LAST WORD BY SAM NDA-ISAIAH

Let’s Talk About The Obasanjo Loot

samndaisaiah@yahoo.com

 

Now that ex-President Obasanjo is safely back to his chickens at Ota, the best thing for all of us is to simply say good riddance to a very bad rubbish and forget him forever. But Nigeria still has issues with its former president. This is especially so as a new phrase, "the Obasanjo loot", has recently abruptly entered the nation’s vocabulary. Obasanjo himself coined the term "the Abacha loot", so he has given us a very good precedent. Apart from that, he has seized several assets from General Abdulsalami Abubakar, his predecessor and benefactor. So President Umaru Yar’Adua, to whom he is now a benefactor, also has another good precedent to fall back on. Nasir el-Rufa’i recently said that Yar’Adua was not likely to bite the finger that fed him. But Obasanjo did just that: biting off Abdusalami’s 10 fingers. For Yar’Adua, then, it will also be the only right thing to do.

 

The talk on the streets of Nigeria today is that Obasanjo is probably one of the wealthiest men in the world. In 1999, the same Nigerians believed that he had become bankrupt as a result of his well-deserved imprisonment by Abacha, to the extent that his friends had to make desperate attempts to rehabilitate him by contributing a lot of cash for his feeding and the maintenance of his household.

 

Today it is a different story, however. Obasanjo Farms Limited is now the largest and most prosperous agricultural enterprise in Nigeria. Obasanjo’s holdings in agriculture consist of farms in six locations with at least one massive palm oil plantation in Cross River State. He also has exotic cows from Chad and Burkina Faso, most of which are bribes. Almost all of these were not in existence in 1999. There is therefore an urgent need to look into his assets declaration documents to see how much his office has contributed to this rags-to-riches story within so short a time. But that should not even matter. Agricultural development is one that benefits everyone even if, like the president, you now earn more than N30 million every month, a fact that was divulged by no less an associate than Femi Fani-Kayode.

 

Besides, we cannot be talking about farms, no matter how large, when we have NITEL, Kaduna Refinery, Abuja Hilton Hotel, sundry oil blocks, Port Harcourt Refinery, Ajaokuta Steel Mill, Delta Steel Mill, the Aluminium smelter plant at Ikot Abasi, and a massive investment in UBA and Zenith Bank to contend with. Let Obasanjo go with the farm and continue to feed the nation, but we must return every other ill-gotten wealth to the Nigerian people. When I asked a very close associate of President Yar’Adua from the South-West whether the brand new president would be courageous enough to look into the hurried and shady sales of some of these national assets, his answer was telling: "We do not want drug barons or armed robbers to be sent to kill any of us." He meant this to be a joke, but is it not through jokes that one gets to know certain very serious facts? My friend was, of course, making an oblique reference to the suspicious and unresolved murders of Bola Ige, Marshal Harry and Aminosari Dikibo. But if he thought he was being funny, I disappointed him. I didn’t laugh.

 

If Yar’Adua, whose election to the office of president is yet to be accepted by the world, wants to achieve legitimacy, then he must take certain painful steps within the next one month. As I write this piece, I am in Cape Town in South Africa, and the belief here, and indeed all over the world, is that Obasanjo massively rigged the election for Yar’Adua because he needed to install a puppet who would cover him for all his stolen wealth. It is amazing to see how much the South Africans know of Nigeria. In fact, a very impudent friend of mine asked if I had come over to collect the remaining ballot papers still in South Africa. But one thing South Africans still respect Nigerians for is our doggedness to throw Obasanjo and his third term bid out of Aso Rock. For that, they still reserve some respect for Nigerians.

 

One reason why Yar’Adua must take urgent steps to legitimise his government, within the next one month, is because illegitimate governments get weaker with time. In his own case, people who are still in celebration mood over their success in pushing Obasanjo out of Aso Rock will, with time, start seeing the linkage between him and Obasanjo more clearly. And they will start getting restless. Here, Ernest Shonekan’s government is a good reference. Two decisions that lessened tension in the country last week, however, were the new president’s decision to come clean with Nigerians by confessing that the election that brought him to power was not democratic, a total departure from the usual shameless lies of his predecessor and benefactor, and the immediate sacking and replacement of IG Sunday Ehindero, another good riddance to bad rubbish. But many are still wondering what Maurice Iwu is still doing at his desk when even the president himself has mooted the idea of electoral reforms. If he desires maximum support, he must waste no time in doing the right things. If he decides to bid his time, the issue of the illegitimacy of his government will starting taking root and, consequently, he may start losing control. At that point, only brute force and not the people’s goodwill will be able to maintain him in power!

