The controversy over the proposal from the office of the minister of transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, for a security surveillance system for the railway infrastructure in the country, especially the railway line between Abuja and Kaduna, has highlighted the deficiencies in the way the Federal Government has been working under the Muhammadu Buhari administration.
If hoodlums did not attack the train on March 28, with at least eight persons dead, many injured and over a hundred persons abducted, we might not have known that the minister had proposed a system to secure the railways and the Federal Executive Council (FEC) shot it down for the minister to review and re-present.
But we know more now. We know, from a redacted reporting of the FEC minutes in the media, that the minister pushed the urgency of the proposal but that there were vocalised weaknesses in the document.
It was on the September 24, 2021 FEC meeting presided over by the vice president, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, and the minutes were marked EC (2021) 236. The president, Muhammadu Buhari, was attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York, United States. The name of the company was Mogjan Nigeria Limited, and the sum total of the project was N3.7bn. The firm, incorporated by Prince Godwin Momoh, Chioma Momoh and George Momoh, claimed to have a technology that the FEC found untested and consequently too much of an adventure for such a national security emergency.
The reports in circulation only revealed parts of the full discussion and inserted quotes from an unidentified person in the presidency.
But certain points are clear. That the minister stated that the proposal had gone through the meticulous eyes of the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) and the statutory body had, after its review, given the contract a certificate of no objection.
The report said some members of the FEC were not convinced about the rigour of the proposal. Vice President Osinbajo therefore ruled that the minister go over the project again, since it lacked a known technology and tested brand name.
Minutes generally do not give blow-by-blow accounts of proceedings, and that means only highlights survive for perusal.
It is important to raise a few questions. One, did the BPP actually go through the proposal, and if it did, was there a certificate of no objection? Or was it that the minister merely told the FEC that the BPP had studied his material and accepted his submission in good faith? If the BPP actually saw the proposal and appended its signature to a certificate of no objection, then it is curious that the BPP had not provided answers to the questions propounded on the document of proposal.
A matter of whether a technology is good or bad is not in the province of politicians who populate a FEC. The BPP is supposed to be filled with technocrats and experts and they ought to have the facts, rigour and depth for such a matter.
The minutes, as reported, did not say the FEC questioned the BPP for such a proposal apparently filled with gaps, contradictions and lack of finesse.
If the minister presented such a matter from the BPP, he ought to have checked for answers before presenting them to the FEC. And the FEC, bustling with politicians and statesmen, ought to also have called the BPP to account as well as they have rejected the minister’s proposal.
Again, we do not know what the technology is, and we cannot say if it was good or bad. We would, however, want to know how a BPP could arrive at such a conclusion if the technology was below standard and could endanger the lives of Nigerians. Was it turned down by the FEC because it was made by a Nigerian firm or because it was substandard? The BPP’s angle to these issues is important.
The minister was asked to go through it. That presumes that it was not a BPP work but an impulse from the office of the minister of transportation. If that was the case, did they ask him to take it to the BPP?
If they did, what happened between September 24, 2021 and March 28, 2022 when the catastrophe hit the nation on the rail track? Did the minister present it again? After that FEC meeting, several FEC meetings have held, did the matter not come up for review? If it did, what was the conclusion?
The way the story has been projected, it seems the matter was never tabled again after minister Amaechi’s proposal was spurned. Did he not re-present it? If he did not re-present it, was that not an act of official defiance? If it was, why did the president not raise the issue again or take an action against his cabinet member? If the president did not, why did the vice president who presided not remind the cabinet? If they did, what was the action taken?
It seems from what those who leaked the memo and the words of the minister himself that the matter faded into obscurity? It is capital tragedy, a scandal in governance. How could such a case of critical national importance pass into silence when across the country, especially in the north, compatriots are falling from the shrapnel of foolish men who see nothing sacred in human life.
So, meeting after meeting, in a theatre of impotence, they sat and did not visit the matter while intelligence reports inundated the government that the Abuja-Kaduna railway was a soft target. There had been a few near misses, and warnings in the public domain. Yet it did not seem urgent enough for the Federal Government to treat the security issue with urgency.
It is not sufficient for the minister to think he had done his job if the FEC did not, but we are not informed if a sense of disdain accompanied the presentation. Even at that, it was the minister’s duty to ensure that he rang it to the ears of the FEC that something had to be done.
If the minister was not up to the task, there was nothing sacrosanct about taking the matter from his hands. The task of securing the country is in the head of the country, and if a lieutenant failed, the head failed.
What we witnessed in the railway disaster is the failure of the minister to convince his peers, but it is, at bottom, a collective failure of the Federal Government. The full story may not yet have been told, but we know that when the government had an opportunity to secure its citizens, it dilly-dallied, temporised and was absent-minded.
We sometimes as a people fail to note that securing the railways was not only about surveillance. By many accounts, the Federal Government knows the perpetrators of these acts. They know their names, and even the cleric, Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, has trekked as an emissary into their lair to negotiate with them. A news report recently had it that a woman ferried her daughter and other young girls as comfort women for the hoodlums in the bushes. The trails are hot, we just do not follow them.
It is this frustration that has made the Kaduna State governor Nasir El-Rufai to call for mercenaries. It is his vote of no confidence in his Federal Government, the army, the air force, the intelligence agencies and his political party leadership.
The surveillance snafu is only just one tale of a string of failures in tackling a matter whose difficulty to solve is exaggerated by official failure than by its elusiveness. We seem to be playing a dance of death. People are dying, and the FEC is trading blames. We do not need memos, memories or oral recalls. We need a government to save its citizens. So long as that is not happening, the nation lies prostrate, and solemn declarations of intent and documents of action cannot pass for salvation.