By Michael Attah

Three weeks today; precisely, it’s more than three clear weeks, after the House of Representatives gave its verdict of a clean bill of health to the management of the North East Development Commission (NEDC), over alleged financial heist at the commission involving a whopping sum of N100 billion.

Surprisingly, but not unexpected, the Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and its allied vuvuzelas who led the defamatory assaults are silent. They unconscionably blew the false alarm bordering on spurious, mendacious, politically -motivated and malicious allegations on the commission’s management.

But the CSOs have been humbled with the House’s exonerative verdict on the commission and so, have now chosen the wise path in the wisdom of “silence is golden.” Had the verdict turned against the NEDC management, the fury of hell would not have contained their loud rantings.

The NEDC’s management led by the Managing Director, Alhaji Mohammed Goni Alkali, a stickler to standards, anti-corruption czar, a renowned evangelist of transparency and accountability in public service was alarmed and astonished with the bogus allegations raised against him and members of the NEDC management team in July 2020. But he was unperturbed!

As a first reaction to the spurious garbage spilled by an obscure group, North East Vanguard for Good Governance (NEVGG), Alkali, an astute public administrator and world-class manager of human and material resources, retorted calmly, “Nobody gave us up to N100 billion; I really don’t know how they got that figure.” Armed with this truth and confidence in his leadership of the commission, Alkali was ever willing to appear before the National Assembly Committee to respond to the allegations and redeem the image of the commission from politically-induced brickbats.

But the figure of N100 billion, within span of barely a year, alleged on Alkali by his adversaries, who accused him of corrupt practices was an amount too huge to be ignored by anybody. A synopsis of the allegations fingered Alkali in embezzlement, high handedness, abuse of office, over inflation of contracts, awards of non-existent contracts, massive contract splitting and flagrant disregard for due process or procurement laws in the award of contracts among others. So, the news went viral instantaneously.

Recount that President Muhammadu Buhari had signed the “Northeast Development Commission Bill” into law in October 2017, as a replacement for other existing support initiatives such as the Presidential Initiative on Northeast and the Victims Support Fund for victims of insurgency in the Northeast. The NEDC board of management was later inaugurated in May 2019, with Alhaji Mohammed Goni Alkali as the Managing Director.

But early in July 2020, a year later, NEVGG generated, fabricated, and publicized damaging allegations against the NEDC management and bluntly called for the sack of the NEDC boss and its management for the abuse of the funds voted for the settlement, rehabilitation and reconstruction of the Northeast region ravaged by Boko Haram terrorists.

And the allegations whirled instantly because it coincided with the frenzy of the probe of the over N1trillion massive and multi-layered financial sleazes at the management of NDDC, another commission with a mandate to spearhead infrastructural development in the Niger Delta region.

Therefore, the House of Representatives picked up the gauntlet to investigate the alleged financial heist, two weeks later in the same month of July 2020. The issue was brought before the House in a motion by the Minority Leader, Hon.Ndudi Elumelu and it was unanimously adopted. The House mandated its Committees on Finance, Procurement and the NEDC to meticulously investigate these allegations and submit its findings to the Green Chamber, thus setting the stage for the investigation of the commission.

But the truth deliberately undermined by the petitioners ‘was that when the management of the NEDC commenced operations in 2019 upon inauguration, the released take-off grant was N10 billion only, though N45 billion was the entire sum budgeted for the commission in 2019. Other piecemeal releases later cumulatively pegged the total figure released to the NEDC at N25 billion in the 2019 fiscal year. And for the 2020 budget, fresh funds had not been released to the commission at the time the allegations were raised and mainly due to the exigencies of Covid-19 pandemic.

Therefore, the figure of N100 billion bandied as allegedly embezzled sounded hollow and betrayed the concealed intention of the petitioners as conspiracists after the malicious persecution of Alhaji Mohammed Goni Alkali and the management of NEDC. So, the antagonists of Alkali only stirred the honest nest with such damning frivolities for selfish reasons.

But come to think of it, a peep into the books of account of the commission displays an impressive adherence to every financial management, disbursement and procurement law, which Alkali was accused of violating flagrantly. The attacks on his person were carefully crafted.

For instance, Alkali was alleged to have conspired with the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Hajia Sadiya Umar-Farouk to withdraw and squander N5 billion for the procurement of vehicles for the military without approval of the NEDC board. But the decision to support the military operations in Northeast did not emanate from the NEDC management, but it came from recommendations of a communique of a Security Summit of the relevant stakeholders in Maiduguri, which pressed on the NEDC to support logistics for the Military.

And the NEDC board too was duly informed and gave its nod; but the amount expended for the purchase of vehicles was less than N5 billion as alleged. But since it was over the approval limits of the commission, due process was adhered, as the matter was referred to the ministerial tender’s board to the Bureau for Public Procurement. And advice was sought in the process and the approval granted.

