This is an excerpt from The News York Times Times confirming
that Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai revealed how an associate of a
former Minister in the ousted President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration
contacted him and offer to make a refund of $250 million.
Speaking to internationally acclaimed publication, The New
York Times, el-Rufai made the claims. His claims and other revelations about
the effects the anti-corruption body language is having on the misguided
political elite are contained in today’s edition.
The News York Times Report – Private jets that used to crowd
the airport here have been grounded, their wings clipped by the new
government’s crackdown on corruption. Rolls-Royces, Range Rovers and Jaguars
are gathering dust in the showroom of this capital’s top car dealer. Luxury
villas are left unsold, as is the fine Italian marble used to bedeck the homes
of Nigeria’s newly rich.
Since assuming power in May on a pledge to root out the
graft that has long permeated Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari has squeezed
the flow of public funds in an effort to clean up Africa’s biggest economy.
He has put many public projects on hold to review the
contracts, and ordered many government ministries, departments and agencies to
consolidate their bank accounts for closer monitoring of financial
transactions. He has overhauled the management of the state oil company, while
also moving to retrieve stolen money.
In recent days, the campaign escalated with the arrest of
two high-profile figures: Diezani Alison-Madueke, the former oil minister whose
five-year tenure was marred by recurring accusations of widespread theft; and
Olajide Omokore, the chairman of a Nigerian oil company. Both were held as part
of inquiries into corruption and money laundering.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is the continent’s
top oil producer and one of the biggest producers in the world. Yet corruption
has undermined the nation, helping to keep 68 percent of its population living
on less than $1.25 a day and perpetuating instability, especially the
long-running conflict with Boko Haram.
Whether Mr. Buhari can maintain the pressure against graft,
much less transform a society where corruption thrives at all levels, is far
from clear. Over the years, previous assaults on the problem have fizzled. Mr.
Buhari himself first rose to power in a military coup in the 1980s, waging a
self-described “war against indiscipline” during his short reign as military
ruler.
But this year, with national frustration boiling over
corruption and the rampages of Boko Haram, the extremist group that has
terrorized northern Nigeria, Mr. Buhari won the presidential election in March
as the head of an opposition alliance that is tasting power for the first time.
Now many politicians and businessmen say he is facing growing pressure to
reward the faithful.
The widening anti-corruption drive has chilled the economy
elsewhere in the country, but nowhere has its impact been felt as keenly as
here in the capital.
At Coscharis, the leading dealer of luxury cars here,
Happiness Adibe has been going through her worst year in her nine years as a
saleswoman. Last year was her strongest: a record number of buyers, mostly
businessmen and politicians, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying
Range Rovers and Jaguars from her. Seventy percent of her customers paid cash.
“There’s no money now, no money,” Ms. Adibe said. “Contracts
aren’t going on now, everything is standing still. When contracts are going on,
people are getting contracts and doing their, you know, thing.”
At Royal Choice — a gated community of villas selling for up
to $1.8 million each, some furnished according to a London, New York, Dubai or
Shanghai theme — Joshua Bialonwu has not scored a single sale since the new
government took over. Under the previous administration, customers often bought
villas in cash.
On a tour through Royal Choice’s eerily deserted streets and
inside several villas, each empty except for a guard and a cellphone charging
from a wall, Mr. Bialonwu explained why sales had dried up.
“With the uncertainties of the government presently, nobody
knows how much you might be asked to return,” Mr. Bialonwu said. “So you want
to hold on to as much as you can.”
Negotiations over what to do with ill-gotten gains are
taking place quietly.
Nasir El-Rufai, the governor of Kaduna state and a member of
the panel investigating graft, said that associates of one former minister had
approached him with an offer to return $250 million.
“When you say you want to refund, it means you are admitting
that you took what was not yours,” Mr. Rufai said. “I said, ‘I am a governor, I
am not involved in this. I will pass on your message.’ ”
Many officials and businessmen said that graft under former
President Goodluck Jonathan reached levels not seen since military rule ended
in 1999. Billions of dollars are believed to have disappeared from activities
related to the oil industry, the source of 80 percent of all government revenues.
