by Chukwuma Soludo
Although there is no single definition
of fraud, the online definitions that come to mind as one reads Nasir
el-Rufai’s book (The Accidental Public Servant) is “fraud as course of
deception, an intentional concealment, omission, or perversion of
truth”, or “an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage
another individual”. I know el-Rufai as a brilliant fellow and I
certainly expected a definitive book. His stated objective was to “tell
the story of my public service years…” but it turned out a very bad
example of how to write a memoir. It is more of wild concoctions and
commentaries on imagined events outside of his “public service years”.
As I read parts of the book that relate to things that I should know
about, I shook my head in disbelief. I could not believe that el-Rufai
could descend so low. While I will surely correct many of his wrong
narratives in my book, I thought I have a duty to make a preliminary
response – for public records!
Contrary to his narrative, most of us in
government knew that el-Rufai desperately wanted to succeed President
Olusegun Obasanjo as president. He plotted and schemed, destroying
anyone perceived to be potentially in his way. Obasanjo scorned him; the
scheme through the PDP Reform Forum failed; and with the bid to replace
Major General Muhammadu Buhari in Congress for Progressive Change (CPC)
still a work in progress, it is understandable that the bitterness
would find succour in a book to smear and destroy any known potential
threat. The only good person in the whole book is el-Rufai, and perhaps
also my dear sister, Oby Ezekwesili. For him, it is either that Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala was power hungry or that “Charles was not grateful”. We
understand his motives, but for him to also fabricate stories about
Obasanjo, Atiku Abubakar, and Mallam Nuhu Ribadu the way he did (the
three persons that literally made him tick in government) speaks
volumes. What a very grateful person! My people have a proverb that when
a foolish and disrespectful child utters abomination before his elders,
he beats his chest that he has exhibited uncommon courage.
The book is grossly dishonest. It is
amusing to read the purported conversations he had with President
Obasanjo on the third term bid. One reads almost two or three pages as
quotes from the conversation and most parts of the book are replete with
similar long quotes of purported conversations (all in inverted
commas). This tactic was deceptively employed to give the impression of
authenticity to the claims of such conversations. Surely, it is
impossible to report the proceedings of a meeting or conversation
verbatim after the meeting. It would therefore mean either that he was
tape-recording every private conversation he had with people or that he
simply fabricated those long quotes. If he cannot produce the tape
recordings of those conversations (which I believe he doesn’t have), he
should be honest enough to admit that he made up those stories/quotes.
It is too cheap of him to fabricate those quotes and seek to exploit the
gullibility of the reading public to damage other people.
I was amused by el-Rufai’s disingenuous
attempt to frame stories about the Economic Management Team, which he
forced himself upon and probably destroyed. As pertains to me, he lied
all the way in an attempt to concoct a mischievous narrative or plot. He
calls Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala “Ngozi”. I call her “Madam”. He tells a fairy
tale of how I was a student or protégé of Ngozi’s father. Sorry
el-Rufai, the respected Prof. Okonjo had left University of Nigeria,
Nsukka (UNN) before I became a student, and our paths did not cross
until the mid-1990s (while my Ph.D was in 1989). If you even called
Ngozi on the phone, she would have confirmed to you that she never got
any consulting contract for me at the World Bank or any multilateral
institution as you claimed. If you cared for the facts, you would have
known that I began to interact with Ngozi in late 1999, in the fourth
month of my 18-month consulting assignment at the World Bank (an
assignment to which I was nominated by three pan-African Institutions –
ADB, UNECA, and AERC – for the project on “Can Africa Claim the 21st
Century”). You don’t lie about matters that have records.
For your information el-Rufai, before I
met anyone of you at the original Economic Management Team, I had (for a
decade) lived in Ethiopia, United Kingdom, and United States of America
(USA) and traveled to 45 other countries as an itinerant scholar and
consultant; worked at the United Nations; been to Oxford, Cambridge and
Warwick Universities; was a visiting professor at Swarthmore, USA; and
consultant to 18 international organisations including the World Bank,
IMF, OECD, EU, ADB, various UN agencies, etc. I have been consultant to
different departments of the World Bank at different times, including
being on the Chief Economist Advisory Council (CEAC) for the period 2005
– 2012 and no Nigerian had anything to do with any of them. I spent 19
months at the Brookings Institution, USA (January 1991 – July 1992; and
three months in 1998) but according to el-Rufai, I went to Brookings
after a consulting job at the World Bank (which would then mean ‘after
2000’?). According to el-Rufai, I became Governor of Central Bank of
Nigeria (CBN) in “mid 2005” instead of May 2004. He manufactures both
the facts as well as the comments.
