Where Has All The Money Gone? —Olufemi Ogundipe

According to the estimates of the Standard Bank reported in the Financial Times of the UK , published on 6 October 2009, Nigeria earned a whopping sum of $520 billion from 1970, the year the Nigeria-Biafra war ended, till now. This, I believe, is a conservative estimate, because it omits two sources of oil earnings unaccounted for. The first is the oil lost to piracy on southern Atlantic coast of Nigeria, a place recently reported by the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, as second in piracy to coast of Somalia, a failed state in East Africa. The second is the divvying up of oil blocs to some members of Nigeria’s tiny, greedy and parasitic elite including top military brass, political and business leaders, favoured state governors, traditional rulers, some business companies, mistresses and all manner of unsavoury characters. The whole thing reeks of a Mafia-type ethos and one of these days there will be a full revelation when all the masks will fall off and the individuals who benefited from that insensate bazaar, that obnoxious and revolting spoils system, will be revealed and Nigerians will then ask how each person or organisation disposed of their allocations. Thanks to that reputable American newspaper, the New York Times, we know how a particular beneficiary disposed of his own. Writing in the Business Section of the January 10 issue of the New York Times, David Barboza reported that Nigeria’s former Defence Minister, Lt. General Theophillus Yakubu Danjuma, under the aegis of his company, the South Atlantic Oil – an exotic name, isn’t it – sold part of the rich Apo oil field to the forever-oil-hungry Chinese National Oil Corporation for the mind-blowing sum of $2.3bn cash. In that same New York Times report of 10 January 2009, Mr Barboza reported that the Indian National Oil Corporation considered purchasing the Danjuma oil bloc but their home government, under the transparent leadership of Prime Minister Mammon Singh, overruled the purchase because it did not, in their view, pass the smell test. I would like to suggest that the leakage from the notorious oil blocs be put at 100 times the Danjuma proceeds, that is $230 billion, and the same be the amount lost through the obviously lucrative oil piracy. The grand total then would be some $980bn, just a little shy of $1.0 trillion. So I will now use an adaptation of one of the popular American folk songs of the 60s, the song by the legendary trio Peter, Paul and Mary titled, Where Have All The Flowers Gone and ask:

Olufem Ogundipe

“Where has all the money gone, long time passing?

Where has all the money gone, long time ago?

Where has all the money gone?

Gone down the drain.

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Our land Nigeria, despite the immense oil and gas wealth and other natural resources, has been rubbished. We are now a member of that “bottom billion” of the poorest of this earth Yet, Nigeria is home to one of the largest reserves of natural gas in the world, conservatively estimated as the seventh largest in the world. Her natural gas deposits dwarf her petroleum deposits. She also has commercial quantities of bitumen, clay up and down the country, limestone and gold, to name a few of her mineral wealth. Her agricultural potential is second-to-none because of the varied landscape, including the tropical rain forest, the wetlands of the Niger-Delta and parts of Lagos, the Savannah in the middle part of the country as well as the Mambila plateau also in the middle part of the country adjoining northern Cameroons. Despite all that is going for the country, she is home to 100 million of the bottom billion of humanity who live a degrading, destitute life on 1-2 US dollars a day. She is a country of a very tiny and stupendously wealthy elite that does not see the faces nor hear the voices of the 100 million of their fellow Nigerians , the wretched of this earth. Again, the lyrics of the trio folk singers of the 1960s Peter, Paul and Mary capture the situation in their song titled Blowin’ in The Wind:

How many times must a man look up

Before he can see the sky?

How many ears must one man have

Before he can hear people cry?

How many deaths will it take till he knows

That too many people have died?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind

The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

The lyrics in this folk song are those of iconic songwriter Bob Dylan and they poignantly ask of the Big Men and Big Women of Nigeria if they see the faces or hear the voices of the 100 million of their fellow Nigerians whose lot is a life of degrading poverty and premature death and from where there is no escape. May the Big Men and Big Women yet have eyes to see and ears to hear before the inevitable day of revelation and the day of judgment. I would like to urge those of them who can hear to listen to the words of that wealthy American leader John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States who said: “A society that cannot care for the many who are poor cannot save the few who are rich.”

