In what is becoming a trade mark, Nasir El-Rufai, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Abuja, has again pilloried the senate for attempting to question the rationale behind paying N2million monthly salary to two Special Assistants he employed in a manner which the Senate has even considered un-procedural. Rather than make his case, Rufai charged at the Senate that it cannot intimidate him because the legislative house is on a vendetta. This report takes a look at the man who is being seen as a loose cannon and why the issues raised by the Senate should not be buried.
The Senate on Wednesday (August 25, 2004) indicted Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Mallam Nasir El-Rufai in two capacities: as former Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) and as current Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (MFCT). The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Senate prepared the ground for the indictment. It was not only the BPE under the leadership of El-Rufai that was indicted, other institutions of government, whose accounts were scrutinised and found to be replete with a number of irregularities and sharp practices were also indicted. But the reaction of El-Rufai to the indictment, which insinuated that the Senate was on a predetermined mission to intimidate him has made his instant case germane, hence the need to put it in context for an appraisal: What led to the ministerial outburst and condemnation of the Upper House of the National Assembly.
The PAC specifically said of its findings: “Another public institution whose activities were reviewed was the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE). It has submitted its 2001 audited accounts but has refused to sign its 2002 accounts. Investigations reveal that it has so far shielded this particular account from the Board of Directors (National Council for Privatisation), which can only act on audited accounts duly signed by the Chief Executive Officer (DG) and forwarded to the Board. Since the former DG during whose tenure the accounts were audited and reported on has refused to take responsibility by endorsing the report, by law, neither the Auditor General of the Federation (AuGF) nor the PAC can act on it. This attitude can be interpreted as an attempt to conceal their activities from the Board and Committee scrutiny. In our attempt to resolve the issue, the Committee invited the officials in question and the external auditors appointed and retained by BPE. In the process of reviewing the report, certain observations of the external auditors indicated improper financial dealings by Management. The Committee gave the external auditor the opportunity to review the report and amend or modify it according to their professional judgement. They opted to stand by their assertions/comments”.
On its oversight function on the MFCT, the report said “The PAC sought to find out the authority behind the employment and payment of two staff at about N9 million each as reflected in the end of the year balance of the Ministry’s account. We confirmed after a series of correspondences and meetings the following: The payment was done to Special Assistant of the Minister; their employment letter was signed personally by the Minister; there was no authority that gave the Minister the power to employ these staff for five months or to designate them Special Assistants; the employment letter signed by him was an open letter without any fixed salary, thus any amount could be paid to them; both the two Special Assistants are graduates in the 90’s and one of them has not done her NYSC. The Committee felt that the Permanent Secretary has either refused to do his work or has not been allowed to perform by the Minister”.
And one of the requests of PAC that it presented to the Senate in plenary session via its report was for a resolution directing the former DG of BPE to sign, within four weeks, the 2002 audited accounts of the organisation for submission to the AuGF; and also directing the Accounting Officer of the MFCT to recover all money irregularly paid to the two Special Assistants of the Minister and submit treasury receipts to that effect to the AuGF within four weeks. But in a swift riposte, El-Rufai slammed the Senate, reducing the institution to the level of fools. Alleging witch-hunt, he said that he would not be intimidated by the Senate’s indictment. Hear him: “In the next few weeks, you will understand many things that have been happening…… I will not be accountable to any one but the President and I will keep on doing my job. Since my first engagement with the Senate (the N54 million bribery allegation he leveled against some of the principal officers during the ministerial screening), I know that for the next few years they will be trying to find something wrong with me. It is okay for them to try and write their English but nobody can intimidate Nasir-Rufai. We will continue to do our work and in the next few weeks, you will understand many things that have been happening”. Why was El-Rufai’s reaction combative?
But beyond the politics of the bribery allegation, which was said to have been rooted in the manouvres by the Deputy Senate President, Ibrahim Mantu and El-Rufai to have their candidates appointed as the DG of BPE, consequent upon the nomination of El-Rufai as Minister (Mantu’s candidate, Dr. Julius Bala eventually picked the job at the expense of Rufai’s candidate, who is said to be his in-law), is the question of morality and proper conduct in line with laid down procedures.
For a man who is reputed for official exhortation to the principles of transparency and accountability without matching them with action (complete practice of them), there is a limit to which he can occupy a moral high ground in the estimation of the Senate with which he had had an axe to grind in the more recent past, especially when there is perceived malfeasance on his part. El-Rufai should not latch on this sore relationship to dismiss the Senate’s decision to indict him. If he had not committed any malfeasance, it would have been difficult for the PAC of the Senate to concoct anything against him.
The questions: What happened with the BPE accounts and the privatisation exercise? How did El-Rufai handle the issue of his Special Assistants (the twosome that got jumbo pay in a month) at the MFCT?
