We call on President Umaru Yar’Adua to immediately order investigations into the allegation that Securency, an Australian firm now being investigated by the Australian government paid bribes to top CBN officials amounting to nearly N1 billion to secure the Naira polymer contract.

The silence emanating from Aso Villa on this scandal is deafening and shameful. The strategy appears to be that by hiding their heads in the sand for as long as possible, the scandal would somehow go away. But as the BAE and the Mabey and Johnson Bribery and Corruption prosecution in the United Kingdom shows, the west is waking up to the malaise of zero tolerance to bribery in their home countries but winking at their companies at it in foreign lands. 

After discussions with Ghana’s President John Evans Atta Mills, two of the ministers named in the Mabey and Johnson Bribery and Corruption scandal have resigned. But in Nigeria, the person named in the Securency bribery scandal was nominated by the ruling party to be the governor of Anambra State. 

This is another scandal that we will not allow President Yar’Adua to sweep under the carpet. Fortunately, like Siemens, Willbros and Halliburton bribery scandals before it, this is yet another Nigerian scandal with international dimension. It is therefore unlikely to die a premature death. 

For our doubting Thomas’s,  evidence abound that Chukwuma Soludo, the former Central Bank governor, was lying when he denied any role in a multibillion naira contract at the centre of a growing bribery scandal involving the conversion of our currency from plain paper to polymer. 

Our report last week showed that the CBN, under Mr. Soludo, played a major role in the award of the contract to Securency, an Australian firm now being investigated by the Australian government for paying bribes to top CBN officials amounting to nearly N1 billion. 

The report featured documents definitively linking the Soludo CBN to the decision to award the contract. It is left for President Umaru Yar’adua to commence investigations immediately into this shameful scandal. Otherwise we might be inclined to believe insinuations that the first lady, Turai Yar’adua also soiled her fingers in the Securency bribery pie. 

We will not accept a weak undertaking by Lamido Sanusi, the current CBN Chairman to investigate the bribery allegation. A news outlet has quoted a CBN spokesman as saying it is not carrying out any investigations on the matter. 

"We are not carrying out investigations in the sense that you are calling it. We are only asking questions on what could have happened based on what we read on the pages of the newspapers," the spokesman said. 

According to Next, Mr. Abdullahi sought to clear any impression that the CBN is working in collaboration with the Australian government. He also claimed that the CBN had not contacted the EFCC, contradicting the claims of the new CBN governor, Lamido Sanusi that he had contacted the EFCC chairman on the bribery matter. 

There have been several instances for the Yar’Adua administration to demonstrate his anti-corruption credentials but each time, he retreated. 

The first was the Willbros scandal. The American engineering company was said to have distributed over $6 million in bribe to some officials of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and Shell Petroleum in Nigeria. The American government fined Willbros over $32 million in addition to forcing it to forfeit some assets over the scandal. 

Did the Yar’Adua government take any action against the Nigerian beneficiaries of the scandal? No! 

The second was the Siemens scandal. Siemens AG, a German engineering company, was convicted by a German court for dolling out bribes to Nigerian government officials to win contracts in the country. The company on its own admitted distributing more than 10 million euros in “suspicious payments”, to Nigerian ministers and officials. The Nigerian officials were named and shamed in court papers, widely reported by the media. What did Yar’Adua again do? Nothing!

Then the Halliburton scandal- where over $180 million is said to have exchanged hands between the American company and prominent Nigerian government officials from the 1990s to 2000s over the award of contracts for the LNG projects. The American culprits faced justice in their country. The Nigerian culprits, on the other hand, are still honoured guests at Asso Villa together with its appurtenances. Surely under Yar’Adua, It pays to be corrupt. 

On the corruption scandal involving Halliburton, whereas the Nigerian identities of the Halliburton culprits are widely known, the Attorney General and Minister of Justice Michael Aondoakaa is spearheading a campaign to deceive the Nigerian public into believing that the top Nigerians named in the bribery scandal would be prosecuted by the Federal Government. This he did by setting up a “high level committee” with membership drawn from the key security agencies in the country headed by the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mr. Mike Okiro, the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mrs. Farida Waziri, representatives of the National Security Adviser (NSA), the Director General of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and the Director General, States Security Services (SSS) to unravel the identities of all those behind the Halliburton bribe-for-contract deal. 

Nigerians should change their indifferent attitude towards official corruption. Corruption is a cankerworm that destroys the fabric of the society. Without outrage from the populace, this evil will continue. 

President Yar’Adua should not allow the Securency bribery scandal to go the way of the Siemens, Willbros and Halliburton bribery scandals. We demand urgent investigation now!

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Robot  # 1 | 20.10.2009 07:56

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