Nigeria was crafted into one country in the aftermath of World War 1 when the African continent was divided up by the various European nations. The British were administering the various contiguous 300 ethnic nationalities initially as Northern and Southern protectorates. Then in 1914, the British colonial administrator in Nigeria, Sir Frederick Lugard amalgamated the Northern and Southern protectorates into one country named Nigeria. On 1 October 1960, Britain granted full independence to Nigeria. In 1956, oil was discovered in commercial quantities in Oloibiri in the Niger-delta of Nigeria and a natural commodity that could have powered Nigeria’s development has, in retrospect, turned out to be a resource curse. The savage first civil war of 1967 to 1970 was, among other things, a war about oil. The war ended in 1970, but like many wars, seeds were sown for later wars like the recent war in the Niger Delta between a largely ethnic Ijaw militants/insurgents and the Nigerian state army and this time again, it is about oil.

As I mentioned earlier, Nigeria earned an estimated $520bn from oil from 1970 till now. Despite this, Nigeria’s infrastructure is nothing to write home about. The country has a very poor network of roads and the roads are in a state of disrepair, with gullies that can swallow vehicles and are death traps. The country is almost always in perpetual physical and – perhaps spiritual – darkness and has achieved a world record in having over 60 million private electric generators. The diesel to operate these generators is imported as the country’s refineries have become inoperable due to poor maintenance. Hospitals and schools are in a state of utter disrepair and almost nothing works in the country. Even airports are not regularly maintained and cattle have been known to stray onto the runway as happened a few years ago at the Port Harcourt International Airport. Poverty of the masses is pervasive, with 100 million of Nigerians living on 1-2 US dollars a day. Paradoxically, there is tiny elite of Big Men and Big Women who are very very wealthy, many of who live a life of unparalleled corruption and impunity, and, to repeat, they do not see the faces or hear the voices of the 100 million of their destitute fellow citizens. Elections are so fraudulent that they may just as well be called selections. The presence of international election monitors time and time again is absolutely no deterrence to the Nigerian election riggers.

It is very instructive to look at Nigeria in the period right after a 15-year long military rule. This is the period between May 1999 and April 2007. It was the period of civilian rule coming after the military dictatorships of Generals Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha and Abdulsalami Abubakar and ending in April 1999. General Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military dictator who had ruled Nigeria between 1976 and 1979, was “elected” civilian president after a much-disputed and not-too-transparent electoral process. The country was already very tired of military rule and so welcomed the new civilian government.

The eight-year period of Obasanjo’s civilian administration, May 1999 to April 2007, was a period of very robust earnings from oil. Jean Herskovits, an American scholar with deep knowledge of Nigerian politics and Research Professor of History at the State University of New York, Purchase, New York wrote an article in the July/August issue of the high-brow and very highly regarded American magazine, Foreign Affairs, titled, “Nigeria’s Rigged Democracy”. He said inter alia: “In the course of Obasanjo’s eight-year tenure, Nigeria earned $223 billion, two and a half times the amount earned over the previous eight years. But thanks to kleptocracy and rampant graft, much of the money has not gone where it should have gone.” The amount of $223 billion represents some 44 per cent of $520bn officially earned, but grossly underestimated, from oil since the end of the Nigerian civil war in 1970. During Obasanjo’s tenure, Nigerians became more impoverished, electricity was scarce and the pathetic manifestation of this is the fact that Nigeria is now the home of over 60 million imported generators. This qualifies for the Guinness Book of Records. These generators, to complete the Nigerian absurdity, depend on imported diesel fuel. Of course, in Olusegun Obasanjo’s peculiar economic “wisdom”, the importation was given out as a monopoly to one of his cronies, one of his created oligarchs. And may I be impudent enough to state again that Nigeria has the seventh largest deposit of natural gas in the world.

Harry S Truman became the 33rd president of the United States during the latter period of the second world war, after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died suddenly. Prominently displayed on his desk in the Oval Office in the White House was a sign that read, “The Buck Stops Here”. The sign meant that responsibility is not passed beyond this point. Truman did not and would not “pass the buck” to anyone else. He accepted responsibility for the way America was governed. This, I submit, is the mark of a great leader and one who is accountable to the people he governs.

