RIBADU’S COMMITTEE REPORT AND THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION BY UGOCHUKWU RAYMOND OGUBUARIRI
The controversy and high-profile drama that trailed the submission of the report of the Nuhu Ribadu-led committee to President Jonathan did not come as a surprise to most observers with perceptive faculty. While most Nigerians have been wallowing in the effusions of gratitude to Mr. President for setting up the committee in the first place and for accepting its final report in spite of the vicious attempts to render its findings inchoate and inoperable, it bears stating that this thinking clearly misses the point; for the Ribadu committee was originally conceived and propelled to go through the motion of executing its terms of reference as a convenient ploy by the government to de-radicalize the mounting agitations by Nigerians concerning government's passivity and seeming inertia towards the issue of endemic corruption especially in the petroleum industry.
The rot in Nigeria's oil and gas sector has become so putrid and the clamour for action so virulent that the government could no longer ignore the soaring consciousness and popular pressure for change. This realization necessitated the birth of a committee to examine operations in the petroleum sector while the appointment of Mallam Nuhu Ribadu to chair the committee was dictated by the need to confer some modicum of credibility to the workings of the committee.
While some Nigerians were busy showering encomiums on the President for creating the committee and appointing Nuhu Ribadu as its chairperson, the government - and especially, the petroleum-related agencies that were meant to be probed - were busy devising all manner of uncanny schemes to truncate the work of the committee and ensure that it remained attentive and compliant to the latent, overriding political interests that informed the creation of the committee in the first place; interests that are meant to be preserved and legitimized using the committee as a subterfuge. This, in a sense, provides the context for understanding the traitorous role that Steve Orosanye and his ilk chose to play as members of the committee and the ensuing drama that characterized such roles.
It is utterly inconceivable - indeed, it has become one of the most bizarre contradictions of the Jonathan administration - that a government which sets out to probe a corruption-ridden petroleum industry and to empanel a committee for that purpose will, in the same breath, instigate or permit the appointment of pliable members of the same committee into choice positions in the same institutions and industry they had elected to probe. In an effort to justify this calculated scam, the President, while receiving the report, had argued that “Any member that has any observations should write it and send to me through the chief of staff or the minister of petroleum...it is not to investigate anybody in government. Becoming board members of NNPC does not disqualify them to be members; sometimes you need those in establishment to explain certain things and not to influence anybody.”
This defense, to say the least, smacks of double-talk; for Nigerians will readily recall that the erstwhile Minister of Power, Barth Nnaji, was eased out of office on the muffled excuse that he had some vested interest in the power plants whose privatization he was spearheading. How come then that the same government of President Jonathan did not envisage a potential clash between the interest of Dr. Steve Orosanye and Mr. Bernard Oti as committee members and their interest as critical stakeholders in the institutions they were meant to probe? Why is it that, unlike the unfortunate Bath Nnaji, the Petroleum Minister has remained glued to her ministerial seat, supervising the probing of her own ministry, and delivering a hearty handshake to Nuhu Ribadu for doing a good job of indicting her ministry? Is there anything so special that Diezani Alison-Madueke is endowed with which “poor” Nnaji does not possess? Such brazen display and disingenuous application of double standard is highly symptomatic of Nigeria's descent into a banana republic.
The President's speech while receiving the report also exposes a mindset that should be a source of deep worry and melancholic sadness to any serious-minded Nigerian. The President had hinted that the whole idea of setting up committees was to sanitize the system and not to witch-haunt anybody. It is highly depressing that the President still habours the disposition of “no intention” to prosecute anybody in government in the face of the maddening crisis of corruption being perpetrated by officials in government institutions like NNPC and their collaborators in the private sector. It remains to be seen how the scourge of corruption can be vanquished without prosecuting the perpetrators.
The effusive remark about “commitment to sanitize the system without witch-haunting anybody” also orchestrates staggering confusion and ambiguity. Some clarification will therefore be in order here: what ordinarily is referred to as “the Nigerian system” is simply an expression of the complex interactions of individuals, groups and organizations as well as the interplay of official laws and social values which define the actions and freedoms of citizens within the Nigerian space. No system ever exists or operates in a vacuum. If a system is bad or corrupt, it is only because the people (or a segment of it) are corrupt. You cannot therefore set out to fix the system without first fixing the people. And that will entail ensuring that those who subvert the public good are penalized.
By asking that the renegades - deliberately planted in the committee - submit their own report (if any) through the chief of staff or the minister of petroleum, one can be sure that the committee's report has reached its final place of interment. May its “soul” rest in peace!
I wish to salute Mallam Nuhu Ribadu - and the faithful committee members - for their display of uncommon courage, passion, patriotism and doggedness in carrying out the committee's assignment. The value of their sacrifice will not be determined by the choice of the government to either implement the report's findings or discard it as it has always done. It lies in the fact that they have assisted Nigerians in clarifying the struggle and in pointing them to who their real enemies are.