Vice President Yemi Osinbajo on Monday said corruption and lack of transparency among other factors were responsible for poor contract negotiations in Nigeria. He spoke on at a two day capacity building workshop for negotiators.
The workshop, organised by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) in Abuja, sought to “help Nigeria improve its terms of engagement with the rest of the world” in an effort at stemming illicit financial flows.
The Vice President cited the P&ID case and the Strategic Alliance Contract case where Nigeria stands the risk of losing billions of dollars due to poor and shrewd negotiations of the contracts. He called for proper negotiations by Nigeria in the ongoing discussion on climate change which, he said, should put into consideration Nigeria’s peculiar economic situation and the needs of the citizens.
Yes, Osinbajo hit the nail right on its head. He was not the first to say it but the fact that it came from the nation’s number two man made it doubly weighty. And so everyone should listen well. Corruption has tarred every hand involved in negotiating contracts for our government. Not that there are no expert legal draughtsmen to draft contract documents or defence lawyers to stand for the government in court. In fact, there is a surfeit of either. Take the case cited by Vice President Osinbajo.
P&ID is asking the Nigerian government to pay it a breach of contract fee of over 9 billion dollars. The contract was for the building of a gas plant in Calabar that would turn natural gas into power to feed the nation’s grid. The NNPC was to supply the gas while the firm would get payment in the form of gas by products.
As it turned out, the project failed. P&ID, with the help of some corrupt NNPC officials, managed to get a London court to award $9bn in damages against Nigeria. That was in 2012. However, the present Buhari government appealed that decision in 2019 and a higher court in London ruled that Nigeria had been wrongly treated and ordered a fresh hearing of the case.
It is not only that some NNPC top shots messed up their nation, a Lagos lawyer the government had hired to defend it in the first trial abandoned the defence halfway. He claimed he did not receive support from the very government that put him on the job. How ridiculous! In deed, the second London court that has now ordered a retrial blamed the Nigerian lawyer for doing a poor job of defending his client, thereby helping P&ID to obtain a fraudulent damages award.
The P&ID case is just one of several in which Nigeria has been done in by its corrupt citizens both abroad and at home. It has been said that corruption is a thriving business in Nigeria, leading President Buhari to warn: “If we don’t kill corruption, corruption will kill us”. But how to kill this menacing octopus is proving to be Herculean because corruption has proved that it can fight back.
