On Monday, a rather dull drama erupted while the House of Representatives Committee on the NDDC investigated allegations of creative accounting in the commission. The acting Managing Director of the NDDC, Prof. Kemebradikumo Pondei, purportedly fainted during the probe while being grilled by the lawmakers. Like many other witnesses, I do not believe Pondei fainted for reasons of ill-health or even exhaustion. He was either embarrassed and badly wanted to be out of that place, or was tired of the charade. He could not summon his imaginative faculties to provide him with a more reasonable means of escape. Instead, he pulled something out of the bag of tricks that some well-known politicians used to distract from their corruption cases.
After one has heard the egregious allegations against the NDDC top officials, one cannot blame Pondei for resorting to the tawdry drama of feinting a faint. If anyone had to admit to the public that they paid a whopping N642 million to a company to train locals on how to help locate and identify the NDDC projects in the Niger Delta area, it is logical to give oneself a soft landing by fainting. How does one account for how they spent N1.5bn on COVID 19 palliatives and not get dizzy? From watching Pondei and his fellow officials, I also wanted to push my chair back and faint on behalf of all the victims of that agency’s mindless corruption.
Pondei and his fellow actors make one wonder why laudatory ideas go to Nigeria to die. The NDDC was supposed to compensate Niger Delta people who have been serially raped and robbed of their natural resources by the corrupt Nigerian establishment over the years. Part of the agency’s agenda was to address the issues of poor infrastructural development in the region, and level them up with the rest of the country that was leaving them behind. Since its establishment, the NDDC has been mostly staffed by the indigenes of the Niger Delta (and which is quite understandable). Given the closeness of the leadership to the Niger Delta people, one would expect they would at least demonstrate a visceral understanding of where the shoe pinches and also be driven by the imperative of an urgent redress of issues. However, that expectation seems like an unattainable ideal. They ran the place like Nigerians. Unfortunately, the average Nigerian has been socialised into thinking that any chance in a public office is an avenue to grab as much as possible. The result is that people approach a call to service in public office like a meal ticket.
When the NDDC Executive Director of Projects, Dr. Cairo Ojuogboh, explained in a television interview how the agency expended N1.5bn or N1.6bn (the man could not even state which), one wondered if Nigeria is salvageable. There does not seem to be a vision running the country; governance is a just series of pacification exercises to assuage both the restless spirits of young people wallowing in poverty and despair and the powerful vassals who sit in their lush palaces waiting to get paid. At every level of governance, there seems to be a failure of the imagination on the improvement of lives. We have no idea of how to produce anything, but we are quite efficient at spending money lavishly and unconscionably. The whole NDDC enterprise, from the admission of even its officials, seems like a legalised racket. Imagine what could have been achieved in the Niger Delta if the access to the kind of money had been accompanied by commitment and zeal to improve the collective lot.
While Pondei has given us something to gnaw on with our tired teeth for the whole of this week, I hope the whole probe drama at least leads to some reforms. In Nigeria, probes into allegations of financial misconduct are commonplace. They are like Netflix series; before you fully absorbed an episode, another has already started playing. What probe have we not seen in this country? We were here in 2009 when the House of Reps probed allegations that the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo frittered away $16 billion on the power sector without any megawatt to show for it. What became of that one?
By now, most of us have legitimately lost count of the number of times the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation has been probed under different administrations for various infractions. Despite all of those probes, their activities are still just as shady. Again, Nigeria has probed fuel subsidy payments a multiple times, but to what end? Arms procurement probe. Excess crude account probe. NEITI probe. China loan diversion probe. The CBN/FIRS forex allocation probe. Banks’ unremitted stamp duty probe. Probe of this one, probe of that one too. There have been so many probes, and the sordidness of the revelations that come out of each of them could make anyone vertiginous and faint. So, to what end is this latest one?
Was that same NDDC not summoned before a panel in October last year over allegations that they spent N65bn to desilt and clear water hyacinths even though only N2.5bn was budgeted for that purpose? They are back in the news again this year, this time led by a fainting MD. Do not be surprised when they are summoned again next year. By now, these probe activities’ frequency should have taught us that what we are dealing with and which should be urgently addressed, are the deeper structural problems of the country. Frequently setting up probe panels is treating the symptoms of an unrelenting disease. If those inquisitions worked, we should not be frequently summoned to tackle now hackneyed techniques of robbing the public purse.
While that incident attracted mixed measures of opprobrium, disgust, sarcastic commentary, and outrage from the public, I must admit that my feeling of a letdown from the whole nonsense did not kick in until I found out that Pondei was a professor. His profile says he studied Medicine and Surgery at the University of Lagos, and was awarded a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Birmingham. Funny, isn’t it? The world is currently in the middle of a pandemic. Elsewhere in the world, scientists —including microbiologists —have their heads bent in a laboratory somewhere as they research overcoming the disease. Here in the Third World, our trained professors of science are busy responding to corruption charges by fainting in the full glare of the public. How more aptly could the extent of our depravity be illustrated than what Pondei staged?
On the same day that a western university announced a breakthrough in the quest for COVID 19 vaccines, a professor of microbiology sits before a probe panel to respond to questions —no, not on anything that has to do with science— but on alleged financial misconduct. When we talk of brain drain, people look in the direction of doctors feverishly writing professional exams to eventually escape Nigeria. However, is a case like Pondei not worse? Is that not why we sit by and wait while the rest of the world searches for a cure?
Lately, the Academic Staff Union of Universities president, Biodun Ogunyemi, asked the Federal Government to keep schools closed till 2021. He was quite clear that his suggestion was about public safety, but it is still a sad commentary. We are not shutting schools in expectation of scientific solutions that we are working on currently; we are just biding our time until the rest of the world that takes its knowledge seriously rescues us with vaccines. Not that we are bereft of human capacity, Nigeria has trained people from some of the world’s best institutions. Some competent people just never get meaningfully engaged while others get seconded to bureaucracies where their brains are depleted on corruption probes.
Nigeria is a funny country where you laugh to keep the tears away. Ours is a country where religious organisations build universities, but when a disease hits the land, they offer miracle healing. How would that not be when those that are supposed to do the hard work of studying for solutions are busy fainting before corruption probe panels?
Credit: Abimbola Adelakun, Punch