Consider the first question. Recall how the BPE matter came up on the floor of the Senate: The Senate had focused attention on the privatisation exercise in the 2004 budget report put together by its Appropriations Committee headed by Senator John Azuta Mbata, which raised a query on the whereabouts of the proceeds from the sale of the public assets under the privatisation programme. The conclusion of the committee was that it had looked round everywhere and it had asked questions from those who should know about the proceeds from the sale and nobody could provide any positive answer. Senator Mbata had stated, “so far, we have been informed that there are no funds in the privatisation account. This is surprising because we have been told that the privatisation programme has been successful. We mentioned it by the way as a possible financing item for the deficit. It could have been one of the areas that we could have quite easily dipped our hands to finance the deficit, because it would be an actual, it would be an amount of money, which will be there sitting in an account having gone this far in the privatization process.
Unfortunately, we have been unable to confirm that there are any such monies anywhere to the best of our search”. Which is why the Committee concluded, and the Senate, in plenary session, concurred to probe the activities of (BPE) under El-Rufai, who is a loyalist of the Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, who himself is Chairman of the National Council on Privatisation (NCP). Before now, there had been feelers about plans to probe certain official activities under the supervision of the Vice President. The privatisation exercise, which has been a butt of allegations and criticisms against the Vice President was bound to be investigated one day to either confirm or debunk the suspicion in circles that the second citizen had used his position and his cronies to buy off many, if not all, of the public assets that had so far been disposed off by the BPE. The probe had since been put in abeyance as part of deliberate effort to douse the tension in the Upper House in the wake of the recent plot to oust the leadership of Adolphus Wabara.
Let us go back to the privatisation palaver. The alarm by the Senate Committee on Appropriations, which resulted in the motion to probe BPE operations, incidentally under the supervision of El-Rufai who also at a time leveled allegation of demand for bribe against some principal officers (Deputy Senate President, Mantu and Deputy Senate Leader, Jonathan Zwingina) of the Senate during screening of Ministerial nominees, had come on the heels of a move by Obasanjo to seek to replace Atiku Abubakar as Chairman of the NCP, through a Bill. But curiously, in what was seen as fight-back, the Senate Committee on Privatisation under the Chairmanship of an Atiku loyalist, Senator Isaiah Balat, had done a report based on the Bill and recommended the rejection of Obasanjo’s proposal.
The content of the report leaked about twenty-four hours after the Senate Committee on Appropriations raised an alarm over the missing privatisation proceeds, an indication that the contending forces were applying themselves to the supremacy and survival battle. But in a move that suggested that it meant real business, the Senate on Thursday, March 18, 2004, passed a resolution to probe BPE and the individuals and organisations possessing the privatised national assets. Senator Mantu, who presided over the Senate sitting, had, at the risk of being accused of vendetta against El-Rufai, ensured that the motion sailed through.
Mantu had invoked Section 97 of the Senate Standing Rules to delegate the probe to an Ad-Hoc Committee, which would have precluded the Privatisation Committee under the chairmanship of Senator Balat, an Atiku man, from carrying out the assignment. The matter had come up on the floor on a day Senator Balat was absent. The calculation of Senate leadership was to take the assignment away from Balat’s committee, who as feared, may not be objective, given his closeness to the Vice President.
Mantu, however, did not have a free day as a member of the Privatisation Committee, Farouk Bello, who while responding to the motion for probe, cautioned the Deputy Senate President against waging a war of vendetta over the N54 million bribery allegation made against him and Senator Zwingina by El-Rufai.
According to Bello, “The leadership of the Senate agreed or concurred that the Privatisation Committee is incompetent to handle this assignment, at that time, it dawned on me that there was a hidden agenda”. He noted the displeasure of the Senate leadership over the N54 million bribery scandal, but warned that it was unconstitutional for the Senate to use its influence to settle what he said were personal issues. Outside the Senate, Bello volunteered further explanation: “What I said on the floor of the Senate was that nobody should use his position to influence the decision of the Senate and I quoted the oath that each distinguished Senator took before we commenced our senatorialship”.
Bello’s passionate defence of the Privatisation Committee and its recommendation that Vice President Abubakar should not be removed at this time, had cast him in the mold of a converted loyalist of the Vice President. On the recommendation by the Committee that the Vice President should be retained as Chairman of NCP, Bello had said “Along this line, I said that because a Committee based on the wishes of the people and also based on the exigencies of the time brought out a report that does not suit the leadership and will also not toe the line of the leadership should not be given the chance to handle this investigation, but that it will involve a selection of certain people that are only loyal to them to do that investigation, the intention is to influence…….At this critical time when there is a friction, why should we be part of it? Wait, let the status quo remain for now, because by the time we do anything, we are taking sides, but let the status quo remain and the status quo is Chief of General Staff. When it is in peace, when there is no difference between the two, we will take that decision and I am sure Nigerians will hail us, but now, it is like taking a decision”.
