Mass Anger Against Corruption

Most Nigerians I know do not take corruption or corrupt people lightly. They come hard on them with all the weight they can garner. What with the angry ink flowing freely from newspaper editorials and their columnists! Below is one of them. It is published in the Punch newspaper of 2nd October 2007. The columnist, Azubuike Ishiekwene, counsels the Speaker of the House of Representative, Madam Olubunmi Etteh, that:

It’s time to go, Madam

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Patricia Etteh, said that the report by the Idoko Panel that investigated the award of the N238m contract to renovate her house was not an indictment. I do not doubt that the report may have read like a nice testimonial from a convent. But apart from the speaker and the few around her who will milk this mess till the very end, every single day that she spends in office from now on can only further damage the integrity of the House and compound her own shame. Her position is no longer tenable and she must now leave – not she alone, but also her deputy, Babangida Nguroje, and the civil servants who actively aided and abetted the disgraceful proceedings of the last few weeks.

When it was first reported that Speaker Etteh had approved a contract to renovate her house at 48 times the value of the same job four years ago and nearly 15 times its value in 2005, she was not even around to answer any questions. Shortly after the House was inaugurated in June, the speaker plunked down N70m from the purse of the House for a cross continental trip that began in South Africa, through London and finally ended in the US.

Her election as the first female Speaker in Nigeria’s parliament was a big deal and the world needed to know that this woman from humble beginnings, the stone that the builders rejected, had finally become the head of the corner. She marked her birthday in the US in such a grand, miliki style that the resonance drowned all the early stirrings of trouble in the House.

Of course, there was no shortage of acolytes quite happy to turn black into white. The Eziuche Ubani media committee tried to downplay the scandal, while the Office of the Clerk of the National Assembly bought acres of newspaper space in which it not only added salt to the public’s injury, but also shamelessly tried to confuse the issues by claiming that it wasn’t just the speaker’s house but a ‘cluster of houses’ that was involved in the renovation; and that, in fact, it was not a renovation, but an ‘upgrade,’ at a lower price than had been bandied in the press.

But now we know better. The Idoko Panel reluctantly appointed by the speaker and relentlessly under pressure from her office during the two-week investigations, has said, unanimously, that the process of the award of the contract was marred by serious procedural lapses. Contrary to the requirement of the Public Procurement Act, the contract was neither advertised, nor was a quorum constituted before it was awarded. The bill of quantities and the technical drawings that ought to have informed a rigorous and competitive process were not filed and some of the companies that got the contract were not even registered as required by the law. On top of this, the speaker’s personal aide, Iquo Minima, who gained notoriety in the last House for slapping a fellow legislator, Emmanuel Bwacha, won the N71m to provide the furnishings. The speaker had approved this sweet deal and other contracts for the renovation six days before she hastily constituted another meeting to ratify the decisions. Her defence that she was misguided is not unlikely, but is at best shallow and at worst irresponsible, given the fact that one of her personal aides benefitted directly from the contract. The whole thing was a sham by any standards, which the speaker, in her sober moment, would find hard to explain, even if it had been a contract she personally awarded for the renovation of any of the hairdressing salons in her two houses in Abuja.

The speaker has blamed her woes on legislators who were unhappy with her shuffling of the House committees. She has blamed implacable foes in the opposition, and even a few former and serving governors in her party. She has privately blamed it on chauvinism and a sinister ethnic agenda. She has blamed everything and everyone, but herself.

It’s not impossible that her enemies have got her where they wanted; yet her case strikes me like that of the man who doused himself with petrol and then sought warmth by the fireside. A little soul-searching might help.

Within days of her assuming office, she restored the full budget of the Speaker’s office, removing the 40 per cent cutback imposed by her predecessor. Her office now gets N125m quarterly, while each Rep gets between N10m and N12m. Six months before her predecessor left, the House had bought two S-Class Mercedes Benz cars for him. When Madam stepped in, she not only wanted a massage toy worth N98m, she also wanted two brand-new jeeps, each worth about N12.3m.

The speaker is not new to trouble. Around 2005, the House had asked her firm to supply laptops. She did but later tried to get the whole stuff out of the store through the backdoor. The Ethics Committee headed by Mohammed Bello investigated the matter, but could not finish its work because Obasanjo’s Aso Rock, through the Speaker, jumped in to save Etteh. The matter was swept under the carpet. We don’t know if she repented but recent events have shown that the demons have simply refused to let go. The female parliamentarians group, which she used to head, collapsed because women, being women, had a hard time understanding what Etteh was doing with the funds.

We’ve been moaning about how we ended up with an Etteh on our hands; yet not even one who has eaten the head of a tortoise would fail to be moved by the story of her fall. Etteh, the kid from Ikire in Osun State, started her working life as a receptionist/typist with the Ibadan-based engineering consulting firm, Etteh and Aro. She slowly but steadily picked her way through work-a-day life and Nigeria’s rugged political terrain. After her training abroad as a beauty therapist, her moment of anchor appears to have been when Bode George became the military governor of Ondo State. He has remained her godfather and was quite willing to forgive her initial, wayward sojourn in the AD on whose platform she was elected into parliament in 1999.

Of course, her penance was not complete until she defected to the ruling PDP. As Leader of the PDP South-West and Deputy Whip in the last House, she was a remarkable diva and arrowhead for Obasanjo’s third term ambition; it was the least she could do for George and for her new father figure from Ota. Her election as Speaker was a rare and spectacular reward of loyalty by a party famous for its treachery. In spite of the dark clouds over her past, however, I desperately hoped that Etteh would make good, and perhaps become the poster girl and symbol of hope for all who may have hard a difficult past. But alas, that, obviously, was not to be. We are confronted with a congenital liar and a brazen manipulator of the levers of power. Some have argued that she should get away lightly because she had nothing to gain personally from the transaction and that it was, after all, only a procedural breach. That’s nonsense. When Chuba Okadigbo was removed as President of the Senate, it was not because he had profited personally from the contracts that landed him in trouble; it was for what became famously known anticipatory approval. Contrary to the Senate rules, he approved the contracts before the funds were appropriated. Once a public officer makes a fatal error of judgment, there is a heavy price to pay.

But sadly, the speaker can’t get it. She cannot understand that it’s not about money, godfathers or about twisting the system around her fancy nails. Yes, such a mess crops up around the world from time to time, whether in form of Jack Abramoff in the US, Tessa Jowell in the UK, or Mbulelo Goniwe in South Africa. The difference, however, is that while elsewhere legislatures are striving to clean up their act, become more transparent and make parliament as good and as honest as the people it represents, our system appears to be stuck in the mode of secrecy and primitive accumulation.

The House must be commended for yet another act of self-cleansing in its journey to become an institution that we can all be proud of. But that process will suffer a fatal blow if Madam Speaker, her deputy, and others involved in the scam are allowed to stay one day longer than October 16.