Nigeria’s oil wealth has not translated into meaningful development largely due to bad leadership and corruption.

When Antonio Maria Costa, executive director, United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, UNODC, spoke at a three-day national seminar organised by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, in Abuja, late last year, most of his audience literally paled cold. According to him, between 1960 when Nigeria became independent and 1999 when democracy was restored, a staggering sum of $400 billion was stolen and stashed away by a generation of corrupt rulers. That is within a space of 39 years. And the discovery of oil, the nation’s cash cow, predates independence. “If you were to put $400 billion bills in a row, you could make a path from here to the moon and back not once but 75 times. The opportunity cost of the stolen common wealth is enormous. Think of how different Nigeria would (have) looked today,” Maria Costa lamented.
Of course, he was stating the obvious. Fifty years ago, Nigeria commenced commercial export of crude oil to the international market. According to Tam David-West, professor of Virology and one-time oil minister, "Shell BP began by exporting 5,100 barrels per day, bpd, in 1958. In 1959, it jumped to about 10,000 bpd.” Production and export have since attained about 2.4 million bpd, translating into enormous financial resources. “That is a lot of money. But, where is the money? There is nothing to show for it,” David-West lamented.

The paradox of the situation is that there appears to be nothing on ground to show except the stark rural and urban poverty and collapse of infrastructure and institutions like health and education that are vital to sustainable growth and development of any nation. While power supply has become a huge problem in spite of over $10 billion sunk to revive it in the last eight years, several communities have been decimated owing to the deplorable condition of both rural and urban roads. For Frank Kokori, frontline trade unionist, the advent of oil in Nigeria marked an unfortunate turning point in the nation’s history as it led to the emergence of a crop of lazy citizens who lost the initiative to be productive. According to Kokori, the country became a dumping ground for imported goods as cheap dollars flowed ceaselessly from petroleum. “The sad commentary about the Nigerian situation is that it is one of the few countries that pump out more than two million bpd and still live in this primitive infrastructural situation. Oil boom has become oil doom,” he said.

Indeed, for Nigerians, especially people of the Niger Delta region under whose soil and waters the black gold is deposited, the boom of oil led to doom. Magnus Kpakol, senior special assistant to President Umaru Yar’Adua on poverty eradication, said poverty in the country has dropped to 50 per cent. While conceding the fact that more than 70 million of the 140 million population are poor, he said more than 50 per cent of the people living in sub-Saharan Africa still live on less than $1 per day.
But why has it remained a mirage translating earnings from crude oil to good life for the majority of the citizens? According to analysts, the reasons for this unfortunate situation can be attributed to poor, visionless, inept and selfish leadership. A cursory peep into the early days of independence reveals that during the First Republic, there were genuine efforts to consolidate the gains of freedom and self-government as the regions engaged one another in healthy competition of improving the living conditions of their people. While the late Obafemi Awolowo of the Action Group, with its philosophy of democratic socialism, spearheaded development drive in the Western Region, late Nnamdi Azikiwe of the National Council of Nigeria and the Camerouns, led the Easterners with its philosophy of pragmatic socialism. Using the Northern Peoples Congress, the bulwark of conservatism and primitive capitalism as a vehicle, the late Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, drove development in the North.

But all that soon changed after the first military coup led by Chukwuma Nzeogwu, a major in the Nigerian Army. The putsch failed but late J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi, a major-general and most senior army officer at that time, took over the reins of government. The action of Nzeogwu was later to set a chain of military rule that lasted for almost four decades. Yakubu Gowon, retired general and former head of state, had the oil boom of the early 1970s to contend with. With so much petrodollars at his disposal, he embarked on a spending spree, even allegedly picking the salary bills of other countries. When late Murtala Muhammed, a general, eased Gowon out of power in 1975, there was hope and light at the end of the tunnel. He dismissed over 1,000 civil servants and permanent bureaucrats for offences related to abuse of office, corruption, “divided loyalty” and nepotism. He probed governors in Gowon's administration and many of them were found to have dipped their fingers in the public till. Mobolaji Johnson and Oluwole Rotimi, both retired brigadiers, were the only military governors that were absolved. Muhammed confiscated the ill-gotten assets for the government but Ibrahim Babangida, general and self-styled military president who took the nation on an endless roller coaster of political transitions, returned the loot to the looters.

