Hopefully, for his own sake, Nuhu Ribadu will become
Adamawa State’s next governor, following his
decampment to the People’s Democratic Party (PDP)
last week to run for the governorship
As a person, I wish him well. As a politician, however,
he appears to be in need of counselling.
“I wish to assure you that my defection is in pursuit
of a good cause, and never out of any selfish
interests...I’ll never let you down on this new path.”
he explained last week.
Clearly, the new PDP convert does not understand
that he is unlike any other defector, and unlike any
other member the PDP has ever known. For him, this
path leads into the dark.
The reason: Mr. Ribadu is identified with one moment
in which Nigeria claimed to fight corruption, an
affliction best identified with the party he now
adopts.
Some eleven years ago, when Ribadu captured
national and international attention as the chairman
of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission
(EFCC), it was for providing close insight into the
ethical challenge before Nigeria.
That spark of light was a ruse, of course: President
Olusegun Obasanjo simply wanted to sell a forest of
monkeys to the international community.
The EFCC boss pretended not to know that, and his
critics argued that if Ribadu were a sharp knife, it
was designed to cut only in the direction of
Obasanjo’s enemies.
Perhaps not, but Ribadu did not make arguments in
his favour easy. Consider that he was at the peak of
his considerable limelight when the EFCC told the
international press in September 2006 that the
commission had seized $13.5 million dollars from
Mrs. Patience Jonathan, the wife of then Governor of
Bayelsa State.
That story was broken to the international press by
EFCC spokesman Ositah Nwajah. Not once before he
left the commission did Mr. Ribadu suggest, as he
would do four years later, that that information was
merely political.
Just one month before that seizure, the EFCC had
also obtained a court order to temporarily freeze
N104 million Mrs. Jonathan had allegedly tried to
launder through one Nancy Ebere Nwosu.
Remember also that in that tumultuous 2006, Mr.
Ribadu, in his role as chairman of President Olusegun
Obasanjo’s Joint Task Force (JTF) against corruption,
indicted 15 corrupt governors.
That JTF was one powerful body: in addition to the
EFCC, it comprised the Independent Corrupt
Practices and Other Related Offences Commission,
the Code of Conduct Bureau, the Department of State
Services, and the Nigeria Police, each contributing
five senior members.
Among the headliners of the JTF’s infamous list were
Mr. Jonathan, who would later become Nigeria’s
president, and Bola Tinubu, who in 2010 would
become Ribadu’s political leader.
The EFCC law demands that the commission provide
an authoritative annual report to the National
Assembly. Fulfilling that requirement in that
September 2006 in which the EFCC was dealing with
Mrs. Jonathan’s $13.5m matter, Ribadu specifically
listed Mrs. Jonathan among Nigeria’s most corrupt
elements.
The case—or cases—of the Jonathans would come to
define Mr. Ribadu, but nobody knew it at that time.
Obasanjo knew he was not serious about fighting
corruption, and Ribadu knew Obasanjo was not, but
Ribadu seemed content with that balance of smoke
and mirrors. Power however shifted massively when
Obasanjo, ignoring the heavily incriminating report
of the JTF, placed Jonathan on the PDP presidential
ticket with Umaru Yar’Adua.
It is true that when a Nigerian is sufficiently powerful,
he becomes a saint: the moment Jonathan became a
candidate for the vice-presidency, his slate was
wiped clean, as was that of his wife.
But nobody was saying any such thing…officially or
unofficially. Time passed, as did the political
turbulence under Yar’Adua which blew Ribadu first
out of the EFCC, and then into exile.
More time then passed, and Ribadu returned to
Nigeria in 2010, having decided to run for the
presidency.
To me, he was entitled to that ambition, but Ribadu’s
main problem seems to be how quickly he forgets.
Among others, he forgot he was no longer the boss of
the EFCC, and that the institution had its own
structure, records and processes.
Ignoring all that, as well as all the pronouncements
he had made in 2006 about Mrs. Jonathan, Ribadu
unilaterally pronounced her clean without any
recourse to the burden of proof.
“There was a never when I was in the EFCC when we
ever invited that woman to come and make a
statement,” he thundered at an NVS HotSeat
interview in October 2010. “…I never I never I never
invited Mrs Jonathan for questioning or take her
statement.”
That is curious because in August 2006, Ribadu filed
against Mrs. Jonathan at the Federal High Court in
Abuja suit number FHC/ABJ/M/340/06. Ofem Uket,
the EFCC’s prosecuting counsel told the court, “Mrs.
Patience Jonathan, wife of the Governor of Bayelsa
State, was the person who instructed one Hanner
Offor to launder the said sum of N104,000,000 into
the account of Nansolyvan Public Relations Limited
with First Bank of Nigeria Plc (FBN), Niger House,
Marina, Lagos.”
Four years later, Ribadu had forgotten all of it.
He also forgot, as he chose to run for the presidency
on the platform of the Action Congress of Nigeria
(ACN), a one-man business that was owned and
managed by Bola Tinubu. He forgot that Tinubu had
been one of the most prominent figures in his EFCC
diary.
Appearing at the Senate in 2006, he described
Tinubu’s corruption as being of an “international
dimension,” but running for the presidency, he forgot
he ever said that, or that he had listed Tinubu among
the corrupt governors. In February 2007, a list of
indicted public officials published by the EFCC in an
effort to stop them from contesting elections also
prominently featured Tinubu.
In Ribadu’s political memory loss, he persuaded
himself that the same Tinubu would help him
become president. To observers, however, it was no
accident that that the ACN States voted PDP in the
presidential contest. Few things run as deeply as
corruption memories!
Little wonder that, in July 2013, the presidency
cursed Ribadu out for daring to call Nigeria under
President Jonathan a ‘sinking ship.’ It laughed at him
for having willingly served Jonathan as chairman of
the Petroleum Revenue Special Task Force.
“It is only a shameless man that will turn around and
accept to be the political lackey of a man he once
openly accused of corruption at various times
between 2004 and 2007,” the presidency said.
This background is why Ribadu’s journey into the
PDP is exceedingly strange. If his presence in the
ACN and in the APC was frivolous, his arrival in the
PDP is a tightrope walk over the ocean with hungry
sharks in the waters below.
Again, I hope he wins the Adamawa governorship.
Otherwise, the swashbuckling former corruption
fighter is the untrained swimmer whose drowning
many politicians will swear they never witnessed
even as they joyfully fall over each other to pay for an
obituary.