 

If Obasanjo accused the late General Abacha of taking over Kaduna Durbar Hotel and classified the hotel as part of the Abacha loot, then why should the same Obasanjo get away with selling the Abuja Hilton Hotel to a company of which he is a key promoter and a major shareholder? Obasanjo holds 600,000,000 (six hundred million) shares of Transcorp and yet did not see anything wrong with selling Nigeria’s only Hilton Hotel to it. That’s even in addition to NITEL. No, the Abuja Hilton Hotel and NITEL should be classified as part of the Obasanjo loot. But the way to handle this should not be to revoke the sales but to seize Obasanjo’s Transcorp shares and all he has gained from it. Obasanjo is also a major stockholder in Zenith Bank and the UBA. Zenith Bank plc, through the bank’s serial capitalisation process, and UBA via the former STB’s seemingly complex but very straightforward takeover of UBA by those who know. These, too, should make up part of the Obasanjo loot, just as Obasanjo continually scrutinised the Abacha family holdings in the former Inland Bank plc.

 

Former cabinet members also have documents to show that Obasanjo is a major stakeholder in Onigbolo Cement Company in Benin Republic, Obajana Cement Company in Kogi State, Kaduna Refinery and Port Harcourt Refinery.

 

I have nothing against Aliko Dangote; in fact, I admire his business acuity but, like most Nigerians, I think Nigeria should revisit all his import tax waivers in the last eight years and what Obasanjo benefited from this in person (and here I am not merely talking of Dangote’s N500 million donation to the former president’s presidential library project while at the same time giving a lesser donation of N200 million to the Abuja National Mosque project), in addition to the president’s links with the Kaduna and Port Harcourt refineries and the cement companies. If the EFCC under Obasanjo’s watch harangued Mike Adenuga, another investor in the class of Dangote, over IBB’s and Atiku’s suspected investments in Globacom, now that Obasanjo is out of power he too should go through the same scrutiny. And, by the way, who owns Dayson Investment Company, the real purchaser of Alscon, the Aluminum smelter plant at Ikot Abasi? Dayson is a faceless company registered at the British Virgin Island.

 

But I think Obasanjo’s most heinous loot would be found in the way he shared and re-shared oil blocks in the last eight years he was in power. The former president has given out more oil blocks than all other former presidents put together. At a time he became, in fact, pejoratively known as "President of Oil Blocks". He seized oil blocks from his political adversaries and those who did not support his third term bid and re-awarded them to those who did.

 

The world also needs to know - not that many people don’t already know - the president’s sweetheart relationship with Femi Otedola, Aliko Dangote, Lasxmi Mittal, Lasxmi’s brother Primod Mittal to whom Obasanjo hurriedly sold Delta Steel, Sapele Power Plant, Ajaokuta Steel Mill, Itakpe Steel Mill, the seaport terminal at Warri and the central rail line from Ajaokuta to Agbor to Warri at very ridiculous giveaway prices. And this should also include why Obasanjo revoked the sale of AP to Jimoh Ibrahim at N17.5 billion only to sell it to Femi Otedola at much less than Ibrahim’s offer price. No Nigerian president has ever taken Nigeria for granted this far.

 

General Victor Malu badly needs the job of the chairman of the committee that would probe Obasanjo. President Yar’Adua may not go that far, but someone somehow has to do the job sometime.

 

Wherever Abacha is today, he must be laughing at all of us!

 

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E A R S H O T
What Is Government’s Business In NICON?
In spite of the denials of the BPE, there is obviously something sinister about its undue interest in the affairs of NICON Insurance plc, a company it has already sold to Jimoh Ibrahim .Today Ibrahim holds 70% of the privatised company. BPE is accusing Ibrahim of mismanaging the company even though the profits of the company have tripled since the takeover.

But even if the company is being mismanaged, what is BPE’s business? Its 30 % stake in the company does not grant it more powers than the other 70% stakeholders of the company. If the BPE has become such a corporate policeman, why is it not threatening to take over NITEL from Transcorp for even more serious reasons? Have the buyers of NICON not done better on the company than the buyers of NITEL done on the telecoms firm? In a decent society, even the NCC would have rightly taken over NITEL by now. But, of course, we know why that has not been done.

The truth is that the BPE wants to complete the assignment given to it by Obasanjo. But it was an illegal assignment and all such illegalities died on May 29. Hopefully!