Mohammed Haruna
30 December 2008
column
The dismissal of Malam Nuhu Ribadu, former Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), from the Nigeria Police Force last week would have come as no surprise to most Nigerians.
From the moment he resisted instructions from his employers to proceed as a student to the elite National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), in Kuru, Plateau State, it became obvious that he was headed for big trouble.
His redeployment about a year ago which, metaphorically speaking, was no bigger than a molehill considering he was a public servant subject to posting anytime, was transformed into a huge mountain by the media and a raft of social critics he had assiduously cultivated in the course of his battle against financial crime. It was all as if without Ribadu the fight against corruption was as good as lost.
No doubt Ribadu made a big difference in the fight against corruption. The EFCC, with him as head, was the first time in Nigeria that the long running official rhetoric about fighting corruption acquired some teeth.
In an undated open petition against Ribadu to President Umaru Yar'adua signed by one Malam Mohammed Isa Jama'are as Chairman and Captain Patrick Eyang as Secretary, a group calling itself The Nationalists tried to belittle Ribadu's performance at the EFCC.
In the first place Ribadu, the group said, should never have been appointed to the job because he had "never held a single police command post." Second, it said, in four years as the boss of EFCC he chalked up no more than 56 convictions.
"Our investigations, the group said, "show that the DPO of Mushin Police Command had over 250 convictions in the year 2003 alone. That means in the four years Ribadu served as the EFCC boss, the Mushin DPO would have had an average of 1000 convictions.... I cannot see how the EFCC boss can be congratulated for a mere 56 convictions nationwide in four years, no matter how much publicity such convictions courted."
The Nationalists' attempt at belittling Ribadu's performance as EFCC boss can be easily dismissed as petty. First, holding a command post is not the only yardstick for measuring an officer's performance. Second, the number of convictions at the time of the group's petition was 90 not 56 as it claimed. More importantly, the group chose to ignore the commonsensical maxim that quantity is not quality; even if Ribadu had had less than 56 convictions, the more important thing was the gravity of the offenses involved not their numbers. And no sensible person would equate the offence of, say, "419" or big time money laundering with, say, petty theft which was likely to have been the preponderance of the cases our Mushin DPO handled.
Besides, not only were the offences in the EFCC convictions grave, the value of assets and cash recovered as a result of those convictions were, according to Ribadu himself, about 5 billion dollars or over 600 billion Naira. This amount is by no means peanuts. Indeed, some victims of this forfeiture of assets have cried foul over the valuation and disposal of their assets. This means that Ribadu could only have understated their value.
No, any which way you look at it, there is no denying that Ribadu achieved spectacular results as EFCC boss, at least relative to the record of the country's anti-corruption war before the establishment of the EFCC.
Even then the noise that greeted his transfer out of EFCC was really so much storm in a tea cup.
If Ribadu's dismissal from the police has come as no surprise to most Nigerians it is because, in a way, there was something inevitable about it.
There are at least three reasons for this inevitability. First, President Olusegun Obasanjo created the EFCC - and its poor cousin, the ICPC - not to fight corruption as such but primarily to serve as a camouflaged battle tank for crushing his enemies, real and imagined.
This much became obvious from the highly selective manner the commission was deployed against anyone who stood in the way of the man's unsuccessful self-perpetuation plan and tyrannical ways. Above all, it was obvious from the way the commission chose to see, hear and speak no evil about the way the president himself abused his office to fabulously enrich himself by, for example, establishing a presidential library while in office, and by being the prime mover and share holder of Transcorp Plc as a Nigerian multinational corporation to which he gave away Nitel for a song and to which he also gave oil blocks without bids.
Ribadu may have achieved spectacular results in fighting corruption as EFCC's boss but you judge an action not by its result alone. You judge it even more by the intention behind it.
No one, for instance, can deny that much good came to Africa as a result of colonialism. Still it has been justifiably condemned almost universally because the primary intention of the colonizers was not to do good but to exploit the continent.
Of course good intentions alone are not enough guarantees against abuse of power - after all is it not said the road to hell is paved with good intentions? But bad intentions invariably lead to it.
His record as EFCC boss notwithstanding, it is undeniable that Ribadu was a willing tool in Obasanjo's hands. The fact was that as a leading member of Obasanjo's inner kitchen cabinet that included others like Malam Nasir el-Rufai (himself also embattled), Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Mrs. Oby Ezekwesili, he and his boss tried to use each other.
As I once pointed out on these pages, this inner kitchen cabinet was behind an unsigned document titled "Draft Succession Strategy" which was a thinly disguised attempt at power grab by the group. The document spelled out how the president was to have ensured that only those who would continue with his reforms - themselves presumably - succeeded him through a systematic coordination of the activities of "the police, SSS, EFCC, ICPC and other state organs."
As someone born into aristocracy Ribadu must have known that the failure of his group to grab power through subterfuge was bound to have consequences. I, for one, was surprised that he tried to cling to his office instead of proceeding to NIPSS quietly when he was asked to move. But then, perhaps in the dangerous world of power play you never retreat or surrender since no one takes prisoners.
This takes me to the second reason why Ribadu's sack was only a matter of time. This was his apparent belief that he had become indispensable in the war against corruption; only someone who believed he was indispensable will give due process the kind of short shrift Ribadu gave it for much of his tenure, all in a bid to achieve results. In other words only such a person would behave as if the end justified the means.
Third, Ribadu may have done well in his job but he indulged in too much self-promotion by, among other things, talking too much for his own good - of course with plenty of help from the media.
Unfortunately for him, propaganda, as history has repeatedly shown, has its limits. And more often than not the subject of media spin end up at least as much its victim as its target audience. This happens when the subject begins to believe his or her own fiction about his or her infallibility. And this seemed to have been the case with Ribadu.
All this is not to say his eventual sack last week was unquestionable. Ribadu should, of course, not be above the rules governing his employment no matter how well he had carried out his brief. Even then I would have thought that since he had gone to court to challenge the way those rules were used against him, the proper thing was for the authorities to have waited for the court's ruling before taking a final decision.
Like so many of the Obasanjo Boys - and Girls - he may have behaved with so much arrogance when he was in the corridors of power but that is no reason to deny him fair hearing as stipulated by our Constitution and by our laws.
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Fa fa fa fowl! As chief Zebrudiah in the Mascurade will say. For me and other pundits all over Nigeria who've been monitoring unfolding of events around Malam Ribadu, I strongly believe there is more to it than meet the eye. In every civil service or Military structure, Nigeria not an exception, there are procedures that are followed before someone is sacked. A summary dismisal for someone like Mallam Ribadu who have put Head and limb in line to perform his duties for the nation, something just didn't add up. I believe this must be probed maybe not in the present administration of corrupt politician but at a later more sane administrative dispensation. Our society have been poluted by the likes of IBB and cohorts who should be rounded up and imprisoned for their crimes before they polute irriversibly the fabric of the society. Nigeria does not belong to IBB, Ibori, Obasanjo etc. to warant them doing as they please.