Wednesday
September 23, 2009 |
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One easy way to describe James Onanefe
Ibori is that he is a former governor of Delta State. It is also the
least interesting way to describe the astonishing career of a man who
mirrors much of what is wrong with Nigeria.
Here’s a more interesting fact about Mr. Ibori: Long before he became
governor, he’d been convicted twice for crimes committed in Britain. In
1991, he and his then girlfriend (and now wife), Theresa Nakanda, were
found guilty of theft. Mr. Ibori was fined 300 pounds sterling and
ordered to pay another 450 pounds sterling as cost. A year later, Mr.
Ibori was convicted again, this time for handling a stolen credit card.
Here’s another, even weightier, narrative: In 1993, during the reign of
bespectacled Sani Abacha, somebody wired more than a million dollars
into Ibori’s account in the US. That transaction drew the due attention
of American law enforcement officers. Puzzled American officials were
curious to know how a man – that is Ibori – who at the time lived in a
subsidized council flat in London could have come by so much cash. The
US government, suspecting that the money came from one 419 scheme or
another, asked a judge to freeze the account. Ibori explained away the
cash by passing himself off as a consultant, and he produced a letter
from the Abacha regime to back him up.
Listen to yet another tidbit about the man. He and his associates
currently face prosecution in Nigeria and the UK on charges of
laundering billions of naira of public funds during Ibori’s eight years
as governor. Nuhu Ribadu, who ran the Economic and Financial Crimes
Commission until December 2007, has said that Ibori tried to “persuade”
him with – wait for it – $15 million to discontinue the agency’s
prosecution of the former governor on embezzlement charges.
Mr. Ibori looms just as large in the mystery department. On September
28, 1995, the Bwari Upper Area Court convicted a man named James Onanefe
Ibori of negligent conduct and criminal breach of trust. Yet, when two
men from Delta invoked the case in pleading that Ibori be declared
ineligible to serve as governor, the case went all the way to the
Supreme Court and produced a confounding verdict. Nigeria’s highest
bench decided the plaintiffs had not proved that James Onanefe Ibori the
governor was the selfsame James Onanefe Ibori the convict.
Ibori has a hardworking (but luckless) handler in Tony Eluemunor, a
former journalist. Mr. Eluemunor’s unvarying mantra is that his master
is a victim of a carefully choreographed malicious slander. Sadly for
Ibori and his handlers, the repetition of this line has done little to
improve its credibility index. And neither Mr. Eluemunor nor his
principal has come forward either to identify those who are after Saint
James or to convincingly prove the falsity of the many counts of
corruption tagged to Ibori’s person.
If Ibori’s were a simple story of a public official whose greed
overwhelmed his sense of restraint, he would be a commonplace. In the
arena of Nigeria’s gubernatorial politics, too many stealer-governors
love to play in the First Division. They often cart away more than half
of the revenue accruing to their states.
Mr. Ibori’s genius lies in the way he has parlayed his criminal record
into a swaggering performance. His political trajectory has been nothing
short of amazing. From his humble beginnings as a petty thief in London,
this man rose to the commanding heights of Nigerian politics. Nigerians
ought to wonder why such a man – why men with similar pedigrees – are
routinely permitted to rise to leadership.
Nigeria has a case against Ibori in a federal court in Asaba. Yet, that
fact did not stop Umaru Yar’Adua from putting Ibori on an official
delegation to this year’s Beijing Olympics. That fact did not
inconvenience the ruling Peoples Democratic Party which recently
elevated Ibori to the rank of “party elder.” That exaltation made Ibori
a custodian of the party’s mission and exemplar of its deepest mores.
Several of Mr. Ibori’s front companies are on the list of rogue debtors
whose delinquency brought some Nigerian banks to the brink of collapse.
Even so, the former governor enjoys, and flaunts his, open access to Mr.
Yar’Adua. Nobody in Aso Rock has the sense (forget the sense, how about
courage?) to warn that Mr. Yar’Adua’s dalliance with Mr. Ibori, an
ex-convict who happens to be the principal accused in trials on two
continents, sells Nigeria as precisely the kind of crooked country that
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described.
The day Mr. Ibori and his ilk begin to cower, instead of strut the stage
– that day will mark the beginning of a new, salutary ethos.