By el-Rufai’s own account in the book,
the approval to embark on the demolition of properties in Abuja was
obtained on 30th August, 2003. I state (and challenge him to prove
otherwise) that Ngozi was no longer staying at Bolingo Hotel by the time
he started his demolition programme. How can you then fabricate a story
that we met at her suite in Bolingo Hotel and also fabricate a
purported quotation of what I told you, which among other things,
referred to your demolition programme? I thought you were smart enough
el-Rufai to at least lie consistently. Is this not fool proof that you
made up all the quotations in the book?
As at the last count, no less than 15
persons claimed to have recommended me as Chief Economic Adviser or
Central Bank Governor. My simple response to all is: thank you! Thank
you also el-Rufai if indeed you played the role I have just read from
your book that you played in my appointment as Chief Economic Adviser.
Of course, President Obasanjo is still alive and several of the actors
are also alive. In my own memoir, I will detail how I joined President
Obasanjo’s government. I have also heard fantastic claims of some people
that they literally appointed me governor of CBN. In a recent chat with
President Obasanjo, he for the umpteenth time insisted that nobody can
ever claim to have advised him to appoint me as governor of CBN. He
reminded me that even I did not know—which is a fact!
El-Rufai also conveniently forgot that
he first met me in late 2000 when I came from the US to help the federal
government prepare for the IMF Article IV consultations and also train
senior staff of CBN, Ministry of Finance and National Planning on the
macroeconomic and technical computations involved (paid for by USAID).
el-Rufai chose to forget that he pleaded for my technical assistance to
Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) as a consultant but I told him I was
too busy with my international assignments. I rather offered to attend
any of his privatisation committee meetings anytime I was in the country
and to offer my services free of charge. He forgot that I wrote several
technical notes to help him succeed, including being the sole author of
the initial draft “Anti-trust and Competition Policy” – all free of
charge!
El-Rufai seemed unhappy that I gave
every credit of our achievement to President Obasanjo. Well, I am
informed enough to know that in a presidential system of government,
only the president is elected with the mandate to govern and every
appointed person in the executive branch has a delegated responsibility
to assist him. Only in Nigeria would you see a minister or appointed
official write books to take credit for achievements in office. As
governor of the central bank, I made it clear that I received every
award or recognition on behalf of the president. I have no apologies for
that.
Interestingly, el-Rufai tells the story
of the great achievements of President Obasanjo in restoring the Abuja
masterplan, using him as an assistant. I thank him for at least
acknowledging that the idea to restore the masterplan was Obasanjo’s and
that he drove it all the way. What he did not tell is the story of how
el-Rufai’s vindictiveness almost ruined the exercise as well as the
monumental fraud associated with it. This is for another day!
Of course, el-Rufai could not hide his
opposition to the banking sector consolidation. Unfortunately as we say
in my place, you cannot cover the moon with your palms. You may not like
Soludo or Obasanjo, but in the last 27 years, there are two fundamental
structural transformations of the Nigerian economy that have taken
place – the telecommunications revolution, and the banking sector
revolution (consolidation). Ours was not a mere reform, it was a
revolution! Nigeria’s only transnational corporations were built in
three years.
We put two Nigerian banks in the top 300
banks in the world and they remain there, and nine others in the top
1,000 (there was none before my tenure). The Nigerian private sector as
we know it today (especially the new economy in oil and gas and emerging
big businesses) largely owes its wealth to our revolution. The world
acknowledges that without our foresight and courage, the Nigerian
financial system and economy would have collapsed during the global
financial crisis. We developed a robust, transparent and no-nonsense
regulatory and supervisory regime before the global crisis, and left
behind one of the strongest banking systems that was globally rated in
the same league as those of Israel, India, China, and Russia. You chose
to forget that we revoked the licenses of 14 banks in one day
(unprecedented in our history), including banks owned by my friends.
This is a story for another day!
The story of how we built the world’s
fastest growing financial system and Nigeria’s largest transnational
corporations in three years, rescued the entire system from collapse
despite the unprecedented four shocks that buffeted the system during
the global crisis, on course to fully restructure the few ailing banks
before the end of 2009 with or without a penny from government; and
designed the comprehensive roadmap for sustainability and growth (under
FSS 2020) is told in my book. Our Financial System Strategy (FSS 2020)
remains the roadmap till date. Sorry el-Rufai, there is little you can
do about this record. Even with ten 234NEXT newspapers, and 20 other
books, you cannot re-write history!
Since el-Rufai takes pleasure in
reporting what ordinarily should be private conversations, let me also
take the liberty to report that he admitted to me on April 28, 2013 that
what he wrote about me were the “impressions” he was given. That for me
summed it up. My advice el-Rufai, is that you don’t collect some hair
dressing salon gossip, hearsay, ‘impressions’, and wild imaginations –
all intentionally designed to damage others, and bind them into a book
without crosschecking the facts. That is intellectual fraud!
- This Best Outside Opinion was written by Chukwuma Soludo
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