CNN anchor, Isha Sesay, is right about what she said on her Twitter handle. The kidnap of the 110 girls of Government Girls Science Technical College, Dapchi, is not a national disaster as President Muhammadu Buhari had described it; it’s a national disgrace.

The only thing worse than the disgrace is the incompetent response of Buhari’s government and the buck-passing in a moment of national grief.

How do we tell a world that still cannot understand how 256 girls got missing in Chibok, that after four years of trying and managing to rescue 100, another 110 girls are now missing without trace?

How do we explain to the parents and families involved that one week after their children were taken away from school by terrorists neither lawmakers representing the constituency, nor the state governor, nor the policemen in charge of the area, nor the soldiers, can give an account – any kind of coherent account at all – of what happened?

Broken promise

Buhari promised to keep Nigerians safe and secure. How can he look at himself in the mirror today and not think that if the missing 110 schoolgirls is a national disaster, then his personal failure to keep his promise is the father of that disaster? When it happened under former President Goodluck Jonathan, Buhari’s All Progressives Congress, then the opposition party, said it could only have happened as a result of malicious incompetence.

That may have been correct. Jonathan’s government did not make any pretensions about honesty or competence. Army generals were diverting funds set aside for the war on Boko Haram into their private pockets and angry troops, tired of fighting with their bare hands and buying their own medicines at the war front, were shooting their commanders or fleeing across the border.

PDP angry?

One hundred Chibok girls are still missing today because Jonathan believed some of those who were around him, who said the story of the missing girls was a hoax by the opposition to undermine his government.

Have you noticed how the rank and file of Jonathan’s party, the Peoples Democratic Party, has jumped on the bandwagon to flog Buhari?

The same people who said Chibok was a scam and on whose watch Boko Haram grew from a homeless status to become a landlord?

I know that politicians must play, but to play with the fate of children whose lives they endangered by their callous negligence is unforgivable.

It’s surreal to think that we’re right where we were four years ago; that in the same Yobe where 29 boys were murdered by Boko Haram in their hostels, 110 girls were later abducted and Minister of Interior, Abdulrahman Dambazau, is saying the government is taking steps to ensure that this does not happen another time.

Not another time

Well, there’ll be another time for Dambazau and all those who have shamelessly let the country down yet again. There’ll be another time for Army spokesperson Onyeama Nwachukwu; the Yobe State commissioner of police Sunmonu Abdulmaliki, and for their bosses who sent them to rub salt in our wound by trading blames.

There’ll be another time for Governor Ibrahim Geidam who had falsely announced the rescue of some of the girls even before seeing the parents of the girls and hearing their own side of the story.

Sure, there’ll be another time to announce that more billions of naira has been poured into the war on Boko Haram and anyone who wants can now have a picnic anywhere in the North East. There’ll always be another time to deepen our misery.

But there won’t be another time for the 110 missing girls or for the parents and families who are haunted by the bizarre thoughts of just where their girls are or what is happening to them.

There won’t be another time to repair the future of those children and hundreds more like them who will see no point at all in going to school. It is not Dambazau saying that the government is taking steps to ensure that this won’t happen again that doesn’t make sense to me.

It is the fact that the government has not said what it would do to prevent more girls from being kidnapped or more boys from being murdered in their dormitories.

Just like it happened in Chibok, it took Boko Haram one to two days of doing a recce and bedding in before the girls were rounded up and herded away in trucks.

There was a calamitous failure of intelligence between Dapchi and either Geidam or Damaturu – both places where soldiers attached to Operation Lafia Dole had at least not been withdrawn and which are only about 60 kilometres from Dapchi. This failure paved the way for the girls to be taken away with the casualness of a practice match.

What is Buhari going to do about it? How many schools are still open outside the capitals of Yobe, Adamawa or Borno? And why is it impossible to deploy vigilantes or drones or some minimum form of technology to complement the effort of the brave soldiers on the front lines to secure schools and other soft targets?

Unlike Chibok

Unlike Chibok, which happened in the forest area of Sambisa, Dapchi is miles and miles of flat land, stretching all the way up to the arid borders of Niger Republic. I’m lost for words that in a zone that is practically at war, nearly half a dozen trucks plied the major Damaturu-Bayamari Road for hours on February 19, 2018, with distraught schools crying for help and nothing happened. To say there won’t be a next time does not mean it won’t happen because Dambazau said so. Buhari’s government has put Boko Haram on the back foot. Yet, if the rising wave of other forms of violence is a parable of how much work still needs to be done, then Dapchi is a clear statement that the government has been too eager to give itself a pass mark.

