Priti Patel: The antics of a jaded lobbyist

A backbencher in the British Parliament, Priti Patel, representing Witham, a small English town of slightly over 25,000 people, has of late been trending in Nigeria. This was after the 46-year-old former Secretary of State for International Development decided to leave her comfort zone in Westminster to take up arms against the Nigerian government. Her piece […]

A backbencher in the British Parliament, Priti Patel, representing Witham, a small English town of slightly over 25,000 people, has of late been trending in Nigeria.

This was after the 46-year-old former Secretary of State for International Development decided to leave her comfort zone in Westminster to take up arms against the Nigerian government.

Her piece for City AM, a free newspaper in the UK titled: “If Nigeria wants to take part in global markets, it must shape up and honour its obligations”, has since gone viral.

In the Op-Ed, Patel left no one in doubt that she was lobbying for Process and Industrial Development (P&ID), a firm registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Island.

But the UK Parliamentarian also made a futile effort to shield her interest by playing up some of the false narratives that the opposition Peoples Democratic Party and its supporters have been bandying around to cast President Muhammadu Buhari and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in bad light.

Her main grouse is about a £9bn compensation settlement ‘owed’ by the Nigerian government to her “clients” in what many Nigerians believe is a questionable deal.

Patel wrote: “In 2010, P&ID signed a 20-year contract with the Nigerian government to create a new natural gas development refinery, but the project fell through after the Nigerian government reneged on its contractual commitments. Upon taking office, President Buhari promptly cancelled a compensation settlement, and has done his level best to pretend Nigeria’s obligations to P&ID do not exist.

“Since Buhari reneged on this deal, P&ID has undertaken legal efforts to affirm a tribunal award, first decided in London. It also made several attempts in court to force the Nigerian government to respect its obligations.

“The most recent court decision at a London tribunal confirmed that the Nigerian government owes P&ID almost $9bn for the initial breach of contract, loss of income, additional costs, and interests accrued after five years of non-payment.

“However, the Nigerian government has continued to flout international law and convention, and it refuses to respect the various court decisions.”

True to her job description as a lobbyist, the British MP painted President Buhari as a rampaging bull in a china shop, but this, according to government sources, is not as simple and straightforward as she pretends it to be.

She also does not appear to know much about what she is gambling her ‘reputation’ on so soon after she lost her cabinet job for attending unauthorized meetings in Israel, and for not reporting same as convention demands.

Independent checks reveal that P&ID signed a contract with the Ministry of Petroleum Resources to drive the Gas Master Plan (GMP) with the NNPC supplying Wet Gas to the company which was to build and operate an Accelerated Gas Development (AGD) project to be located at Adiabo in Odukpani Local Government Area of Cross River State. The gas would then be converted into fuel suitable for power generation.

And although P&ID claimed to have invested $40 million in the project there is nothing on ground to show that the company even acquired any land nor built any structure for the facility.

The other side of it is that Patel is criticizing a government that decided to toe the path of due process on what informed the immediate past administration to approve payment of $850 million a few days to its terminal date, and transfer the payment responsibility to the then incoming Buhari administration in 2015.

The question many are asking is: why is the MP concerned about this particular case?  Can it be that Patel has not learnt her lessons after been burned after similar escapades in Israel and the United States?

She lost her cabinet position when as International Development Secretary in August 2017, Patel went on a trip to Israel on what she described as “private holiday”.

She was later discovered to have held several meetings and discussed official government business which were never brought to the attention of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

An aspect of the visit was that Ms Patel met the Israeli Prime Minister with a donor lobbyist, and failed to declare or admit to the meetings and was subsequently forced to resign in November last year. She had barely spent 16 months on the job before she lost it!

In the aftermath of her exit from the Theresa May cabinet, the Open Democracy website described Patel as someone “in the centre of the UK’s dark money-funded think tank-lobbying industrial complex”.

Now her decision to dabble into Nigeria’s oil industry and politics at such a crucial time is bound to keep tongues wagging on her links to P&ID in spite of going into Parliament with a background in lobbying.

Patel visited Nigeria in August last year as International Development Secretary and there were no reports of her complaining about Buhari’s alleged disregard for the rule of law. Neither did she question the country’s relationship with foreign investors.

She instead spoke glowingly about the Buhari administration, solicited international support for the government and announced an aid package worth £200m over the next four years for Nigeria.

Patel’s points in the City AM article about a selective anti-corruption crusade  is certainly fodder for government opponents. Or could she have been engaged by corrupt elements to sully the rising international profile of President Muhammadu Buhari?

 

Okubanjo, a public affairs analyst sent this piece from Abuja