Interestingly too, the probe established nowhere where Alkali neither committed funds of the commission to acquire landed properties in Abuja, Kaduna or Maiduguri nor paid himself monthly salaries and allowances amounting to N8.5 million, without recourse to the Salaries and Wages Commission as alleged by the petitioners. Thus, the otherwise serious investigation of the NEDC management over misappropriated N100 billion and abuse of procurement laws morphed into a comic show.

In the NASS correspondence with ref. No; NASS/CAN/35/Vol.1/153, dated July 8, 2021, to the NEDC Managing Director, it communicated the decisions of the House of Representatives resolutions on the probe of the alleged misappropriation of 100 billion as follows; (a) Commend the North East Development Commission for their due diligence in the execution of the projects; and also, directed the management to hasten to utilize other released, but unspent funds in the commission’s custody.

In clear terms, the House of Representatives found out the truth and absolved the NEDC Managing Director, Alhaji Mohammed Goni Alkali and his management team of any complicity in the handling of the commission’s finances. Therefore, the NEDC under the leadership of Alkali remains a doyen of accountability and transparency in the execution of projects, as it seeks to ameliorate the sufferings and pains of people of the Northeast region devastated by more than 10 years of Boko Haram insurgency.

Attah is a legislative staff at the National Assembly and wrote this piece from Abuja.

By Israel Abiodun

Like a half-drunk arousing from a stupor, Amnesty International is finally exiting a self-inflicted reverie by returning to the trenches against the Nigerian state and the institutions entrusted with maintaining the country’s sovereignty, law enforcement and military agencies. It is an assignment at which it failed in the past and has apparently also failed in this instance even before it has properly relaunched itself.

The international human rights monitoring non-governmental organization was apparently dazed by a quick series of events: the former service chiefs left office on excellent notes and got higher national assignments contrary to its expected outcome from the campaign of calumny against them during their tenure; the legacy of these former service chiefs was sustained by their successors, which means terrorists that are Amnesty International’s clients continued to receive heavy punishment at the hands of government forces; and against the lies told to block Nigeria from acquiring military hardware, the country successfully bought attack aircrafts that has further tipped the equation against terrorists.

Caught out in this manner, the folks at Amnesty International, possibly hard pressed for a strategy to roll back the progress recorded by the government against the terrorists it has always been sympathetic to, the NGO dug up its old style book and resorted to a worn tactic of presenting Nigeria’s military and law enforcement organizations as being tools in the hands of a government it has done everything to cast as repressive and murderous against the citizens.

A first manifestation of this was the publication of its trademark hasty report titled “Nigeria: At least 115 people killed by security forces in four months in country’s Southeast”. The story touted that ‘“The evidence gathered by Amnesty International paints a damning picture of ruthless excessive force by Nigerian security forces in Imo, Anambra and Abia states,” said Osai Ojigho, Country Director at Amnesty International.’

That report, scanty on facts and heavy on conjectures, tenuously attempted to present all those in the figures it cited as innocent. The impression it created was that member of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a designated terrorist organization, and its militant wing, the Eastern Security Network (ESN), were innocent of the carnage they claimed responsibility for in the southeast. Perhaps Amnesty International has a database of all IPOB/ESN members against which it was able to verify the identities of the casualties from the security operations against terrorists in the region and that it was also able to crosscheck its database about the membership of the 500 persons it reported as arrested.

It used the testimony of two persons, with a mix of faceless and nameless persons thrown in, as a basis for establishing the innocence of the people that were unfortunately killed or arrested in these operations. This alone is reason to be suspicious of whatever figures Amnesty International throws around – a population sample that is statistically flawed and conclusions that are overly reliant on anecdotal reckonings that it makes no efforts to substantiate.

What should set the alarm bells tolling for any conscientious Nigeria, however, is this organization’s subtle but insidious pitching of citizens against each other by creating the impression that the terrorists, their innocent victims, and the government forces that are protecting innocent citizens from terrorists are different breeds of humans that should be accorded different level of human rights. The group overly focused on the killing and arrest of suspected terrorists while glossing over other fundamentals.

Its reports said _”Nigeria’s government has responded with a heavy hand to killings and violence widely attributed to the armed group calling itself Eastern Security Network (ESN), the armed wing of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a pro-Biafra movement. According to government officials, the ESN killed dozens of security operatives and attacked at least ten public buildings, including prisons and police stations, from January to June. In response, security forces comprising military, police, and Department of State Services (DSS) have killed dozens of gunmen, as well as civilians, where attacks have been committed.”_

Thus, Amnesty International accused the government of responding to terrorist acts “with a heavy hand” while it glossed over the fact that those killed were mostly during gunfights that ensued when they attacked security formations in the southeast. It trivialized that civilian that refused to subscribe to IPOB/ESN’s preference for violence were summarily executed by these terrorists in the goriest manner. It equally attempted to be clever by half when it admitted that “the ESN killed dozens of security operatives and attacked at least ten public buildings, including prisons and police stations, from January to June” yet was critical of the response to these crimes. Can Amnesty International name one country that would allow crimes of this magnitude against the state and citizens to be treated with kids’ gloves?

