The Presidency has deplored the attempt by the ACN to accuse it of having had a hand in the open dissension among members of the Ribadu Committee, saying the disagreements during the presentation were as surprising as they were sudden.
The Presidency has dismissed as lies and glib talk, allegations by the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) that the decision by President Goodluck Jonathan to appoint two members of the committee, Steve Oronsaye and Bernard Otti, to positions in the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) while the task force was still working on its assignment was a deliberate booby trap.
“The drama that has been generated around the Petroleum Revenue Task Force Report, one of three reports that were submitted to President Jonathan on Friday, Nov 2, says a lot about the attempt by others to politicize everything possible and seek cheap advantages where they need not do so,” noted a press statement by Dr. Rueben Abati, Special Adviser to the President, Media and Publicity. The release said the ACN statement issued by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, “falls into a familiar pattern by the party and its lying Lai, to seek every opportunity to insult President Goodluck Jonathan, as they write glibly about what they call “the President’s efforts to downplay the whole disagreement and give the dissenters a soft landing.”
“The ACN claims that Steve Oronsaye and Bernard Otti’s membership of the NNPC while serving on the Ribadu committee compromises their position. It is important to note that this committee and other committees had government officials, and ex-staff as members. They were not set up as quasi-judicial bodies but as committees of wise and knowledgeable men and women who would offer useful advice and in getting such useful advice there is nothing wrong in encouraging the participation of a broad category of persons including insiders and outsiders,” the statement read in part, adding that “the ACN should desist from looking for faults where none exists, in the expectation that if they tell the same lies long enough, more gullible persons will be persuaded to trust them.”
Last Friday, Jonathan received the comprehensive reports of three committees set up by the Federal Government earlier this year on different aspects of the operation of the country’s petroleum industry: the Petroleum Revenue Special Task Force was chaired by Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, Governance and Control Task Force, tasked with Mr. Dotun Suleiman as its chairman, and the National Refineries Committee headed by Dr. Kalu Idika Kalu.
But the presentation was almost marred by open disagreement in the Council Chambers of the Presidential Villa, Abuja, when Mr. Steve Orosanye, deputy chairman of the Petroleum Revenue Special Task Force told President Jonathan that he was not part of the report submitted by Mallam Ribadu. The brickbats between Ribadu and Orosanye and their supporters within the committee were such that President Jonathan quipped when he wanted to make his remarks: “My friends from the media, I know you have a big story today.”
In accepting the reports, President Jonathan counseled any committee member who had issues to channel such observations to him through his Chief of Staff or the Minister of Petroleum Resources. He then assured Nigerians that his government has no interest in hiding anything, imploring the media and civil society groups to help in dispelling such insinuations. He stated that if the finding of the committees border on corruption or outright stealing, such aspects of the report will be forwarded to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
But in a statement issued in Lagos yesterday, the ACN said if the Federal Government did not have any ulterior motive; it would have waited for the task force to complete its assignment before naming Oronsaye onto the board of the NNPC and Otti as the Director of Finance of the same body. “Alternatively, both men should have resigned their membership of the committee the moment they were given the plum jobs to avoid the apparent conflict of interest. The fact that they stayed on, only to disparage the report of the task force so openly and ferociously at the end, is the clearest indication yet that they were meant to play that exact role of spoilers,’’ ACN said.
The party said the temerity with which the duo sought to denigrate the report of the task force in the presence of the President of the Federal Republic showed that they must have been acting a well-prepared script. “All that these two men needed to have done, if indeed they did not agree with the report of the task force, was to write a minority report and present such to the President, instead of engaging in theatrics as they did at the presentation, right in front of the whole world.
“Unfortunately, the President’s efforts to downplay the whole disagreement and give the dissenters a soft landing did more to accentuate the damage done to the report by the two men. The President’s statement, that becoming board members of NNPC does not disqualify them from being members of the task force, is an indication of his innermost thoughts on this issue,’’ it said.
ACN, however, said it was not surprised at how things turned out with the task force, having previously warned, in a statement it issued on February 8, 2012, that naming credible people like Ribadu to head the task force might just be part of government’s ploy to poach credible personalities from the opposition just so it could decimate it (opposition) and also tarnish the well-earned credibility of such personalities.
“Among our observations in that statement, we had said: ‘There is also the possibility that booby-traps will be deliberately set for such credible personalities to guarantee their failure in their stated assignment, after which they will be ridiculed and dumped like an ordinary chump’. We hate to say our fears have been justified.’’
The ACN reiterated its earlier statement that the Federal Government was not interested in any genuine effort to clean up the corruption in the oil sector, and that it was merely engaging in window dressing by setting up committees upon committees, whose outcomes would eventually add to the growing list of reports now gathering dust at the presidency.