Last year, after the governor of the country’s central bank
asserted that billions of dollars in oil revenue owed to the treasury was
missing from public coffers, he was removed from his post.
The missing funds could amount to “$10.8 billion or $12 billion
or $19 billion or $21 billion — we do not know at this point,” the bank
governor wrote to the Nigerian Senate before his dismissal, adding that the
problem could “bring the entire economy to its knees.”
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, the state oil
company, spent half of what it collected on its own operations, Mr. Rufai said.
“The corrupt try to take money under the table,” he said.
“Under Jonathan’s government, it is done so openly, with records. People
actually document the diversion of funds. You just wonder, what is wrong with
them.”
The loss of oil revenues has left many of Nigeria’s 36
states bankrupt or nearly bankrupt, unable to pay salaries.
Corruption in other sectors of the government was equally
self-destructive, said Mr. Oshiomhole, the federal graft panel leader.
Money meant for the purchase of arms in the army’s fight
against Boko Haram vanished, leaving soldiers without proper equipment. The
privatization of the state power utility was riddled with fraud, enriching
individuals but leaving most Nigerians still without electricity.
An import duty waiver granted to a politically connected
Indian rice importer has dumped one million tons of substandard rice in
Nigeria, Mr. Oshiomhole said, adding that a big farmer in his state, Edo,
shelved plans to grow rice as a result.
Here in Abuja, people with no particular expertise but solid
political connections made fortunes.
“Nothing better explains the amount of theft that went on
that somebody without a business — he has a small office in the corner of his
house with an iPad and a cellphone — has jets,” Mr. Oshiomhole said. “Everybody
was just buying jets.”
The cash fueled a boom in high-end real estate development
in the capital, Abuja, and in Lagos, the nation’s main city. Villas and
condominiums built or purchased to launder money tellingly remain unoccupied,
real estate agents and businessmen say.
At Pated, a store that has sold Italian marble to the Abuja
elite for decades, some politicians and high-ranking civil servants came to
make large purchases in their official vehicles, said John Abimiku, a salesman.
Others were more discreet, or tried to be.
“If you are dealing with a private businessman, you see a
lot of prudence in terms of managing their resources,” Mr. Abimiku said. “But
if it’s a politician, you tell him a price and he doesn’t argue too much.
‘O.K., it’s all right, it’s all right. Let’s have it.’”
But Sadiq Yaqub, Pated’s manager, said business now was the
“worst it’s ever been” in the 12 years he has worked at the store.
To press ahead, the Buhari government will back a new law to
prosecute cases of corruption more quickly, said Itse Sagay, a legal scholar
and human rights activist who now leads another presidential panel against
corruption.
No high-profile case of corruption has been prosecuted
successfully in the past decade, reinforcing a culture of impunity, Mr. Sagay
said. Wealthy defendants have been able to exploit legal maneuvers to draw out
trials for more than a decade.
“After 10, 12 years, you begin to have prosecution fatigue,”
he said. “Witnesses have died, witnesses have disappeared. Those who have
started the prosecution have retired.”
Mr. Sagay said that his panel is also focusing on reforming
the handful of government anti-corruption agencies, which, he said, have been
“contaminated” by officials working in concert with those they are supposed to
be investigating.
“We now have at the federal government level a government
that actually appreciates the work of the anti-corruption agencies,” said Sola
Akinrinade, the head of a government anti-corruption academy.
Mr. Akinrinade acknowledged, though, that previous
governments had also had strong starts. After being elected president in 1999,
Olusegun Obasanjo surprised many with an equally aggressive push against
corruption. But within a year or two, it was business as usual in Nigeria.
“Corruption,” Mr. Akinrinade said, “will fight back.”
Adam Nossiter contributed reporting.
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