if not annoying. If indeed the president has sold off his shares, at what price did he do so? If he acquired 600 million shares at N1 each and sold them off at N6 each, he certainly made a killing of N3 billion without adding any value to the economy. And if the woman wants us to believe her story that the president sold his shares, then Nigerians would like to know how much tax he paid on this.
In any case, nobody believes Okereke-Onyiuke’s cock and bull story about Obasanjo having sold off his shares. She should tell that to the Marines! Obasanjo might have stored the shares in the name of one of his accomplices for safekeeping. We are not as unintelligent as Okereke-Onyiuke wants the world to believe and she will find that out immediately her boss vacates power on or before May 29, 2007. But the Freudian slip in Okereke-Onyiuke’s verbosity was that Obasanjo was the promoter of the company. She said it was the president who mooted the idea of forming the mega corporation at a meeting with 32 prominent Nigerians.
Some good news emerged last week, however, when it became public that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) had raided the offices of Transcorp and questioned both the chairman and the new managing director of the company. But in investigating Transcorp’s activities, the EFCC, I think, should not spend too much time in Transcorp offices because Transcorp does not have “activities”. The company does not add a single product or service to the Nigerian economy. It is only a contraption owned by Obasanjo and his friends for buying up government-owned companies and acquiring oil blocks. Instead, the EFCC should be more interested in how Transcorp paid for the Abuja Hilton Hotel, for instance, and that should in fact begin in the offices of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) on Ibrahim Babangida Way, Abuja, and not those of Transcorp on Alfred Rewane Road at Ikoyi, Lagos.
Leadership Sunday had, sometime ago, exclusively reported that it was not Transcorp that won the bid for the takeover of the Abuja Hilton Hotel, but nobody has appeared to explain to Nigerians the sleight of hand that made it possible for Transcorp to “pay” for what it didn’t win. The takeover of NITEL is even more flagrant and it was done in full public view. The case of Block 281, which Transcorp now owns but which was first officially allocated to Binergy Limited, should particularly arrest the attention of the EFCC. There is no denying the fact that the EFCC is doing very well in spite of the recent public complaints. And we must agree -- no matter how we disagree with some of the anti-graft agency’s methods -- that their officials are only trying to make the best of a very difficult job. It is certainly not an enviable job to be given the EFCC mandate under a leader with Obasanjo’s character. If you compare the records and accomplishments of the EFCC with the ICPC, you will understand my point.
As I said earlier, the president has his own funny definition of corruption. When he was counter-accused by his deputy in their ongoing mutually destructive war that he (the president) was a beneficiary of the looting he is so desperately trying to pin on the VP, the president’s most seminal defence was that whatever funds were given to him and his group, including the very expensive cars that were bought for his (the president’s) mistresses, were offered voluntarily and without his permission. The Nigerian president does not even know that receiving stolen goods (as he has done in this case) is a crime under Nigerian law and punishable with imprisonment.
|