Smell of the whitewash

It was that as an officer in the same office for many years, he served as the secretary of numerous panels and commissions. Some of them were probably probe panels, so when he was jolted out of retirement last week and asked to head a three-member panel to probe the purchase of two armoured BMW […]

It was that as an officer in the same office for many years, he served as the secretary of numerous panels and commissions. Some of them were probably probe panels, so when he was jolted out of retirement last week and asked to head a three-member panel to probe the purchase of two armoured BMW cars by the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority [NCAA] for the use of Aviation Minister Ms Stella Oduah, it must have sounded like familiar territory.
Or is it? For a man who could smell public service wrong doing from a mile away, his latest appointment to a probe panel must look odd in several important respects to Isa Bello Sali. The first oddity is the timing. Even though news of the BMW purchases broke a week earlier and it made front page news in the online media and all national newspapers for many days, the president set up this panel only a day before he was to depart for a working and pilgrimage visit to Israel. A man who is about to embark on pilgrimage may have a slightly distorted picture of this world.
Three men were asked to conduct the probe. Apart from Sali who is the chairman, the others are National Security Adviser Colonel Sambo Dasuki and Air Vice Marshal Dik Iruenebere. There were only two cars involved in this matter, so why do you need three men to conduct a probe? The president would also do well to add a woman. In countries where trials are held by jury, the principle is that a person should be tried by a jury of his own peers. This isn’t a trial properly speaking but it sure looks like one, so a woman is needed on the panel because she is more likely to see things Ms Oduah’s way.
The Presidency said that the committee has two weeks within which to submit its report. Yet, even as the announcement was being made, Minister Oduah left in the president’s advance team for Israel. Committee member Col. Dasuki also left with the president for Israel so it is doubtful if the committee can begin, much less conclude, its work in two weeks.
There is mounting evidence to suggest that the president does not think carefully before he sets deadlines for committee work. When he first set up the Okorounmu committee to advise him on the national conference, he said it will do the work in a month. The day he inaugurated it, he increased this to six weeks. Chances are that even six weeks will not be enough because the committee has embarked on a nation-wide tour.
An important question to ask here is, since when did Oga Jonathan need a probe panel before he sacked a minister? In June last year when he removed Defence Minister Dr. Bello Haliru Mohamed together with National Security Adviser General Andrew Owoye Azazi, there was no probe panel even though the issue at hand [the Boko Haram insurgency] was a thousand times more complex than the purchase of two armoured cars.
Three months later, Jonathan removed the Power Minister Prof Bath Nnaji. Media reports at the time said Nnaji was removed due to a conflict of interest situation before his firm was bidding for the Enugu disco. Yet there was no probe panel, even though bidding for a disco is more intricate business than buying two cars off the Coscharis shelves.  
Last August, the president also removed Youth Development Minister Barrister Inuwa Abdulkadir. His spokesman later said the minister was removed because he mishandled an assignment. The assignment in question was the rancorous National Youth Council of Nigeria elections in Makurdi, which government officials rigged. How did the president know it was mishandled since he didn’t set up a probe panel? Two weeks later, Jonathan sacked nine ministers from the cabinet. No probe panel was ever set up to investigate those ministers as far as the public knows.
If you are in Isa Bello Sali’s shoes, you must therefore wonder, why the change in procedure when it comes to Ms Oduah? President Jonathan recently said he underwent a change of mind with respect to the national conference, which he all along opposed. But why did he change his mind about the way ministers are sacked? Even in the most matured societies, a minister who finds herself embroiled in scandal is usually sacked or she offers to resign in order to relieve the president of pressure and prevent a diversion of attention for the government. This is done even if subsequent investigation exonerates the minister. Government’s time and attention is more important.  
What is the president’s body language with respect to what he wants in this matter? This point must puzzle the probe panel chairman. Jonathan allowed Ms Oduah to be on his entourage to Israel. Why didn’t he tell her to stay at home and face the panel that he asked to probe her? Apart from his own panel, the House Aviation Committee also has an on-going probe. They marched out the permanent secretary who went to represent Ms Oduah and they threatened to issue a warrant for her arrest unless she personally appears before the committee tomorrow. Why should the president risk such embarrassment? Why can’t he tell the minister to quit the Israel tour and go face the House panel lest they think he is shielding her?
Now, Alhaji Isa Bello Sali knows too well that whenever a serious probe is underway, the officer concerned is suspended from his duties in order to allow an unfettered investigation. With the minister sitting pretty at her desk, access to files could be tricky. Officials of the aviation ministry and its agencies may not be forthcoming with information with their boss still in place. In any case, Nigerian civil servants have learnt the art of survival the hard way. They have by now read the president’s body language and could see that Ms Oduah is likely to go scot free. Why should anyone risk being in her bad books, given her reputation as a woman of steel?
Or was the Sali panel appointed merely to take the wind out of the House investigation’s sails? The House probe is being conducted in public and it has already brought out a welter of revelations. The president’s own panel wouldn’t sit in public. It will sit behind closed doors, sip coffee, pore over files, and interview Ms Oduah and some other officials. It will then turn in a report which the president may sit on for days or weeks before he acts on it, if he ever does. He will be hoping all the while that the media will move on to another issue and forget about this one.
Otherwise the president could have done this investigation himself in less than ten minutes. All he had to do was to invite the minister to his office, ask her to bring the car purchase file and then ask her a few questions. While the minister will play cat and mouse games with every probe panel, she cannot do so with the president and cannot withhold papers from him.  
Isa Bello Sali will also remember the very large number of committee reports and probe panel findings that have gathered dust on the shelves of the Cabinet Office in the last four or five decades. Nigerian rulers appoint probe panels when they have no intention of dealing with a recalcitrant official. One of the most notorious panels in this regard was President Shehu Shagari’s Presidential Committee to Determine the Nationality of Shugaba Darman, after the Borno State House of Assembly majority leader had been bundled off to Chad.
I am beginning to smell slaked lime and chalk. Someone’s doing a whitewash here.