On 19 March 2009, General Obasanjo was interviewed in the highly-regarded current affairs programme of the BBC, HARDtalk, by Stephen Sackur. The interview covered three areas, namely the Congo, the Sudan and the war crimes and the current genocide in Dafur by the agents of Omar El-Bashir , the Sudanese President and strongman. Let us not forget that El-Bashir was also involved in genocide during the earlier conflict between Northern and Southern Sudan. More about this at another time. The third area discussed was Nigeria, with particular reference to Obasanjo’s tenure as civilian president. I have seen this video in its entirety many times because I am incredulous that Olusegun Obasanjo actually presided as a civilian president over Nigeria for eight years. In the portion that dealt with his stewardship in Nigeria Obasanjo was, to put it mildly, evasive, cantankerous and never for one fleeting second accepted that the buck stopped with him as far as the vast corruption that swirled around him at the very highest levels of his administration was concerned. Even his body language left very much to be desired. If you are looking for a man who accepts no responsibility for egregious lapses in governance, that video poignantly puts Olusegun Obasanjo in that mould. Anyone interested in seeing this video can retrieve it from the archives of the BBC HARDtalk and see it for himself.

One of the jewels of our homeland Nigeria, Chinua Achebe, world-acclaimed and iconic novelist, and now professor of English at Brown University in Rhode Island, visited Nigeria a few months ago and made many weighty statements and I will paraphrase two of them. The first was that Nigerians should hold their governments accountable. The second was really some indictment of the pervasive culture of corruption: “Nigeria is a place where money just disappears.” I hear in this the echo: “Where has all the money gone?” and the reply: “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” I will like to hearken to the words of my elder and an iconic figure, Chinua Achebe and through this medium ask Olusegun Obasanjo a few questions. I also firmly believe that there is a very deep moral crisis in Nigeria and silence is therefore not an option for any of us including the elders who often maintain a deafening silence. Wole Soyinka, another of our nation’s jewels, convincingly demonstrated in his epochal work The Man Died that “the man dies in us when we remain oblivious to injustice around us”. This was a book he wrote when he was unjustly imprisoned for 27 months in solitary confinement for his opposition to the savage Nigeria-Biafra war by one of the galaxy of military dictators that internally colonised our mangled homeland passing the baton one to the other.

So, on to my questions for General Obasanjo. During the first seven years of his eight-year rule, Olusegun Obasanjo was in charge of the Ministry of Petroleum. In the interest of honesty and transparency, we would like to have the complete list of all the Nigerians who were allocated oil blocs during the eight-year rule. All Nigerians have a right to this information. It is absolutely in order to expect that those who got these allocations pay the appropriate taxes after the oil blocs are sold. Anything less than complete disclosure would amount to a cover-up with all the negativity therefrom. One of the organisations so favoured by Olusegun Obasanjo was Transcorp Nigeria, founded by him while in office and one million of whose shares he acquired also while President of a country he has nothing but disdain for. This qualifies for a new low in public morality.

In the first four years of Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration, much fanfare was made of the billions of naira voted for road construction. The sad truth was that the roads were nowhere to be found. Where did all the money go? General Obasanjo, as the man at the helm at that time, owes Nigerians an answer. The Minister of Works was his appointee, served at his pleasure and if he was incompetent and/or corrupt, Obasanjo bore ultimate responsibility because the “buck stopped at his desk”. A good leader must be willing to accept responsibility for the competence and probity of his subordinates whom he put and kept in office. If they lacked probity and competence, he had the power to remove them.

