[size=16pt]Tompolo’s Contract[/size]

By Obi Nwakanma

Unease continues to trail the Jonathan administration’s decision to cede the control of Nigeria’s strategic waterways to Global West Vessel Specialist Agency, a private company owned by Government Ekpemukpolo, known more generally as Tompolo.

The implication of this move is dramatic and not a little troubling. It amounts to ceding a strategic national security environment and a protected statutory function to privateers; a move which undermines the function, validity and in fact relevance of both the Nigerian Navy and the National Maritime Administration.

But more precisely, it is a move that makes Nigeria more vulnerable to national security risks and incidents. Of course the federal government has tried to allay the rising fears and dismay of many Nigerians angered and worried by thisill-advised and clearly schizoid decision.

Last week the minister of Transport, Mr. Idris Umar spoke to journalists in Abuja about it.He was quite antsy at the hint of national dismay. Many Nigerians, Minister Umar noted, have been insinuating a devil’s compact between the Federal government and the militants of the Niger Delta.

“This is irritating!” he fumed. “This is absolutely wrong.” Nigerians are not properly informed about the situation at hand, or the nature of this deal, the minister suggests. Nigerians ought not be worried because Nigeria’s national waterways have not been “concessionned to militants.”

Leased, perhaps, is the word the minister might want to use. Yet the minister did describe the deal between an agency of the ministry he runs, the Nigerian Maritime Agency, and Global West Vessel Specialist Agency (GWSA), a company of privateers, in a twist of logic and doubletalk, as “strategic concessionning” – that word irritates the hell out of me.

But Nigerians love such abstract neologisms that meanhardly much, very often uprooted from their natural environments – usually the rhetoric laboratories of New York’s Madison Avenue where they shape the daily lingo for the free marketers on Wall Street.

Soon enough such words gainsome sex appeal, and no sooner picked up by Nigerian ventriloquists ever busy quarrying strange, mysterious language from the books and journals that paint far removed worlds they can only live in by sheer imaginative propinquity. Such a word “concessionning” is one such that gained currency in the frenzy of the other word, “privatization.”

Perhaps “concessioning” pretends to add some sheen of gravity to an ordinary word. It means conceding – that the federal government has simply conceded – that is, granted as of right, Nigeria’s strategic national waterways – a high security environment to a private citizen to manage and operate for profit.

I’m sure most thoughtful Nigerians find this, the sheer implication of this kind of deal as brazen as it is unnerving. According to the Transport minister Tompolo’s contract is mere “wet lease.” Global West Vessel Specialist Agency will act only under a partnership with the National Maritime Authority.

Its contract is basically to build and provide platforms, jetties, security vessels, and surveillance equipment as well as expertise that would man and secure Nigeria’s strategic national waterways and of course collect rent. Nothing in the contract, the minister says, suggests that the personnel of this private company will bear arms.

Only the Nigerian Navy, the other institution in this awkward contract will continue to handle the arms. This, Mr. Umar insists, does not amount to conceding – “concessioning” – Nigeria’s security to a private contractor, it is “strategic.”

But to cede the surveillance and control of Nigeria’s territorial waters to such a private contractor, particularly one like Tompolo, one of the commanders of the private armies that rose recently in the Niger Delta is a dangerous move.

It demands both scrutiny and review. There is good sense in restricting the management and control of Nigeria’s strategic waterways to only the disciplinary oversight of the Nigerian Navy, for which it was formed in the first place. A well trained, well-deployed, and well-equipped National Naval and Amphibious regiment will do a better job of securing the strategic waterways – particularly against the background of the fluid situation in the delta.

The Naval Act of 1964 empowers the Nigerian Navy to that task until it is repealed. It seems to me that in granting this concession to a private security contractor, the president has done two things (a) He has possibly overstepped his executive mandate.

It might require a legislative mandate to grant the kind of wide-ranging concession made to Tompolo and his Global Vessel Specialist Agency (b) he has whittled the statutory status of the Nigerian Navy and turned it into something of a “Siddon Look Navy” which merely guards the doors while the real business of national security is done by Tompolo and co. It gives people like me uneasy comfort.

Nigeria’s Maritime Environment is far too strategic to be conceded to an independent contractor. I have heard the argument that under “Northern overlordship” such a wide-ranging concession was made to Yar Ardua and Atiku Abubakar’s Intel, and that this is an opportunity for “Niger Delta nationalists” to reposition that strategic imbalance.

There is in this kind of thing a rather narrow, short term gain. I think that the National Assembly must do its duty to the nation by calling the administration to order on this matter urgently.

The Ministry of Transport, even with the backing of an executive order cannot, or to put it differently, must not be able to singly undermine, reduce, and parcel away the statutory privileges of a national institution like the Navy, particularly in these times.

We also cannot, indeed should not trust Tompolo, doubtlessly a “reconstructed militant” with a strategic security gateway such as Nigeria’s waterways. Nigeria’s foreign trade depends on the security and maintenance of its strategic waterways.

The protection of its oil facilities; the deterrence against the theft of national oil resource depends on the strategic security and surveillance which must remain with the Navy and which must never be conceded to a privateer.

The Nigerian Navyneeds review and upgrading, that is all. It must be re-engineered towards more capable deployment. The Nigerian Navy has so far no capacity for shipbuilding, or for developing its own naval equipment, including surveillance capability.

It has so far proved itself too much of a deadweight against the nimbler insurgents of the Niger Delta. But the president of Nigeria must not play politics with such a veritable Nigerian institution with Nigeria’s national security at stake. Tompolo’s contract does raise that stake, and something of a red flag.

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/03/tompolos-contract/

If a private company is now in charge of surveilance and patrol of oil installations in the Nigerian territorial waters, I wonder what the Navy does.

Havent you heard of nepotism before mr man ?

This singular attitude shows that Jonathan is ethnocentric and tribalistic.

Onlytruth: If a private company is now in charge of surveilance and patrol of oil installations in the Nigerian territorial waters, I wonder what the Navy does.

Ijaws have secured the Bight of Bonny pending whatever happens in 2015.

This is how it starts. Enrich private defense contractors and you will never know peace.

Empower them and they will end up running your country covertly and overtly.