The scam that sold NPA to political interest

For some time now, the Nigerian media was inundated with reports of how political interests may have mortaged the collective patrimony of Nigerians through a fraudulent Joint Venture Contract between the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and the Niger Global Engineering and Technical Company Limited owned by Senator Hope Uzodinma.

The Joint Venture Contract for the maintenance dredging of the Calabar Access Channel which is said to have been facilitated by former President Goodluck Jonathan on the advice of the then Minister of  Transport, Umar Idris was designed to effectively sell off the NPA to a political interest in Senator Hope Uzodinma’s Niger Global Engineering and Technical Company Limited otherwise referred to as Niger Global.

The Joint Venture between the NPA and Niger Global worth over N26 billion Naira was procured in flagrant disregard for all rules guiding procurement in Nigeria and that transaction was conducted in brazen disrespect for contractual procedures of the NPA as an agency of the federal government of Nigeria.

It is fast becoming evident that everything about the NPA/Niger Global JV agreement on the Calabar Channel is anything but lawful. It was all political settlement that serves no national interest. It is a carefully orchestrated scam designed to mortgage the patrimony of millions of Nigerians by a few political operators who are still holding sway despite efforts by the management of the NPA to get the agency off the hook of the self-serving scheme.

In a July briefing to the Minister of Transportation, Mr. Rotimi Amaechi, the Managing Director of the NPA, Hadiza Bala Usman noted that, “the NPA has consistently maintained that maritime activities in the Calabar Channel is low and cannot sustain a JV arrangement that would establish a channel management company”.

The Managing Director of NPA further stated that the procurement process that brought about Calabar Channel Management (CCM), the consortium that was created by the JV between the NPA and Niger Global and its partners “was reviewed and described to be flawed by the Bureau of Public Procurement”.

She also stated that “the recommendation for the appointment of Niger Global Engineering and Technical Company Limited as the JV partner for the Calabar Channel was done by the Federal Ministry of Transport unilaterally without the technical input of the NPA, including all the recommendations to Mr. President”.

 

Hoodwink of CCM

The NPA had called for bids for the management of the access channels in Lagos, Calabar and Bonny in 2004. It later formed joint ventures, JVs, to establish Lagos Channel Management Company and Bonny Channel Management Company, and shelved the idea of a JV for Calabar channel management, following technical advice.

NPA’s technical consultant, Mobotek International Ltd, had, argued at the time that low ship traffic on the Calabar channel did not justify a JV, normally funded from ship dues, Ms. Bala-Usman said in the memo.

In June 2010, the NPA initiated a fresh round of procurement for the Calabar channel, and received bids from six companies. At the time, BPP requested and secured presidential approval for use of selective tendering to “fast-track” the process in line with the law.

Yet, on September 13, 2012, while that process was continuing, the transport minister, Mr. Umar, sought Mr. Jonathan’s approval to cancel the procurement process and appoint a “special purpose vehicle known as Calabar Channel Management Limited” (CCM) as a JV belonging to Niger Global and the NPA to manage the Calabar channel.

Notwithstanding the fact that a procurement was ongoing, the minister’s request was approved by the president on November 6, 2012. Worse, CCM was yet to be incorporated at the time, BPP later said in its memo to the president.

The JV agreement between Niger Global and the NPA, was signed on July 25, 2013.

However, after several petitions and a legal actions leading to cancellations and reinstatement of CCM, Mr. Idris Umar , the then minister of transport directed NPA to prepare for the take-off of the CCM and ensure a second JV agreement with Niger Global in October, 2014.

Subsequently, the project vehicle of Niger Global, CCM, submitted invoices for the fourth quarter 2014 and first quarter 2015, totaling $34.56 million, and the government paid $12.5 million before further payment was suspended.

Further payment on account of the JV contract was suspended due to an investigation being carried out by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission over suspicion that the company never embarked on any dredging exercise despite receiving $12.5 million payment.

 

The BPP Intervention

The Bureau of Public Procurement had observed that the CCM was incorporated after the procurement process for the Calabar Channel Management had begun. In a memo to President Goodluck Jonathan referenced BPP/PRES/2015/013 on the 18th May, 2015, the BPP through its Director-General, Mr. Emeka Ezeh stated that “it appears as if Messrs CCM was surreptitiously incorporated for the purpose of obtaining this contract without competition”.

The BPP memo which came shortly before Mr. Jonathan handed over power in 2015 was eloquent in condemning the handling of JV contract between NPA and Niger Global to the extent that President Jonathan was told in clear terms that “awarding the contract, worth N26 billion to a company that failed or refused to bid for the contract, amounted to “gross violation of due process”.

 

Payment for No work

Despite clear evidence that the Jonathan administration through Senator Hope Uzodinma’s company forced NPA into a deal of economic sabotage, Niger Global was paid the sum of $12.5 million without competitive bidding and without delivering on the job. The management of NPA has raised an alarm over payments made under the previous administration without evidence of work done or appropriate certification as required by the procurement Act.

Accordingly, the NPA briefing indicated that:

“All efforts to find details of dredging activities for the period during which CCM claimed to have dredged the Calabar Access Channel (November 2014 to January 2015) proved abortive. The Harbour Master and Port Hydrographer during the period stated that they were unaware of any dredging undertaken by CCM during the period”.