But El- Rufai said that he was not afraid of probe. That may have set the stage for a Herculean task of tracing the proceeds and tracking down whoever is taking “custody” of the proceeds. The probe, as has been said, had been suspended to the pleasure of all stakeholders, at least, so it seemed for now.
However, the scrutiny of the books of government ministries and organisations by the Public Accounts Committee of the Senate under the chairmanship of the opposition Senator Mamman Ali has proved a high hurdle for El-Rufai to scale.
Trouble had started for him when the Committee took interest in the appointment of two staff members with dual citizenship as political appointees. The two persons, Miss Aishatu Kolo and Dr. Abdu Muktar who are Nigerians by birth but had since taken up American citizenship were employed in July last year as Special Assistants to the minister in circumstances that were considered to have breached the process of appointment into the public service. The duo was said to have worked with El-Rufai’s at the BPE from where he brought them with him to the FCT Ministry. The committee, which invited El-Rufai to appear before it, had documents that confirmed that the two Special Assistants collect a hefty N2 million a month. Rufai was at the closed-door hearing of the committee to defend various claims and allegations, among them, the one to the effect that two Special Assistants were part of the original 15-man team of consultants brought into the country by the minister in 1999 when he was the Director General of the BPE.
The Minister appeared for the first time rattled as Committee members fired questions at him, but he told the Committee that he secured the permission of President Olusegun Obasanjo to appoint the consultants, adding that he also got the permission of the President to deploy the two employees from the BPE to the MFCT in July last year when he became Minister. The Minister explained that the United States Agency International Development (USAID) determined the salaries of the Special Assistants when they were hired in 1999. However documents referred to by the Committee had contradicted part of the Minister’s claims that the United States Government paid the salaries of the “expert consultants”.
The concern of the committee as articulated by its Chairman, Senator Ali, had bothered on the reason as to why people who graduated from the University in 1997 were considered to have the requisite qualification and experience and experience to be hired as consultants by the BPE. Members had also wanted to know whether it was legal (within the laws of the country) for people with dual citizenship to be given political employment in a country where there were so many unemployed people.
Besides, El-Rufai could not provide answer to another poser as to why he should offer employment to Kolo who has not undergone the compulsory National Youth Service Corps in line with the laws of the country. The Minister was cornered when he tried to explain away the point by saying that the employment of the two Special Assistants had not been formalised. The Committee cited two appointment letters, which the Minister personally signed and issued to them (the two Special Assistants).
Members had argued that it was against the civil service rule for the minister to personally issue and sign appointment letters to employees without going through the due process, but he replied that since their appointments were yet to be formalised, their present earnings were recoverable loans. But he could not cite any section of the Public Service Financial Regulations, which permits the granting of such loans to political appointees. But officials from the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation who were waiting in the wings at the instance of the Committee to provide expert advice and information said the action breached the financial regulations of the public service. The committee had also wanted to know whether the salary profile of public servants issued by the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission makes provisions for such expenditure.
The totality of these had formed the basis of the report of the PAC, which the Senate received in plenary session and adopted. But, because of the war in which some Principal Officers of the Senate (who have been taken as Senate) and El-Rufai have been involved over the bribery allegation he (El-Rufai) leveled against them, the oversight function of the PAC, which culminated in a damning verdict on El-Rufai, is being pooh-poohed by the Minister on the platform of a subsisting disagreement.
Should that be allowed to diminish the import of the findings by the PAC?
Will the Senate allow itself to be intimidated by El-Rufai’s braggadocio? How will the Senate react to its condemnation by the Minister, who in fact, recently disengaged Aishatu Kolo?
Kolo was treated to a lavish send forth party recently on her way to the World Bank to pick a job. Was this not pre-emptive capitulation to PAC’s recommendation even before it presented its report to the Senate?
So, what is the basis of the El-Rufai’s claim of intimidation by the Senate?
If he knew he had done the right thing, why should he have allowed Kolo to go?
Is President Obasanjo watching this dramatic war going on between the Senate and El-Rufai?
Perhaps, Obasanjo’s decisive intervention this time in the light of these revelations will bring a final end to this war that is not doing credit to the image of the Senate and portraying El-Rufai as a loose canon and agent provocateur on an errand by the President as he always claims to have received his go-ahead?
Indeed, El-Rufai has presented himself as a man who needs to be closely watched.
And the reason is simple: He has done enough in the last 15 months to over heat the system in a manner unbecoming of a minister. The bribery allegation saw him claiming that God was his witness; and now, he says he does not care about issues raised by the senate and that he can not be intimidated. Some say he is a loose cannon, others say he is a cannon on the loose.
