It is not known to
this column how close Brigadier Sani Abacha was to Major General Muhammadu
Buhari by December 1983. It was Abacha who announced at the end of a few
minutes of martial music on New Year ’s Eve that the government of President
Shehu Shagari had been thrown into the dust bin of history. Buhari became the
fulcrum of that history as Nigeria’s head of state. On August 27, 1985,
there was another game, the Revolving Doors’ game. Buhari was out, thrown out,
while Ibrahim Babangida, was in, thrown into the pinnacle of political power
in Nigeria.
Babangida clamped Buhari into the dungeon for
some months where he cooled his feet, while his colleagues were bestriding the
Nigerian political and military firmament like they owned the world. Babangida
left or was forced to leave the throne after eight years of dangerous foot
work. He called Chief Ernest Shonekan, a successful private sector
entrepreneur, to come and take the baton of leadership.
He took it and as he was trying to hold it in his hand firmly, Abacha who had been eyeing the coveted prize greedily grabbed it in 1994. He immediately increased the price of petroleum products. The public rolled out a series of protests. As an appeasement measure, he set up the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF) as an intervention development agency to bring succor to the people especially in the rural areas. He made Buhari the executive chairman of the Fund which he ran for five years (1994-1999).
Why did Abacha
appoint Buhari the Executive Chairman of PTF? Was it as an atonement for the
sin of standing by while he was overthrown by the Babangida Boys? Or was he
just sympathetic seeing that the man had been left in the cold by Babangida
since his ouster on August 27, 1985? Or was Abacha simply looking for a fabled
disciplinarian who didn’t love money too much or the dirty part of it? Buhari
needed that rehabilitation, physical, financial and reputational. He was eager
to come in from the biting cold and be seen as a man who, despite the overthrow
and detention, had kept his dignity and integrity such that Abacha who was
Babangida’s man, could trust him with the big-wallet job.
The Petroleum Trust
Fund was to intervene in such areas as roads and waterways, supply of
educational materials, rehabilitation of educational infrastructure, food
supply, health, water supply, etc. Buhari set up a capricious management
structure and appointed Afri-Project Consortium (APC) led by a 42 year old man,
Salihijo Ahmad. This Consortium was the sole manager of the PTF projects.
Ahmad had admitted
to Newswatch in an interview published by the magazine
in its April 19, 1999 issue that it was APC that wrote the proposal which
defined the mandate of the PTF. It suggested the criteria, procedure for
selection and appointment of contractors, consultants and suppliers. It also
worked out the monitoring mechanism adopted by the PTF. The APC had some 620
consulting firms reporting to it. It was the sole management consultants to the
PTF. Most Nigerians had no idea how the PTF was run. It was when President
Olusegun Obasanjo took over in 1999 and set up an interim management committee
(IMC) headed by Dr Haroun Adamu to wind down the PTF that the worms crawled out
of the can.
That Interim
Management Committee appointed three technical consultants to investigate
various aspects of the PTF management. Their findings conducted independently
were damning. When I read President Buhari’s remarks a few weeks ago in which
he crowed about the achievements of the PTF under his leadership, I decided to
do a facts-check since I knew that Newswatch had done a
cover story titled “How Buhari Ran PTF” which was
published in its March 13, 2000 issue. This story was the product of a thorough
investigation into the mammoth fraud as discovered by the technical consultants
hired by the IMC. Details of the IMC report are distilled for you here.
The findings: N144.51
billion had been given to PTF by the Federal Government during its lifetime; A
residential estate was to be built at Wuse, Abuja, for N703 million but the
technical consultants hired by IMC put the realistic valuation at about N328
million; Between July 1994 and July 1999, about N25 billion was either stolen
or improperly expended; Extension of PTF headquarters was to gulp N650 million;
Expired HIV/Aids drugs and kits worth N28 billion was supplied to several
hospitals nationwide. This was confirmed by the Nigerian Guild of Medical
Directors whose Secretary, Mr. Rowland Ogbonna, asked the Federal Government to
withdraw the drugs immediately from all hospitals in the country.
Many projects were
abandoned while the completion rate of other projects was put at 30%; the sum
of N500 million that the PTF deposited in a bank disappeared as soon as the IMC
was announced. The bank agreed to pay the money after President Obasanjo read
the Riot Act to the bank officials. On taking over, IMC discovered that there
were no contract documents, drawings or specifications relating to projects.
