Given the combativeness with which the House of Representatives Committee on Aviation began its probe of the overpriced bulletproof cars bought by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) early last week and other ancillary matters, the conclusion of the sitting, during which the Minister of Aviation, Stella Oduah, gave her presentation turned out to be an anti-climax. Not only was nothing virtually said about the inflated prices of the cars, the last day of the sitting was so anticlimactic that the panel even began to harry the other top witnesses from the NCAA for misleading the minister – almost as if the buck no longer stopped on the table of the minister. I do not of course expect the committee’s conclusions to be weakened by their seemingly contrived inability to smoke the truth out of the witnesses, nor do I expect them to be swayed by the minister’s obvious insolence when she was riled, flattery when the spirit seized her, and tendentiousness when she launched into clear mendacity. The country expects the committee to do a good job, and we’ll just have to wait and see.
For those who have followed the so-called reforms Ms Oduah undertakes in the ministry, the scandal that oozed out of NCAA even took too long in coming. The scandal is open enough, undisguised in substance, clear in ramifications, and shocking in its brazenness. But in long and winding prefatory statements, the minister kept harping on enemies trying to unhorse her, media attempting to try the scandal on the pages of newspapers, and other nameless villains she swore were after President Goodluck Jonathan’s transformation agenda. She treated the responses made by aviation officials who tried to clarify issues before her intervention with extreme condescension. The coordinating spokesman (an imprecise, nugatory and annoying role) for the agencies under her ministry, she said with self-righteous dismissiveness, didn’t quite do right by suggesting the scandal was just a rumour. Then she excused her own media aide who should know, and who virtually confirmed the minister needed the cars for her safety, on grounds that he suffered from honest and innocent misapprehension. And she gave a slap on the wrist to the new Director-General of NCAA for throwing a red herring before the baying and inquisitive public.
After inundating the committee and the public with these excuses, probably the only and last time her responses would be civil, she simply launched into abuses, condemnatory analyses of her critics’ motives, and other uncivil extrapolation. Her critics were either detractors, she said proudly, or they were “entrenched, corrupt or profligate.” Even the “false accusations and trial in the media,” she added petulantly, might have affected the committee’s sense of outrage. It is a tribute to the tolerance and resilience of the committee members that they sat glumly through the withering attacks on their bona fides.
It is not certain whether the committee asked for a background briefing on the running of the agencies under Ms Oduah, or on how she put only people she could trust in positions of authority, and on how she ran the supposedly autonomous agencies with dictatorial insouciance only a special or highly connected minister could attempt. If they did, they would understand why in spite of the obvious infractions of the law in the NCAA, and other malfeasances, she rose to the agency’s defence, describing it as being “conscious of its obligations” under the Appropriation Act. And in spite of having committed the NCAA to extra-budgetary spending, Ms Oduah could still say hyperbolically that “The NCAA is therefore conscious of its obligations relating in particular to appropriation and will never spend monies that have not been appropriated by the National Assembly.”
The minister’s view of financial commitment is strangely out of this world. She seeks to persuade the committee that as long as the amount due on the loan facility taken from the First Bank to buy 54 cars does not exceed what the minister had powers to approve, no law had been broken. Indeed, she even tried to bamboozle the public with the concept of the “Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF),” which she argued incredulously justified the humongous amount for which she gave anticipatory approval to finance the cars, bulletproof and ordinary. She was of course silent on why she approved the purchase of 54 cars instead of 25 appropriated by the National Assembly. Perhaps the same MTEF would explain the arithmetical wizardry. And while the financing bank insisted that the facility granted NCAA was a loan, and which was documented, Ms Oduah kept insisting it was a lease, and that in any case the dynamics of the transaction made a lease equivalent to a loan. For a minister who strived to distance herself from the scandal, it is not certain whether the point was lost on the committee that her spirited defence of NCAA amounted to guilt by association. After all, would she ever defend what she abhorred?
Then, of course, too, she tried to rewrite the principles of finance by describing the N643m loan granted the NCAA by First Bank as a mere understanding that could be revoked anytime. For many of us who had at one time or another taken a bank loan, we know that banks do not trifle with their money. They are often brutal and merciless. Ms Oduah gave the impression the deal between the NCAA and First Bank was a mere understanding, not an obligation. If so, let her prepare for lawsuits. In reality, we know she is merely evading the truth. She and her agents in the NCAA and other aviation agencies know the true transactions that had been concluded, and how those transactions undermined the law. Whether the House of Representatives committee got to the bottom of the case remains to be seen. We’ll also have to await the report of the president’s administrative panel, and then see what the rather distant EFCC is capable of doing to end the rot in the ministry and its agencies, which rot she has repeatedly tried to dignify as reform and transformation unequalled in the history of aviation.
Ms Oduah reiterated that the NCAA and the ministry had not spent money not appropriated. Yet the NCAA wrote First Bank to pay the vendors of the cars. She tried to put emphasis on the fact that the bank had retained a copy of vehicle documents and spare keys. Could it have been otherwise? Or does that vitiate the commitment to the deal, the weight of the loan, or the import of the extra-legal spending entered into by NCAA? No matter how semantically clever the minister tried to be, it is clear 54 cars were bought, among which were two bulletproof cars; and money not appropriated was spent, whether it had translated into cash for the creditor or not.
As to the biggest issue surrounding the unlawful spending by NCAA, that is, the person for whom the bulletproof cars were bought, Ms Oduah gloatingly announced that the cars were neither registered in her name nor yet allocated to her office. Next time whistleblowers want to go public, let them wait for the murder to be committed, not the murderer to aim the gun. But more seriously, does anyone expect an official car to be registered in the name of the person to whom it is allocated? Would a cash-strapped agency like NCAA commit itself to nearly a billion naira in spending, let alone buy two bulletproof cars, without the express approval, if not instigation of the minister?
But by asking these questions, by doubting her fidelity to facts, by questioning her spending habits, and by denouncing the excesses of her ministry and its agencies, Ms Oduah dares to call us names in return, describing us as “purveyors of rot and corruption fighting back every inch of the way,” and dismissing us as a people perversely dedicated to fighting progress. In other words, we the victims are to blame for everything just so that Ms Oduah could continue to indulge her fancies and recreate a national carrier against common sense and every economic objection. Worse, she now has an army of tribal defenders who, like Niger Delta militants and Ms Oduah herself, are too blinded by sentiments to see the truth and pursue the cause of justice. If in the end, among the myriad agencies probing the scandal, we can’t find one to convict her and the offending officers in the agencies under the Aviation ministry; and if we can’t find a president scandalised enough by the rot to give Ms Oduah the treatment Julius Caesar gave his wife suspected of unfaithfulness, then it will be firmly time to give up on the country.
