Cameron Duodu Letter from the North Chuba Okadigbo, who has just been impeached as president of the Nigerian Senate, has an impish sense of mischief. Once, when the late Nnamdi Azikiwe, first president of Nigeria, complained that an election had been rigged by the party to which Okadibgo then belonged, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), Okadigbo retorted that Azikiwe’s statement constituted “the ranting of an ant”. Now Okadigbo’s people, the Igbo of Nigeria, regard Azikiwe or “Zik” with enormous veneration and they were infuriated that Okadigbo, a young don at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, who had just been weaned into politics, had abused their elder statesman. (Apart from his past position as an ex-president, Azikiwe was a traditional chief – the Owelle of Onitsha). Azikiwe himself was not amused, and is reported to have said, “Any young person who does not respect old age will grow up to meet it.” A loaded sentence, especially the “it” at the end. It could mean anything – the illnesses attached to old age; the penury which often accompanies it; or, at the very least, the neglect from friends and family that the aged sometimes endure. Whether Zik ever lifted the curse, as later reported, wherever he is today, it is Zik who is having the last laugh. For Okadigbo has come a proper cropper. He was elected president of the Senate in November last year when the then president, Evan Enwerem, was found by the media to have falsified his age on his electoral papers. Enwerem’s removal was a very bad signal from the civilian administration that had been sworn in – under the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo – only six months earlier (on May 29 1999). The civilians had taken over after 16 years of military rule, during which the late Sani Abacha, in particular, had filched $3- billion. The scale of military corruption, during and before Abacha’s reign, was such that the hope of the populace was that no civilian administration would ever go near the sort of corruption and maladministration that soldiers all too often use as an excuse to lay hands on the nation’s coffers. What made matters worse for the civilian administration was that the speaker of the (lower) House of Representatives, Salisu Buhari, had been removed under circumstances similar to those of Enwerem, four months before Enwerem was booted out. Buhari’s crime was that he had claimed he possessed a degree from the University of Toronto, although he had never even studied at the university.
So there was enough scandal in the corridors of Nigeria’s legislative apparatus to monopolise all conversation, when Okadigbo arrived to assume the office of Senate president. And everyone thought there could not possibly be another scandal in the legislature, for even if Okadigbo were inclined to do something silly, he wouldn’t do it because he knew all eyes would be on him.
They thought wrong. A Senate committee that investigated how the money voted for running the Senate had been spent, found that Okadigbo and three of his fellow Senate officials had voted for themselves, huge sums of money for such things as “gifts for Christmas and Sallah” (an Islamic festival). The committee said Okadigbo had: l accepted a secret payment of $208E000 from public funds, the purposes of which included the purchase of gifts for Christmas and Sallah;
l spent $225 000 on garden furniture for his official residence, in addition to $340 000 worth of furniture for inside the house itself – $120E000 above the authorised budget;
l purchased, without authority, a massive electricity generator, the price of which was inflated to $135E000; and l (this is what infuriated the Nigerian public the most as indicative of Okadibo’s ostentatious lifestyle) although he controlled 24 official motor vehicles, he nevertheless wasn’t satisfied with that and had bought eight more (at a cost of $290E000) to bring his complement of vehicles to 32! The eight additional vehicles “could not be accounted for”, the Senate committee reported. The committee also reported that some sena- tors had been awarded contracts to supply all manner of things – paper, computers, street lighting, and so on. Each had relied on front companies and had inflated the prices of the goods supplied, to good measure.
The two officials accused with Okadigbo – deputy Senate president Abubakar Haruna and Majority Leader Samaila Mamman – resigned as soon as the report was made public. But Okadigbo challenged the investigating committee’s report, whereupon a motion for his impeachment was tabled. Senators voted by 81 votes to 14 to impeach him. They replaced him with Senator Pius Anyim, with Senator Ibrahim Mantu as deputy president. Okadigbo’s debacle is, as could be expected, being laid at the foot of Azikiwe’s curse. But more mundane matters appear to lie at the heart of his come-uppance. Okadigbo had annoyed Obasanjo by unduly delaying the budget and other legislative measures sent to the national assembly by Obasanjo’s government. In fact, an attempt was made to impeach Okadigbo in June but this failed when Okadigbo removed the Mace from his office and hid it away. His friends later confided to the media that he had told them he had placed the Mace under the guard of a “seven- foot python”! As a parting shot, the man who headed the Senate investigation, Senator Kuta, told a radio station that the real reason Obasanjo wanted to stick the knife in Okadigbo’s back was that during the election campaign last year Obasanjo had given Okadigbo money to be distributed to election campaigners in Okadigbo’s aastern region, but that only a fraction of the money had reached them. Well, well, what did the Owelle, Azikiwe, say? If Okadigbo hadn’t respected one former president (Zik), why would he respect another (Obasanjo)? And thereby hangs a tale.