The APC could and did award contracts and vary the pricing without any
reference to the PTF. Mr. Ahmad had asked the IMC officials to come and collect
some documents in connection with all the transactions. On the day of the
appointment he collapsed and died. The other members of the APC team claimed
that they were not in a position to supply the documents.
There were more
sordid revelations. The Afenifere did an analysis of the
siting of the projects. The consumption of petroleum products by the
South was 70% while that of the North was 30%. However, the distribution of the
PTF projects was a reversal of the consumption pattern: 70% to the north and
30% to the south. All southern states had 4,440.43
kilometres of roads rehabilitated (24%) while states in the north
had13,870.47 kilometres rehabilitated (76%). Teaching Hospitals’
rehabilitation: South 38%, North 62%; Specialist hospitals: South 29%, North
71%; Food supply: South 17%, North 83%; National Health and Educational
Rehabilitation Programme (NHERP): South 0% and North 100%; Vocational
Programme: South 3%, North 97%; Primary School rehabilitation: South 12%, North
88%. Haroun Adamu acknowledged the gross imbalances in the sharing of the
projects but regretted that his committee could not do much to remedy the
situation since by the IMC mandate they could not embark on new projects.
From the findings
there was massive fraud in PTF, fraudulently masquerading as achievements. The
institution was a government intervention agency but run without the regulatory
checks and balances that undergird the implementation of government projects.
The Afri-Projects Consortium was just on its own, a loose canon with no
authority to check it. Buhari was the Executive Chairman but he was
absent-minded and had capriciously surrendered the operational powers of the
PTF to APC without diligent supervision. The boys looted the place dry and
there was no evidence that Buhari had an inkling of the huge corruption under
his feet. Sometime before the IMC takeover, a newsmagazine, TheWeek,
had interviewed him about the swirling corruption allegations. He said
allegations of corruption against him were false. “My integrity is intact.” His
friends said so too and even insinuated that Dr. Adamu was going after Buhari
because the former dictator had detained him in 1994. Adamu told Newswatch:
“I am not here to probe Buhari, No, that is not our mandate. Whatever happened
when he was head of state is long forgotten. He is my friend.”
Buhari’s personal
integrity was not soiled by the Petroleum Trust Fraud but he displayed supreme
incompetence as a manager. As an Executive Chairman the buck stopped at his
desk and no matter how you want to slice it he takes vicarious responsibility
for the humongous fraud that took place in that institution. Secondly, the
grossly lopsided distribution of the PTF projects between North and South is an
awful testimonial for a man of his national standing to whom the nation through
the coup makers had given the highest position in the land. His lopsided
appointments today constitute adéjà vu.
When I read what he
said about Abacha I was sorry for him. He said to a delegation, Buhari Support
Group led by Comptroller General of Customs, Hameed Ali. “I don’t care
about the opinion you have on Abacha but I agreed to work with him and we
constructed roads from Abuja to Port
Harcourt, Benin, Onitsha and so on. We also touched education
and health. One of the former Heads of State was bragging that he spent $16
billion on power in Nigeria. Where is the power?”
The emerging
confrontation between the two former dictators, former friends and former
allies and now fierce foes, Obasanjo and Buhari, will receive the attention of
this column in due course. For now, I think President Buhari’s open veneration
of the kleptocratic and autocratic Abacha is a cause for nausea. At the 10th
anniversary of Abacha’s death Buhari had given the fantastically corrupt Abacha
a clean bill of integrity. Even at that time, Nigeria was running all
over the world trying to retrieve the billions Abacha had scattered in several
banks in several countries and several continents. The horrifying stories of
the elimination of prominent politicians and businessmen by Abacha constitute a
notorious portion of our national narrative. No matter how hard Buhari tries,
no matter what he thinks of the despicable, despotic Abacha, no matter why he
thinks the man was a saint he will never succeed in winning Nigerians to his
side. He will only wake up with fleas since he chooses to be in bed with dogs.
*Ray Ekpu was the Chief Executive of Newswatch Communications,
publishers of the defunct Newswatchmagazine
orlamun_yu-1979 Alice Ramsay Here
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