In what could possibly be the most perverted instance of revisionism recorded in the year 2021, Amnesty International flippantly dismissed the casualty on government side as “dozens of security operatives”. For the avoidance of doubt, The Brigade Commander of 34 Artillery Brigade, Obinze, Owerri, Imo State, Brig. Gen. Raymond Utsaha reported that IPOB/ESN “gunmen had killed 78 police officers, 38 army officers, five Naval officers, seven Air Force officers, 15 Nigeria Security and Civil Defence officers, 31 community policing members and over 100 innocent citizens in the five states of the South-East region since the unrest (January to the first week of June 2021).” Who should Nigeria hold responsible for these atrocities? Would the criminals, bold enough to commit these kinds of atrocities, allow themselves to be taken in without a fight or alive for that matter?

The reality, irrespective of the spin by Amnesty International, is that the more than 262 people that IPOB/ESN killed under the franchise of “unknown gunmen” were Nigerians, they had names and identities with families and loved ones that have remained in mourning. It is appalling that this so-called human rights NGO has behaved in a manner that confirms that it places terrorists above these deceased Nigerians in terms of value and the need to safeguard their lives. It is an irresponsible act of misplacing human right monitoring and reporting that the entire world should rise and condemn.

Of greater concern is the long-term damage that Amnesty international is attempting to inflict with the questionable report, as it has done in the past. Its mainstream and social media circuits have already picked up this piece of trash without interrogation and are running with it to perpetrate the fable of “a repressive government” while proxy and franchise NGOs are already keening on the report in the hope of hobbling the government to give free reign to IPOB/ESN’s desired reign of terror. A whole lot of pseudo activists, who are in the real sense opposition politicians and crises entrepreneurs, are already running all over the place as end users of Amnesty International’s poisoned chalice.

It is thus pertinent to caution those celebrating the Amnesty International’s report that there is absolute need for circumspection. The report from this organization, like many before it, is not meant to serve the interest of Nigeria. Rather, it is geared as part of a larger effort to promote chaos in the country by petrifying personnel of law enforcement agency into not being willing to fight terrorism so that terrorists can gain the upper hand and consequently achieve the breakup of Nigeria: by now it should be clear to all that Amnesty International has routed for Boko Haram/ISWAP to form an Islamic (Sharia) republic in the northeast of the country, IPOB/ESN in the southeast and who knows what else they will back in other parts of the country while exploiting ethno-sectarian schisms that were never there prior to its deep state operation in Nigeria.

Let us all agreed that Amnesty International’s human rights campaign in Nigeria is misplaced to the extent that it has deployed its work for diabolical purposes that are against the interest of Nigeria. We should tell this organization to cease and desist so that government forces can restore normalcy in our security situation.

Abiodun wrote this piece from Ibadan.

By Ernest Adadu

Certain arguments are really silly, by its immaturity, dulled by its fluid contents, meaningless and devalued by the writer’s creative disingenuousness. It’s the subject of the rejoinder as captioned in the heading of the analysis published on July 31, 2021, concerning the NYSC scheme. Perhaps still, some analyses are a bit of unbridled prose obscenities and the article in question fits into its finest category.

Foremostly, my heartfelt condolences to the Federal Government , the NYSC and the parents of the Batch “B” 2021 corps members whose journey in life was guillotined by a fatal auto crash near Abuja enroute their orientation camp destination in Katsina state. May their souls rest in perfect peace, amen!

Admittedly, it is too early to drag the souls of these demised corps members into any national discourse, hence their remains have not even been committed to mother earth yet. But an author , opened his excessively lengthy piece on the latest corps members who passed unto eternal glory in their quest to serve our fatherland in the mandatory one-year NYSC scheme for Nigerian graduates.

Therefore, the discussion centers around it because the analyst challenged the ultimate power of life and death which only resides in the discretion and determination of God Almighty. It is at the core of the doctrines of virtually all religions.

Even one of the most famed English dirgic poets, Donne John never secured an answer to the mystery of death, reflective in the series of rhetoric questions in his poems. He resigned to his fate and simply exclaimed in nostalgic pains for loss of beloved ones as; “death, thou are wicked!”

Most significant lessons on issues of life, destiny and death have been mindlessly punctured by the writer’s ferocious reference to the unfortunate power of death as it concerns the corps members in an auto crash. Thereafter, he amused and sloppily juxtaposed reasons why the NYSC is no longer relevant in the light of Nigeria’s current challenges of insecurities.