The dismal state of electricity production and distribution was one of the most damaging aspects of General Obasanjo’s tenure. With a lot of zest, he appointed as minister of power a member of the opposition party, AD, Alliance for Democracy, Oloye Bola Ige, a scholarly attorney who had served as a governor in Oyo State some years earlier. Ige was to turn “stone to bread”, but he did not have the power to choose the professional and administrative staff to work with him. Alas, he was programmed to fail and fail he did. Within a few months, the availability of electricity already in a parlous state took a nosedive and the country was close to a complete blackout. Ige was reassigned to the Ministry of Justice and Olusegun Obasanjo took over the supervision of electricity generation till the forced expiration of his term in 2007. Bola Ige was himself brutally assassinated in his bedroom in his personal home during his tenure as Attorney-General and the murder remains unsolved till this day. The electricity production systematically got worse under Obasanjo’s watch till the very end of his governance. Availability of money to get things done was not in any way the problem. In fact, the country enjoyed robust earnings from oil during those wasted years of Obasanjo’s misrule. What was guaranteed and implemented by the “wise” leader Olusegun Obasanjo were juicy contracts for the so-called Integrated Power Projects to build a large network of grids up and down Nigeria. It was like a huge, obscene bazaar for all manner of people and emergency contractors. Manna was indeed showered from Obasanjo’s heavens. The total cost of this bizarre and crude activity is put at some $16bn. Two rather weird but true-to-character awards are worth mentioning. The first was to a German company in which his daughter, a sitting senator in Nigeria’s National Assembly, had fiduciary and financial interests. Talk of a conflict-of-interest impunity. The second was a contract of several billions of Naira he awarded to the retired military dictator who transferred power to him. That dictator had a company he had registered for the paltry sum of N2,500. Of course, these two contracts were not executed before HIS ULTIMATE President Obasanjo handed over power to a hand-picked successor who calls himself “Servant Leader” Musa Yar’Adua. Nigeria at that time again went through her usual charade of fraudulent elections condemned universally by both local and international election monitors. Big money, ultimately from oil earnings, were used to fund the shameless electoral fraud. Nigerians deserve an account of what happened and what was spent on the electricity that never came to the long-suffering Nigerians.

It is proper to give a report card on Olusegun Obasanjo’s eight-year tenure. Again, Prof. Jean Herskovits is succinct, accurate and to the point and I quote: “Basic living conditions have worsened. Electricity is scarce, and clean water is rare. Despite vast sums supposedly spent on federal roads, those roads have continued to deteriorate. Some 70 per cent of Nigerians must get by on $1 a day. The UN Development Programme’s 2006 Human Development Report ranked Nigeria 159th out of 177 countries studied. In 2004, mortality rate for children under the age of five averaged 217 deaths per 1000 births— higher than anywhere in coastal West Africa, apart from war-torn Liberia and Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, absurdly, the government built a new stadium in Abuja for more than the combined budgets for health and education for 2001 and 2002.”

Again, Nigerians have a right and a solemn duty to ask General Obasanjo, “Where Has All The Money Gone?” For the sake of generations yet unborn, we must not let him off the hook until he gives us a satisfactory and truthful answer.

Despite the dehumanising and degrading poverty of some 100 million Nigerians, there is a tiny stupendously wealthy class, whose members thrive, among other things, on being beneficiaries of awards of oil blocs in the Niger-Delta which they, lacking any iota of expertise in the very knowledge-intensive oil industry, turn around and sell to multinational oil companies for billions of US dollars, with the proceeds kept in secret bank accounts and tax havens the world over. Yakubu Danjuma is a good example of this. Then there are the big-time oil pirates operating on the Atlantic coast of the Niger-Delta. Not to be outperformed are the top dogs of Nigeria who demand and receive receive mind-boggling bribes from foreign companies. The Bonny Liquefied Natural Gas, LNG, project is a good example. Here a subsidiary of Halliburton, a large American oil services company, in order to win the $6 billion contract for this project paid bribes of $180 million to very top officials of three successive Nigerian governments, namely the dictatorships of Generals Sani Abacha, Abdulsalami Abubakar, and of course the “civilian” government of General Olusegun Obasanjo. It is against American law for an American company to offer and pay bribes to foreign entities in order to secure a contract. So the Halliburton subsidiary was dragged to court by the US Justice Department, and was tried in a court in Houston, Texas, found guilty and fined $560 million, the highest fine ever imposed by an American court on an American company for bribery. Now you may ask : What happened to the top Nigerian “sacred cows” who collected the $180 million from the American company? The answer, all Nigerians, “is blowin’ in the wind”.

General Aremu Olusegun Obasanjo, where did all the $224bn earned from oil under your watch go? In addition, what is the dollar value of the oil blocs awarded during that infamous time you made yourself Nigeria’s minister of oil in addition to being the President? Whether you like it or not, you will answer these questions here on earth sooner than later. There would come forth sooner than later a clean leader of Nigeria who will shine a bright light into the inner recesses of your government and disinfect it. Sunlight, the saying goes, is a powerful disinfectant.

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