The claims of having done any dredging by the CCM is being investigated at the House of Representatives , the NPA, the Federal Ministry of Transportation and the EFCC with none yet to be satisfied that there is any liability by the NPA to claims by CCM.

Questions are now being asked as to the appropriateness of the presidential approval that ignored technical advice and jettisoned extant regulations and procedure on public procurement to award a N26billion contract without going through competitive bidding process to ensure value for money.

 

Jonathan’s Culpability

The now scandalous CCM deal is one of the many phony transactions that  may have condemned the administration of former President Jonathan as indeed the most corrupt in the history of Nigeria.

Like in many other corrupt practices perpetrated under his watch, President Jonathan is largely culpable in this CCM scandal. According to documents obtained from the BPP, Mr. Jonathan was said to have initially directed that the contract be given to Mr. Uzodinma’s company without competitive bidding. Later, he allegedly reversed that order after other competing companies protested. Then, following a court process instituted by Niger Global, the president restored the offer. And that effectively marked the beginning of the series of bogus claims for payment for work not done by Senator Uzodinma and his company.

The BPP’s memo earlier referred to suggested that Mr. Jonathan might have been misled by Mr. Idris and the former president’s chief of staff, Mike Oghiadomhe. But the fact that the BPP had cautioned the President about apparent violations in the award of contract to a company that was not even in existence when the procurement process started also conforms to insinuations that the CCM may have been smuggled in by the then President apparently under pressure from his wife, Patience who was rallying several political operators at the time to actualize the reelection bid of her husband.

There has been no response by the media team of the former President.

Similarly, nothing has been heard from Senator Uzodinma since the issue came to a head in the media.

However, Innocent Ibirim, spokesperson for the former Minister of Trasnport, Mr. Idris was quoted to have said that: “all the Minister did followed due process and was in the interest of the nation”.

“The Calabar dredging had to be carried out, and that’s what the minister did. The company had been on the project long before the minister came to office. No law was breached,” he said, after explaining the former minister was outside the country.

 

NPA’s many battles

The battle for the soul of the NPA has been on since 2002 with Hope Uzodinma as a constant antagonist to the genuine intention of successive managements. From Lagos to Calabar, Uzodinma has been laying all manner of claims on NPA since 2002 to date either. Successive MDs ignored his bogus claims to the collective patrimony of Nigerians, except for the ill-fated MD who was brought in to pay $12.5m to Niger Global for unverified works at Calabar channel.

This goes to show the undying interest in the NPA by Senator Uzodinma who ironically now chairs the Senate Joint Committee on Customs, Excise & Tariff and Marine Transport which is today investigating the NPA, an agency with which his Niger Global company is engaged in dispute over the phony CCM contract.

 

Conflict on interest in the Senate

National Assembly insiders believe that the Calabar Channel Management contract is looking more and more like an economic crime with millions of dollars received as proceeds of an illegal financial transaction authorised by a sitting president ostensibly to benefit a certain political interest through an elected senator of the federal republic who is still carrying on with this deal with reckless abandon and in a clear case of conflict of interest.

The question to ask is: in whose interest did the Senate under Senator Bukola Saraki decided to unleash Senator Uzodinma’s open aggression on the NPA by making him chair a joint committee to investigate the NPA in an attempt to intimidate NPA’s management in a show of apparent conflict of interest and flagrant abuse of his oath of office.

By the appointment of Senator Uzodinma to head the Senate committee oversighting the NPA, the 8th Senate may have once again raised its index finger as a counter-force against the war on corruption in Nigeria. The Senate has not helped its own case against the background of Col. Abubakar Dangiwa’s assertion that “it is a possibility that members of the National Assembly might be on a mission to crash the federal government’s war against corruption using the power of oversight as cover”. What can be more evident that Saraki’s feigned ignorance of Uzodinma’s vested interest in the NPA even as he (Saraki) has now made him a law unto himself as chairman of an adhoc committee more powerful than two standing committees of the Senate?

 

The position of NPA

The position of the Managing Director of NPA, Hadiza Bala Usman on the on-going contract debacle appears to be the best way out of an already messy CCM contract.

In her briefing to the Honourable Minister  of Transport, Mr. Chibuike Amaechi, Ms Usman recommended that “the joint venture partnership between Nigerian Ports Authority  and Niger Global Engineering and Technical Company Limited  be terminated in line with the provisions of the Joint Venture Agreement”.

She also posited that “the payments already made and the parts outstanding be considered as debt which would be subjected to thorough forensic audit by the firm  hired to verify the claim; and that the Authority should establish the best mode of transparently managing  the Calabar Channel in line with extant procedures on public procurements following which, Messrs Niger Global Engineering and Technical Company Limited alongside all other qualified companies can then openly compete for the contract.”

With the war of attrition between NPA and Niger Global Engineering and Technical Company Limited now domiciled in the Senate, the stage is set for more damning revelations in the monumental looting that took place through the infamous partnership between the NPA and Niger Global that produced CCM in October 2014 for the management of Calabar Access Channel.

This will go down as one of the most blatant official corruption in the management of Nigeria’s waterways and a key national asset.

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