And soon we’ll forget. The only reason why we’re still talking about Chibok is because Oby Ezekwesili and members of the Bring Back Our Girls campaign group have refused to give up, despite the odds.

Dambazau and others can say it won’t happen again because they know that, like Chibok, we’ll get used to Dapchi and, as usual, just get on with our lives; leaving the matter to God and surrendering ourselves as willing victims of the next idiocy.

Are we all right?

Caveat: This piece is in no way a comment on the judicial context of the ongoing trial of the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, at the Code of Conduct Tribunal. That is not only outside the scope of my competence but would constitute contempt of the court, which I dare not do. 

Rather this is a journalistic overview of events surrounding the latest appearance of the Senate President at the Code of Conduct Tribunal, CCT, with particular reference to the sudden twist in the fate of the CCT chairman, Mr. Danladi Umar, in the hands of the EFCC and its implications for the wider administration of justice as well as the fight against corruption by the current regime.

But really, so many things have changed. At least, Danladi has unexpectedly cleared Saraki of all charges; it appeared he did not play to script. Also, the Appeal Court has asked Saraki to go and clear himself of three charges from the 18 levied against him by the EFCC and which Umar had earlier struck out, discharging and acquitting the Senate President in the process.

There are many questions begging for answer on this sudden volte face by the EFCC. One of them is, are there new evidences linking Umar to the alleged crime? If so, why has the EFCC, which is noted for promptly revealing links between accused /suspects and their alleged crimes to the media, refused to do so in this instant case?

How does the EFCC wish Umar to feel taking the plea of a man accused of corruption in his own court, when he himself is making his plea on corruption allegations in another court?  If there is new evidence against Umar, why did EFCC write initially to clear the CCT boss when it knew it was yet to conclude its investigations into the allegations against him? And are they sure now they have completed the investigation enough to ensure a conviction? Or, as is being speculated, does the Federal Government want people to continue thinking that setting up Umar before the court at a time he is set to hear Saraki’s case again is a way of mounting pressure on him to ensure a conviction of the Senate President irrespective of facts?

Questions, questions and more questions begging for answers; and the more questions we have on issues like this, the more challenging it becomes to see how our leaders can, come out, take water, wash their hands and say they are innocent of what is being done to a just man.

The anti-corruption crusade of the administration is not only losing steam, it is surely losing its initial esteem. And to be candid, many people have been pointing at this decline only that their appeals seem not to have sunk well into the deliberations of the constituted authorities.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo puts this concern laconically when he said, “there were serious allegations of round-tripping against some inner caucus of the Presidency which would seem to have been condoned. I wonder if such actions do not amount to corruption and financial crime, then what is it.  Culture of condonation and turning blind eye will cover up rather than clean up. And going to justice must be with clean hands.”

We will just continue an unnecessary cycle, if we go on like that. It is the existence of credible institutional framework against corruption of all hues that gives boldness to several agencies in the United States of America to take up the  Donald Trump presidency on sundry issues without anyone seeing himself as an object of personality attack. And it is the absence of such a framework here that makes someone like our dear Maina to approach a court and slam a multi-billion naira suit on the EFCC for libel et al.

It is the absence of such platform that created the unnecessary intervention of the police and DSS in the private affairs of General Ibrahim Babangida and his media aide in the last few days. It is the absence of such platform that made the former SGF to remain in office long after credible evidence had been adduced to warrant his stepping down and facing trial.

But it is not too late; our redemption is still possible if, like Saraki said at the national summit on security, our leaders can summon the political will to actually make the fight against corruption an institutional issue and not an instrument to settle personal scores. That is the real change we desire; that was the change this administration promised us during the campaign in 2015. That is the change we expect from them.

Last Wednesday, the  Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) dispatched two of its investigators to the Port Harcourt International Airport in Rivers State to commence investigation into the Dana Air plane incident at the airport.

The previous day, a Dana Air aircraft which was flying from Abuja to Port Harcourt Airport had overshot the runway.

Happily, however, all the passengers on board and the crew were safely evacuated from the aircraft. In her reaction, the General Manager, Corporate Affairs, Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), Mrs. Henrietta Yakubu, stated that the incident could have been caused by a heavy rain accompanied by strong wind and storm in the Rivers State capital. Dana Air also toed the same path.

On February 7, the door of an aircraft belonging to the airline fell off upon landing at the Abuja airport. In its reaction, the airline surmised that the door must have fallen off because it was tampered with.

  As noted by Kingsley Ezenwa, spokesperson of Dana Air, the door never shook since the aircraft was “airbone and fully pressurised.” Nigerians would however recall that on June 3, 2012, a Dana Air flight crashed into a building in Iju-Ishaga neighbourhood in Lagos State, killing all the 153 people on board and 10 more people on the ground. That crash was reportedly the second deadliest on Nigerian soil, behind only the Kano air disaster of 1973. Every effort must be made to prevent a recurrence.