Tunji Otegbeye, nationalist and elder statesman, traces the beginning of the woes of the nation to the doorsteps of the military. “The military merely captured the economy, and looting was at its best at that time. There is no doubt that the military ruined the economy of this country from the beginning to the end. There is also the chop-chop machinery of the politicians to contend with. And so, Nigeria has gone from frying pan into fire,” Otegbeye said. He may be right. The most brazen pillaging of the national economy which was lubricated by oil wealth allegedly took place under the military. Maria Costa said the late Sani Abacha, former head of state, cornered between two and three per cent of the nation’s annual gross domestic product, GDP, every year he was head of state. Perhaps, to underpin the fact that corruption was one of the legacies British colonialism bequeathed to the nation, Nzeogwu’s Supreme Council of Revolution pointed at stamping out corruption as one of the reasons for sacking the Tafawa Balewa-led government. “Our enemies are the political profiteers, swindlers: those that have corrupted our society and put the Nigerian calendar back by their words and deeds,” he declared January 15, 1966.

David-West blames the nation’s economic woes on the way the oil sector is run. He accused the government of Babangida of glorifying corruption, arguing that no other member country of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, runs her oil industry as it is run in Nigeria. While the President Babangida government “liberalised crude oil lifting process” for selfish interest, he allegedly colluded with the late Abdulkadir Ahmed, former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, to operate a “dedicated account” into which huge sums of money was lodged, spent and unaccounted for till date. The $12.5 billion Gulf War oil windfall took wings and flew away without any traces. “Before Babangida came, there were strict conditions for selling Nigeria’s crude oil. Oil was sold to end-users and not to those who sell at Rotterdam but those with refineries that will refine the crude oil. If you do not have a refinery, you must show legal evidence that you have had oil refining contract for more than 10 years and deposit three consecutive audited reports that must show fantastic turnover and networth. Staff strength must not be less than 20. Then oil must not be sold to South Africa because of apartheid,” David-West said, lamenting that all these guidelines were thrown overboard when Babangida took over and crude oil was then “sold like groundnut or palm oil”. Bad as that ‘liberalisation’ was, David-West laments that subsequent governments have retained it because of the lure of lucre. “They have tasted the forbidden fruit, it is sweet. The system dug a cesspit of corruption, with personal interest now taking precedent over national interest,” he said.

So, like a cancerous tumour, corruption practically became ‘one of the fundamental objectives of ‘state policy’ in Nigeria. It became a time-honoured predilection by successive governments. The only government that attempted to fight it consciously after Muhammed was the regime of Muhammadu Buhari, retired major-general. When the Second Republic led by Shehu Shagari fell, the governors were all investigated and those found to have illegally acquired wealth were sentenced to long jail terms. The Shagari era was marked by criminal display of opulence. While the economy cascaded, members of the ruling class awarded import licences to themselves and their cronies. All manners of products were imported into the country through the issuance of import licence by the government. When Olusegun Obasanjo had a second opportunity to rule the country, his government set up two anti-corruption agencies — the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, ICPC, and the EFCC — as a concrete step to combat corruption. Though the EFCC has been accused of being the attack dog of the former President, many analysts hailed the decision of the government to set up by law the anti-graft agency. While Joshua Dariye, impeached former governor of Plateau State, has forfeited several hundreds of millions of dollars laundered in Britain. He and many others, including Ayodele Fayose, impeached former governor of Ekiti State, and James Ibori, the “Dapper Don”, former governor of Delta State, are facing criminal charges of fraudulent diversion of public funds into their private pockets. Over two dozens of the former governors have one question or the other to answer before the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, ICPC, another anti-graft agency put in place by Obasanjo. Dan Etete, Abacha’s oil minister, and Eric Opia, former managing director of Oil Minerals Producing Areas Development Commission, are now fugitives. Last year, Etete got a three-year jail term and a $400,000 fine in France for money laundering. The judgment was handed over to him in absentia. 

David-West sees the rise of the country again from the ashes of debilitating corruption. The emergence of dedicated, patriotic and transparent leadership remains the solution to Nigeria’s economic stagnation, David-West posits. But Otegbeye and Kokori appear disillusioned. “A country where money, not character building, is the big factor, has a bleak future,” Otegbeye said. But Kokori is disillusioned because the only way a credible leader can emerge is through the ballot box. But with the country’s recent experience at the polls, he doubted if things could change. He advocated a return to two-party structure, arguing that the 50-party structure being practised now does not hold prospect of good governance.

Source: Tell