A poor reading of the verdict by the London court slapping a historic penalty of $9 billion on Nigeria last Friday is viewing it as an affirmation of the law of contract. No, it is not. Rather, it is the orchestration of international politics and neo-colonial power-play at their vilest.
Indeed, let no one be deceived that objectivity is assured in the interpretation of international law even by angels, especially when the interests of multinationals are in dispute concurrently across jurisdictions. In such circumstance, pure nationalistic instinct is likely to trump fidelity to reason or the universal principle of fair play.
For ages, the doctrine of sovereign immunity was, for instance, often invoked by powerful nations of the West to commit blue murder anywhere across the universe. But good students of history will recall that attempt later in the 70s by newly independent African nations to draw on the same principle ended ghastly. In the international court, it then became fairly convenient to invert Lord Denning’s new theory of “market place” to hand Nigeria the short end of the stick, in the landmark case of Swiss-owned Trendtex versus Central Bank of Nigeria.
A similar – if not identical – conflict is what is being stoked invariably by P&ID vs Nigeria. In choosing not to view things from the prism of the U.S. court (which can justifiably be seen as unencumbered by any possible nationalist bias), there is, therefore, a compelling reason to see the London court’s Justice Christopher Butcher as bending the arch of justice to favour a home company, with a covetous eye on Nigeria’s substantial asset domiciled within the U.K.
Given the severity of the penalty awarded, it was as if Justice Butcher opted to literally act out his fearsome name by dealing savage knife blows on Nigeria’s jugular.
What then appears ludicrous at home has been the attempt by some cynical elements to scrounge some mileage from this sad development for their petty partisan politics. Only genuine patriots would see the development first as more of a huge slap on the nation by foreign interests, even if our leadership failing, to an extent, is still admitted.
Note, the local airwaves had barely crackled by midday with the highlight of the London judgement, when the social media was drowned with the hysteria of People Democratic Party (PDP) agents against President Muhammadu Buhari as the sole culprit. They claimed the fine resulted essentially from his malicious discontinuation of another of Jonathan’s visionary projects.
But when more media insights began to pour in, that spin began to be modified ingeniously. The following day, Jonathan’s salespeople decided to sweep the entire blame to the gravesides of both ex-President Umar Yar’Adua and Rilwan Lukman, now incapable of defending themselves.
Let us concede that Jonathan was completely locked out of Aso Rock while the sneaky contract was being facilitated by “the cabal”, as the then ailing president was gasping for oxygen, and Lukman (the oil minister) seemed too self-absolved in hauteur to submit the details of the contract agreement to the scrutiny of Michael Aondoakaa, commonly regarded then as essentially a comical attorney general.
But nothing can absolve Jonathan of liability for the non-consummation of the contract, beginning from February 2010, as acting president and three months later as the substantive, following Yar’Adua’s demise. P&ID began to complain more than a year later. By the time the company eventually resorted to arbitration in 2012, Jonathan’s much beloved Diezani Allison-Madukwe had, of course, become entrenched as almighty oil empress.
From what we now know, she obviously was too preoccupied with either signing Nigeria’s patrimony away to her younger “admirers”, like the now fugitive Kola Aluko, in sweetheart oil-swap deals or immersing herself in the sheer effulgence of her mammoth jewellery collection to have mustered the presence of mind to grasp the contract idea, much less contemplate what benefits might accrue therefrom to the nation.
So, it bears restating that national interest was least served by those who committed Nigeria into such contract with improbable terms to begin with. That rape of Nigeria was not helped by Jonathan’s subsequent sloppiness. Today’s sorry outcome is traceable to yesterday’s tardiness.
But by far more atrocious is the taste of British jurisprudence that the nation was offered brusquely by the London court last Friday. While the dereliction of duty on the part of Nigerian officials is regrettable, nothing can however explain the juridical logic summoned by Justice Butcher to enter a judgment that negates morality and mocks all the principles of natural justice.
Note, to corner this windfall, nothing in the convoluted narration made in British and American courts in the last seven years suggested that P&ID engaged in much toil between 2010 and 2012, other than its officials carrying briefcases around Abuja and meeting with Nigerian officials. It never as much as cracked any soil in Calabar to erect the envisaged gas processing plant (as expressly stated in the contract pact), to which Nigeria was expected to lay hundreds of kilometre of pipes.
To generations of blacks still stuck today with the trauma inflicted by the colonial disruption of African civilisations, Justice Butcher’s latest travesty must be a sad reminder of the culture of plunder and predation for which imperial Britain was quite exceptional even among fellow European exploiters in history.
Were the verdict to be enforced to the letter, it should qualify as the single most punitively prohibitive fine ever imposed in history on a sovereign nation, relative to her fiscal strength. The $9 billion sanction represents a whopping twenty per cent the nation’s present foreign reserve and a third of the current national budget.
At the arbitration court in London in 2012, P&ID began by filing claims of $40 million expenses and proceeded to add “lost earnings” in the twenty-year tenure of the agreement based on impossible operational benchmarks of more than ninety per cent capacity utilisation and a patently unrealistic expectation that oil never fell below $100 per barrel.
As if that was not already shylock enough, the judge opted to play Father Xmas by granting the petitioner’s additional prayer that compound interest be paid on the fine imposed on Nigeria. That explains how P&ID’s preliminary claim of $40 million in 2012 mushroomed exponentially to the $9 billion awarded last week.
No sane person will accept such sham without a fight in the first place. Buhari could, therefore, be said to have acted most patriotically by refusing the initial hefty $800 million payout proposed by a departing Jonathan in May 2015. In any case, with Nigeria technically insolvent by the time President Muhammadu Buhari (PMB) took over having lapsed into a recession described as the worst in a generation, there practically was no way Nigeria could have paid, assuming the new administration was even willing.
Expectedly, the government soon mounted a vigorous counter-attack by filing appeal in the U.K and the U.S. against the claimant. Whereas the U.S. upheld Nigeria’s objection to the enforcement of the claim by pleading sovereignty, the British court chose to dismiss the plea as “frivolous”.
What makes the Butcher’s verdict all the more curious is a subsequent media expose, suggesting a determined conspiracy to raid Nigeria’s exchequer. Ahead of the judgment, a whopping twenty-five per cent stake of P&ID was snapped up in a strange deal by a hedge fund manager known as VR Capital Group in March. Since the Friday judgment, the side talk in global financial circles is that the hedge fund manager had all along been pulling levers of influence in the U.K. and the U.S. to make Nigeria either settle or be willing to forfeit her asset. So, it would then seem the vultures had long been hovering overhead as the nation began to wallow in the British dock.
Now the big question: Did VR Capital Group read Justice Butcher’s mind ahead? Or, could his judgment be mere coincidence? Developments like this will only reinforce long-held suspicion that the British jurisprudence is half of the times tainted and can, therefore, not be trusted to avail us justice on own accord without us standing up to the system, nor can its integrity be vouched for to protect our interest behind our back.
- Odion is a Fellow of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (FNGE). The article was first published by Premium Times on August 21, 2019. This is an abridged version.