To be sure, it is not being suggested here that Dana Air is prone to accidents or that its failure and not the alleged inclement weather condition was responsible for the latest incident at the Port Harcourt Airport. There is as yet no valid reasons for coming to such a conclusion. In any case, it is fair to assume that, as a business, the airline could not have deliberately taken any actions capable of tarnishing its credibility. Our concern is that the latest incident could have claimed lives and, in any case, Nigerians deserve to know what really went wrong.

A thorough investigation is, more than ever, needed to unravel the circumstances surrounding the incident. The investigation should unravel whether the Nigeria Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) provided the necessary instrument landing systems for safe operations during inclement weather and whether the weather report given by the Nigeria Meteorological Agency (NIMET) at the time of the incident was accurate and up to date. It must further establish whether or not the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) ensured due diligence on the aircraft and crew, and whether FAAN itself was up to date in the provision of the required infrastructure for safe operations in Port Harcourt Airport and indeed elsewhere.

On a general note, however, we urge the Ministry of Transport to ensure at all times that safety standards are adhered to by all the airlines operating in the country.

Past air crashes cost the nation too dearly and the nation surely needs to do all it can to ensure that avoidable tragedies in air transport are completely eliminated.

Tribune

The clarion call to action against illicit financial outflows and tax evasion/underpayment by multinational companies resonated recently at the Platform for Collaboration on Tax (PCT) Conference held in New York, United States.  Nigeria, at the conference organised by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in collaboration with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), expressed profound concern about illicit financial outflows from the country and tax evasion by International Oil Companies. Nigeria’s   worries are understandable, considering the country’s ranking as having the highest annual illicit financial outflows in Africa.    

Speaking on tax issues and revenue leakages in Nigeria, the Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, noted that illegal financial outflows have continued because foreign countries have placed hurdles on efforts to repatriate stolen funds stashed away in their domains, with the problem worsened by the unwholesome behaviour of some multinational companies operating in Nigeria and other developing economies.      

“There is absolute need,” Mrs. Adeosun said, “for a complete understanding of how these multinational companies behave in Nigeria and other developing countries. Many of them operate a completely different standard in Africa, contrary to what obtains globally.” She also accused the defaulting multinational companies of hiding “behind slow legislative processes” to perpetrate wrong activities in the countries from which they derive significant income.                                                      

Nigeria asked for the collaboration of the global community to designate tax evasion by multinationals across developing countries as a “foreign corrupt practice”, stressing that such an odious label will help to facilitate the Nigeria’s current efforts to sue the erring IOCs in their own countries. Indeed, Africa, in particular Nigeria, has lost a lot in revenue and image to illicit financial outflows and tax evasion by multinational organisations in the country, which are sometimes in cahoots with unpatriotic Nigerian   financial institutions and public agencies.

For instance, the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, told the Federal Executive Council (FEC) at one of its meetings that Nigeria lost about $178 billion to illicit financial outflows in the last ten years. Just last year, the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) also disclosed that the country lost N306bn yearly to tax evasion by IOCs. This is 13 percent of the capital budget in the proposed 2018 federal budget. According to the FIRS Chairman, Mr. Babatunde Fowler, the amount resulted from the companies’ failure to file true and proper tax returns to government agencies. According to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Nigeria ought to significantly reduce illicit financial outflows by the year 2030.  

A Washington-based think tank, in a recent report, put illicit financial outflows from Africa and other emerging economies at between $2 trillion and $3.5trn yearly.    Nigeria, the report said, is the most “vulnerable” country in Africa to the flight of capital needed for investment and other purposes. The report further shows that combined illicit outflows and inflows amounted to 14.1 percent to 24 percent of the developing countries’ total trade from 2005 to 2014, the last year comprehensive data were made available.        

While the support of the global community is needed to tackle this problem, Nigeria must take up the gauntlet and move from mere declarations of intent to decisive action to stem the trend. Increased surveillance and tightening of internal controls are necessary. Other measures must include addressing poor governance, weak regulatory structures, which oftentimes aid illegal financial outflows.                        

Nigeria is still having talks with countries where state funds looted by discredited public officials are stashed.  In 2016, Nigeria signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the United Kingdom on looted assets. Tough legislations that can discourage the movement of stolen funds from one country to the other have become essential. It is also necessary to institute stiff measures against banks which serve as conduits for fraudulent financial outflows. According to the Global Financial Integrity Group, a financial watchdog based in the USA, about $15.7bn illicit funds passed through the Nigerian banking system.