But it is difficult to pin his mindset based on the disjointed coordination of his arguments and thought-process. When one thinks, he is arguing for the cancellation of the NYSC; he also projects his preference for its suspension in another breath. Or when he is toed as someone who thinks the NYSC has lost its relevance completely, he stages back in another paragraph eulogizing the scheme to high heavens.

And the moment one thinks the analyst’s displeasure with the NYSC is because corps members are targets of kidnaps or eliminations by insane forces in Northern Nigeria, he again recounts similar experiences in the Southern part of the country or elsewhere. And the writer’s greatest dilemma is whether to blame the Federal Government or the NYSC management or parents for the vulnerability of serving corps or that the NYSC is no more relevant because even after the service year, those who pass through the scheme remain jobless for years.

Such internal confusion flowing from the ink of a pen on a piece of paper could be quite tragic. But on the writer’s campaign centered on, “Corps members and the alluvion of mishaps,’ insultingly tempered with Voltaire’s prime wisdom; which describes the phenomenon as, “Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.”

It is implausible and infantile reasoning that corp members who meet untimely death, through auto crash, terrorism, banditry, armed robbery, communal clashes and other such security realities in the course of service to fatherland should be enough reason to canvass for the suspension or scrap of the NYSC scheme. Is the writer aware kidnappers or bandits or terrorists are now targeting the abduction of secondary school students all over the Northern part of the country? Should Nigeria now ban secondary education as a solution to it? It sounds like tales by moonlight.

And at a point, the writer resonated that there is no cause for corps members to be posted to serve in very distant places from their homes. Such suggestion defeats the cardinal objectives of the NYSC, designed to stimulate a greater and profound understanding of the ethnic, linguistic, religious, and socio- cultural components of Nigeria by youths.

So, of what essence should anyone think, corps members should keep rotating within their known communities? The writer’s outburst that privileged parents either cause the exemption of their children from service or influence their postings to special/safety areas is mere conjecture and hallucinatory imagination.

Besides this reason, which village or community in Nigeria has no mix of natives from other places? Is it the North or South? Do they appear to domicile in such communities protected by charms or talisman? The Federal government has MDA’s which have state offices in almost all the states. So, when public servants are posted to work, for instance, in Federal Secretariats or agencies located in states of the federation, do they reject the transfers and resign from such employments on account that they might meet death in such locations?

There is really no cogent reason to bellyache over any unforeseen misfortunes because people believe in the words of Douglas Adams who once said; “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

But the writer has forgotten that with the spate of insecurities in the country, the NYSC especially under its present management led by the Director-General, Brigadier General Shuaibu Ibrahim goes to extreme limits to secure the safety of corps members serving in every community. So, it is safe to say, anything that happens to a corps member in such locations could have happened to them even in their parents’ abodes as part of their fate.

That’s the unpredictable work of destiny. Nigerians must imbibe the wisdom of Washington Irving, who reasoned that “Great minds have purpose, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise above them. “Indubitably, the analyst is a poor harvester of events around him. Death is an inevitable end to all mankind and meets anyone wherever it wishes.

The author of the slovenly piece smacks as one of the latest recruits into the camp of campaigners and activists in the National Assembly (NASS) who are hellbent on the scrapping of the NYSC. It is learnt from reliable sources that some members of NASS have committed various infractions over the NYSC certificates they flaunt. Most of them are afraid of being caught like others, and disgraced out of their plomb positions. Consequently, they have passed a verdict of “death sentence” against the continued existence of the scheme and so, recruited pen warmongers for the campaigners.

In the House of Representatives earlier in the year, Hon. Awaji-Inimbel Abiante (PDP Rivers State), led the assault on Nigerians by sponsoring a proposed bill to repeal the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) Act, but it crashed on arrival. The senseless reasons the lawmakers adduced for the undesirability of the NYSC scheme, akin to the ones advanced by writer of the odious piece were flushed down the drain together with their intentions. It is needless to resurrect it in any form or guise!

Like most Nigerians argued earlier in favour of the NYSC, the gains outweigh the temporary hiccups faced by the scheme. The NYSC Director General has reinvigorated the previously dead training and investments ventures of the scheme. He has revitalized the NYSC’s Skills Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development Programme (SAED), which has been of tremendous assistance to young and determined Nigerians in the post service years.

Multiple Nigerian youths who have passed through SAED at the orientation camp, coupled with personal savings in the course of their service year are proud owners of private businesses and investments throughout the country. These are the relics and legacies of the NYSC today. They are self-reliant, independent and employers of labour and not employees.

Those waiting for white-collar jobs can continue to hope, until the day God answers their prayers, while their peers make steady progress in life through the support of NYSC. Haruki Murakami has counselled the confused analyst with this memorable wit; “That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes,” because like Robert Frost intoned, “In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”

Adadu wrote this piece from Gwarimpa, Abuja.