Siemens, Halliburton, Shell, Wilbros, Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) and Starcrest, are all multinational companies with one thing in common. They and their officials have been or are being investigated by authorities in the United States, France, Germany, Switzerland and Britain for their involvement in what continues to provide evidence of the damaging level of corruption in Nigeria.
These investigations are proving that many Nigerian officials both in the public and private sectors just cannot turn their backs on bribe taking and evidently, that corruption is a way of life.
But Nigeria and its governments at different levels are shirking their responsibility of keeping the country decent and free of corruption, a BusinessDay investigation into the attitude of governments to corruption has shown.
In doing so it is beginning to turn out that these different levels of government condone corruption because they are failing to give serious teeth to identifying and fighting corruption perpetrated by Nigerians in both the public and public sectors of the Nigerian economy.
Questions are therefore being asked as to how Nigeria got to this low point in what is now seen as a ravaging cancer the country seems unable to fight back in its entire body politic.
More intriguing is that as Nigerian governments feebly fight corruption at federal, state and local government levels at home, they are also failing to take on leads provided by foreign governments who now routinely indict Nigerian officials, past and present, in various law courts abroad.
Only last Wednesday, an Appeal Court in France fined former petroleum minister, Dan Etete, €8 million (about $10.5 million or N1.89 billion) over money laundering charges. The former minister had appealed an earlier judgment which had levied a hefty €250 million fine and a three year prison sentence on him for using €15 million “in funds obtained fraudulently” to purchase properties in 1999 and 2000.
The indictment and conviction were handed in 2007 and they had a further curious ring to them in that the crimes for which they were obtained had a connection to the notorious US oil service company, Halliburton, which has now gone on official record in the United States to be seriously compromised in the way it did its business in Nigeria, relying heavily on bribing government and private sector officials to obtain special favours in the award of contracts.
Etete, who was minister from 1995 to 1998 during the regime of Sani Abacha, lives in Nigeria, but since the conviction in 2007, no government in the country has followed up this lead to separately charge him for crimes against the people of Nigeria.
In the United States, there is a large dossier on corruption involving bribing of key officials in government, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the ruling party, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
For instance, Jason Edward Steph, a former official of Wilbros, the US-based oil services company that hurriedly left Nigeria in the heat of the Niger Delta crisis, was last year indicted on corruption charges in the state of Texas. A federal grand jury indicted Steph for participating in a conspiracy in 2003-05 to bribe officials in Nigeria’s executive, the NNPC and the PDP in order to secure pipeline contracts valued at $387 million (or N69.66 billion at current exchange rate).
Steph, two other unnamed Wilbros executives and two employees of a multinational construction firm, were alleged in the indictment to have planned to spend $6 million to secure lucrative contracts with the construction of Eastern Gas Gathering System. The bribes were hidden as consultancy fees.
In the face of all these revelations, Nigerian governments continue to fail to act, especially in pursuing the glaring evidence including confessions made by those involved in the corruption schemes, especially where they name those they gave the monies to or the Nigerians who had been involved in the scheme.
From the US to France, Switzerland to Britain and German, authorities external to Nigerian governments continue to take a proactive look at what their companies do in Nigeria, especially trying to make sure that while they are registered in those countries, they and their officials are not seen to be involved in corrupt practices abroad. In the US, such companies are being prosecuted under the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
At some point US, French, Swiss and British authorities investigated allegations that Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), the Halliburton subsidiary, was involved in the operation of a slush fund when they secured the award of contracts worth $10 billion for the construction of the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas plant at Bonny in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In 2007, Siemens came under serious corruption indictment in Germany for its role in bribing government officials to win contracts in some countries where it operates. Nigeria was heavily compromised as the German court named many top level officials, including Bello Mohammed Haliru, the late Haruna Elewi and Tajudeen Olanrewaju, as well as a serving senator of the National Assembly, who had received money from the company. Haliru and Olanrewaju denied the allegation.Back in Nigeria, government did nothing about the Nigerians named and even hosted senior Siemens officials who visited later.
For many years, Nigeria’s dream of joining the comity of the world’s steel producing countries hung on possible conclusion of the Ajaokuta Steel Complex. For many years, Nigerians were told the project was 98 percent complete. For many years, the remaining two percent became the source for the massive corruption that ground the project to a halt.
Russians were in charge of the Ajaokuta project and because Russia operated much like Nigeria, where secrecy surrounds every action, including covering those who take and give bribes, nobody has been held to account for the massive corruption that has come to be associated with the project.
Sources close to the current Nigerian government said the first thing that President, Umaru Yar’Adua did upon assumption of office was to order an audit of all deals in the oil sectorincluding the licensing of oil blocs and award of trading contracts. But nothing much came out of it in terms of being used as a tool to enthrone transparency in the system.
Said one analyst: “There are two ways of looking at it. Such audits can either be used as a way of setting a benchmark on principles and values, where you use it to name and shame people who have been corrupt in the system; or it can be used wrongly as a tool, like is often the case in Nigeria, to establish leverage over key and powerful players or individuals in the system.”
What worries many decent Nigerians who just want to go about their business and have a decent society to live in is the fact that corruption now appears to be a way of life with much of the social and economic implications, including the lack of genuine progress in creating a an egalitarian society, totally lost on those who govern this country.
Apr92009