Reuben Abati
and Doyin Okupe are amongst the best in their business. And by this, I mean the
business of dissembling. That was exactly what Abati did in his latest
treatise, “Jonathan and the Ribadu Report”. I don’t begrudge both Abati and
Okupe. Their job is to be evasive and to try as much as possible to mislead
while continuously throwing lies at us in the hope that some will stick; our
responsibility is to cut through their BS. Indeed, it was a lot of BS that
Abati attempted to heap on us in his last outing.
Abati began his
latest assault on our collective sensibilities with an overdose of insult when
he wrote, “it
is so unfortunate that there has been so much ignorant carping and malicious
tittle-tattling about the report of the Petroleum Revenue Task Force chaired by
Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, both failings arising from a deliberate attempt to
individualise what was actually a group work, a mischievous attempt to
politicise one report out of three, and to smuggle into an emergent grand web
of conspiracy, elements of blackmail, mischief and outright opportunism”.
As the master of BS himself, Abati
knows too well that the “putrefacious stench of the fart that seems to have
overtaken the subject” comes from no other place than the Presidency. Here
is a chronology of the Presidency and Abati’s metamorphosis on the Petroleum
Revenue Special Task Force (PRSTF) report.
A
few days after the report was made public by Reuters, Abati claimed it
was meant to embarrass the government. According to him, “excerpts from the
report could not be taken as an official document because the committee had not
formally submitted its report to the appropriate authority. As far as the
Federal Government was concerned, the report in the public domain was
suspicious”. This was the first clear attempt to undermine the PRSTF report.
Abati
then went on to qualify the task of the committee and foreclose the prospect of
anyone being held to account: “For the avoidance of doubt and for the benefit
of the naysayers, the committees were set up as fact-finding and advisory
bodies to generate ideas and recommendations about how best to strengthen the
oil and gas sector and to further pursue the objectives of institutional
integrity, transparency and accountability”. Abati didn’t see anything wrong in
Steve Oronsaye and Bernard Otti being appointed into different positions in the
NNPC while serving on the PRSTF. “It is important to note that this committee
and other committees had government officials and ex-staff as members,” he intoned.
We
all know the role Oronsaye and Otti played in their attempt to scuttle the report
during its submission to the president on November 2. Their infamous
intervention was done at great insult and inconvenience to the president. But
who cares? Of course, insult and inconvenience count for nothing when billions
of dollars and the president’s anointed are involved.
A
week after the PRSTF submitted its report, as it became evident that the
controversy instigated by the Presidency will simply not go away, Abati’s
second-in-command and Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public
Affairs, the voluble Doyin Okupe, alerted us to paragraph four of the covering letter
of the PRSTF report signed by Ribadu and the secretary, Olasupo Shasore, SAN.
The
offending paragraph four which Okupe alludes to, states: “The data used in this
report was presented by various stakeholders who made submissions to the Task
Force at various dates, which have been disclosed in relevant sections of the
report. Due to the time frame of the assignment, SOME (emphasis mine) of the
data used could not be independently verified and the task force recommends
that the government should conduct such necessary verifications and
reconciliations.”
The
implication of this “overriding” paragraph four in Okupe’s omniscient reasoning
was that “the committee had issued a disclaimer to its own report which will
now make it impossible under our laws to indict or punish anybody except and
until the federal government fully verifies and reconciles the facts as
recommended by the committee in its submission to the government.” Can anything
be more contradictory? Can Okupe be more ridiculous and fraudulent? The
committee admitted that the reason it could not verify SOME of the data used
was the “time frame” of the assignment. How does this constitute a “disclaimer”
or absolve those responsible for the rot in the oil sector as indicated in the
report?
In
his desperate effort to stand reality on its head, Okupe shoots himself in the
foot when he says the “disclaimer” will “make it impossible to indict or punish
anybody except and until the federal government fully verifies and reconciles
the facts as recommended by the committee in its submission to the government”.
In one instance, he calls the committee’s statement a “disclaimer”; in another,
he praises the report by implying that the government will do what the committee
recommends it does: “conduct such necessary verifications and reconciliations”.
How addlebrained can one be in the defense of falsehood? Okupe’s assurance that
a White Paper will be issued and the recommendations would be fully implemented
after the Presidency completes the uncompleted work of the PRSTF is as reassuring
as asking Okupe to head the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
Back to Abati
and his disdain for truth and commonsensical argument. Abati accused Zakari
Mohammed, Chairman, House Committee on Media and Public Affairs, of “talking
absent-mindedly about ‘lack of political will’ to fight corruption in his
(Mohammed’s) criticism of the president’s handling of the PRSTF report. There
is nothing new about Mohammed’s postulation. Every right-thinking Nigerian holds
that view.
This
government has no redeeming feature. It was clear from the outset that the Presidency
was looking for ways to undermine the PRSTF report so as to let itself and its cronies
off. The Presidency was not interested in the committee’s report. If it was, it
would not have created so much ruckus around the report. It simply would have
given the committee extra time to finish its work if it felt the report was
incomplete.
With the PRSTF
report, President Jonathan has met his waterloo. Thankfully, the report has
received the support of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency
Initiative, (NEITI). NEITI says the PRSTF report reechoes the findings detailed
in its own report on the monumental corruption and waste in the oil and gas
sector that have yet to be implemented.
Aso Rock under
President Jonathan has become a graveyard of committee reports. We have lost
count of the number of committees President Jonathan has set up since May 6,
2010, when he first became president. There is a common thread to all the
committee reports: their non implementation.
To say the
government lacks the “political will” to fight corruption is
to be charitable to the president. This government has made corruption the directive principle of state
policy. This was evident the very moment President Jonathan failed
the political-will-to-fight-corruption litmus test when he refused to publicly declare
his asset at the inception of his government on May 29, 2011, and went ahead
during a nation-wide TV interview in June to heap scorn on Nigerians by saying
he did not give a damn about declaration of asset.
At that very moment,
President IDGAD Jonathan declared war, not on corruption, but against Nigerians.
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