By Odilim Enwegbara

This article is not intended to recount what we all already know; the outrageous fraud accompanying the privatisation of our national assets, where some leaders and their cronies dispossessed the nation of its strategic public assets. Not even emerging facts that these assets were unbelievably turned into corporate scraps, seem to have bothered me.

That privatisation ended up raking up huge social, economic and financial costs for our nation is not news to most Nigerians. We all know how boring it can be, reading about what we already know well.

The question that arises is: with all these revelations, have we not heard enough? I’m sure that today no Nigerian should be saying he or she is shocked at the abysmal failure of the process under the watch of the National Council on Privatisation.

High drama has followed the sittings of the Senator Ahmad Lawan-led Senate ad-hoc committee, on the activities of the Bureau of Public Enterprises. What this knee-jerk probe has done is to try and ask all the questions in this world regarding how the horse died, even though, no amount of such questions can bring the dead horse back to life.

From where do I begin the narration? Is it from how the original philosophy of privatisation churned out in 1983 by Willard Garvey and his colleagues, who wanted to use privatisation to dispossess developing economies of their vital national assets and then hand them over to western multinational corporations through local fronts?

According to http://watch.pair.com/cnp.html, in 1983, Willard Garvey and other Wichita, Kansas businessmen founded the National Centre for Privatisation. The purpose of the NCP was “to educate Americans about the then-new concept of ‘privatisation’”, which meant relieving the government of services which Garvey and his partners felt could be performed more efficiently and effectively within the private sector. Ostensibly, the objective was to eliminate government waste, reduce taxes, and government control of the US citizenry.

Adds http://watch.pair.com/cnp.html, “Although privatisation masquerades as relief for the overburdened taxpayer, a different picture emerges in real life scenarios where private enterprise and government have collaborated to profit at taxpayer’s expense.”

It is clear that as someone who is not new to the issues around the privatisation of Nigeria’s public companies, I need not bother listening to the revelations about how the multibillion dollar Ajaokuta Steel Company was sold for a fraction of that amount; then had its assets stripped by the concessionaires. These pricey assets along with multimillion dollar parts in the complex were eventually shipped out of the country by the concessionaires, and all these happened while the Nigeria Police Force, State Security Service and Nigeria Customs Service looked the other way.

Or was I surprised to hear that the N225bn Delta Steel Company was sold for a mere N4.5bn to a foreign company? I wasn’t surprised that a poor country like ours could go ahead to sell the $250m Aluminium Smelting Company of Nigeria, Ikot Abasi, Akwa Ibom State at a mere $130m discount, while there was an agreement with the buyer to spend $120m on the dredging of the Imo River. This was even when it was clear that the two should have been fully separated.

It was obvious I never expressed any form of outrage. What I tried to preoccupy my mind with — even not taken seriously — was would one bother to hear these folks out? Or how can this Senate probe be different from the usual drama with no useful outcome? Could it be the tipping point that would begin to move the country forward? But the more I raised these many questions, the less I showed interest in the week-long probe.

But something unknown to our usual culture happened. Trying to go through the news before leaving home, I came across the opening remarks of the Senate President, David Mark, in which he said the committee was not set up to persecute anyone. That was unusual good news to me. That was followed by the news that the chairman of the ad-hoc committee was a minority senator, Ahmad Lawan. The question that I quickly asked myself was: how on earth would a Peoples Democratic Party-led Senate allow such an important probe to be chaired by a minority senator?

It was real fun as I watched the senators grill the powerful corporate chiefs. What I saw was that the senators in the committee were fully out to unravel the knotty issues around the privatisation process, not minding how deadly the beneficiaries could become.

Now that it is clear that efforts are being made to ensure that such absurdities never take place in our country again, it is important for the lawmakers to overhaul the laws guiding the privatisation process.

The National Assembly should enact a law fully mandating the BPE to ensure that buyers of our public assets are good custodians, who should never engage in any form of assets stripping. But should they ever try such, they should be punished. Sanctions should include empowering the BPE to take over such privatised companies and possibly nationalise them.

To ensure that fake investors and/or foreign fronts are not given any of the nation’s treasured assets, a new provision in the BPE law should require full disclosure and full investigation by the Central Bank of Nigeria of the source(s) of funds used to purchase them. This means that rigorous procedures should be adhered to in determining and confirming the genuineness of the funds used for such purchase before the bidder takes over the company. In the event of a default, the buyer could relinquish control of the company to the BPE.

The bureau should also have the right to repossess any privatised company during 15 years of acquisition if the new owners fail to meet the agreed conditions. Had such a law been in place, there would not have been any difficulty transferring the privatised companies now being run down by their new owners.

The Senate should ask the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to initiate a thorough investigation of the privatisation process since inception. Those buyers who are not meeting contractual conditions or have been engaged in the fraudulent acquisition of such companies should be prosecuted, with the likelihood of such firms being repossessed by the BPE.

Enwegbara, who wrote from Lord Lugard Street, Asokoro, Abuja, can be reached at basil_enwegbara@yahoo.com or 07038501486

Source: Punch