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Between the Senate and el-Rufai
JOHNSON IBEKWE
THERE
are very strong reasons to believe that in addressing the issue of the
engagement of the two Special Assistants of the FCT Minister, Mallam Nasir
-el-Rufai, who were paid in dollars in December last year, the Senate�s Public
Accounts Committee (PAC), led by Senator Mamman Ali, probably went into the
matter with the most sinister intention. Perhaps, believing that it would score
a mighty point with Nigerians once it announced that the Special Assistants had
been paid in dollars, PAC contrived to conceal from the public every evidence
that would show the so-called dollarisation payment to have been in
order.
In consequence, not only did PAC reject a
request by Mallam el-Rufai to tender to it documents regarding the transaction,
it also refused to see certificates of educational attainment and work
experience when the two Special Assistants appeared before it. Now that the
victims of this dishonourable violation of human and legal rights have begun to
grant media interviews and show their credentials, we can see to what extent
senators, whose first duty it is to defend and protect the freedoms of the
citizenry, have gone in abusing legislative privilege in order to spoil the good
names of the two consultants.
Indeed, here again what mattered with the
Senate was to get Mallam el-Rufai, not really to get at the bottom of things.
Once the enemy was tagged, to hell ,with the truth! It is on this score that PAC
would tell both the Senate and the media that the two Special Assistants did not
have any qualifications suitable for the positions offered them by the minister.
Again, now that the key documents in the transaction are available, what we
discover, to our utter dismay, is indubitable evidence that PAC did a very dirty
job in order to deceive not only the Senate but the Nigerian people, and all
that for no other reason than to see if President Obasanjo would eventually
begin to see Mallam e-Rufai as a liability and remove him.
Though the petty trick did not work and
that objective has remained unachieved, the fact remains that the Senate and its
PAC had defamed the two Special Assistants in a manner most vulgar and
insufferable in a democracy. From BPE to the FCT Ministry, all the fresh
documentary evidence that have emerged show that the two consultants were not
engaged as civil servants, as PAC would have Nigerians believe. In coming to BPE
in the first place, they had received their earnings in dollars, the reason
being that they were engaged in America on a programme funded by the United
States Agency for International Development (USAID). But PAC, in its report, had
sought to create the impression that their being paid in dollars was the result
of a unilateral manipulation of things by Mallam el-Rufai. In fact, the main
impact of that impression has been to mislead the public as to the actual
sequence of events, so as to make it look as if dollar payments were first made
to the Special Assistants after the Minister brought them to the MFCT.
There is not even a simulacrum of truth in
PAC�s revised sequence of events. All the documents show that they had from the
beginning of their consultancies at BPE been under contracts which spelt out
their entitlements in dollars and specified in unmistakable terms which party
was to bear the cost, that being, as just said, USAID. Now, the fact of both the
consultants having previously worked with Mallam el-Rufai and satisfied him as
to their competence in performing special functions does not bear any weight
with either PAC or the Senate, but the reason belongs to that phenomenon in
Nigeria�s underdevelopment, which is called "the Nigerian factor." Certainly,
nowhere else is that factor more debilitating than in he conservative do-nothingless,
which characterises attitude to change in the civil service.
No one denies, for that matter, that the
FCT Ministry which Mallam el-Rufai inherited was one irredeemably riddled with
red tape, corruption and criminality and thus incapable of delivering on
practical projects of any serious kind, let alone on the drastic reforms that
the President had sent him to do. So, if Mallam el-Rufai was sent by the
President to do a task which had previously proved unamenable to ways of doing
things in the sedentary civil service, what can possibly be the point of
expecting him to bring to it, at the very level of manpower personnel, elements
whose ability to perform he could not vouch for?
Aishetu Kolo and Abdu Mukhtar, the two
Special Assistants in question, were thus engaged by Mallam el-Rufai on grounds
of merit verified by performance. Yet, documents have become available that give
the lie to PAC�s report on them, which pronounces them to be no different from
"ordinary Nigerians," whatever that is supposed to mean. Not even Aishetu Kolo,
who is rather the lesser on paper qualification of the two, can be said to
belong to the general run of Nigerian graduates. That sharp and cerebral lady,
as the relevant documents show, does have, not only a first degree in economics
of the prestigious Cornell University in New York, but also an MBA of Harvard
University.
However, in the matter of what qualifies
someone to be Mallam el-Rufai�s Special Assistant, the person whose good name
has been most smeared by the Senate and its PAC is definitely Abdu Mukhtar. This
is because by all standards the man is no "ordinary Nigerian." Not only does he
have a first degree in Medicine of Ahmadu Bello University; he also has a
doctorate degree (Ph.D) in Pathology and an MBA of Harvard Business School. And
before he came to BPE, he did have work experience in America entailing
consultancies.
Concerning the Special Assistants being
paid in dollars, what the relevant documents now show is that it was quite in
order. Since they were not engaged as civil servants but as consultants under a
programme funded in dollars by USAID, how could anyone explain their being paid
in naira? What they were being paid in dollars would of course, be chicken feed
in USAID terms. Obviously, it is only when the dollars are converted to naira
that it looms large and can precipitate a hue and cry. It is this cheap
psychology that PAC and Senate had hastened to capitalise on.
As all the facts show, then, nothing that
Mallam el-Rufai does, no matter how good, could ever be satisfactory by the
vulgar standards of the Senate. The man, for having alleged that some of its
leaders demanded a bribe from him to confirm his appointment, will continue to
be investigated by the Senate till the present term of the Obasanjo
administration comes to an end in 2007. And there is no prospect of the Senate�s
recourse to vendetta abating. Every new development in Abuja seems to aggravate
the conflict. Mallam el-Rufai, as fresh documentary evidence shows, is now all
the more the object of the bitterest hatred in the Senate for insisting that
government properties found missing from the official quarters of some senators
be returned. Besides, senators who fraudulently acquired many plots of land in
Abuja only to sell them, have been identified by the minister, and this, so to
speak, is yet another time bomb.
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