Southwark Crown Court, London: If the name sounds familiar in Nigeria, that is probably because it is where former Delta State Governor James Ibori became the face of Nigerian corruption in 2012.
Ibori pleaded guilty to 10 charges of fraud and money-laundering committed during his eight-years tenure as governor and received a 13-year jail sentence.
Fourteen years later, and in the same Courtroom 14 in which the former London Wickes DIY store cashier’s confiscation proceedings were heard, Diezani Alison-Madueke, Nigeria’s former oil minister, was last week acquitted of five counts of accepting bribes and a charge of conspiracy to commit bribery.
Emerging from the court, she offered her gratitude to God. “It has been a hard journey, but I tell you this, God will always do as he will,” she said. “God will be God and God is not a man that he should lie; when he promises you something, he will see it through.”
The former Minister had been seeking God’s intervention for years. “I feel sorry for her,” one Nigerian told The Guardian in Southwark in 2023. “She told me, ‘I need prayers,’ and to ‘please pray for me.’”
Justice is a precious gift, and anytime someone receives it, we should be happy for that person. I join the ex-Minister to acknowledge her gift of grace. But it must be remembered that grace implies an undeserved gift.
Any half-conscious lawyer on the streets of Abuja could have told you that her prosecution in the United Kingdom faced long odds.
Among others, the National Crime Agency had been excluded from the 2015 search of her Abuja home, leaving critical reimbursement evidence potentially seized but never produced in court.
Eleven critical years had elapsed between Diezani’s first arrest and the verdict, and none of the six alleged bribe-givers was charged.
Keep in mind also that the prosecutors did not allege that there was evidence she had awarded contracts to those who should not have had them; they sought only to prove it was “improper” for her to accept benefits from people with interests in government contracts.
Her lead counsel, Jonathan Laidlaw KC of 2 Hare Court, challenged the prosecution’s reliance on EFCC evidence with an ominous warning that will reverberate loudly in Nigeria and may be reused in other courtrooms and among the accountability-conscious: “Either you trust the EFCC, or you don’t!”
And so, Diezani, the queen of the Goodluck Jonathan cabinet, is free: in the UK.
Jonathan, who was ridiculed by Chief Olusegun Obasanjo in a 2014 memoir for five presidents in his administration among whom he, Jonathan, was the weakest, sent a written testimony absolving the suspect.
Only three problems remain:
- First, the US civil forfeiture proceedings in the US in which the Department of Justice in 2023 announced the recovery of $53.1 million in cash plus a promissory note with a $16 million principal value, constituting the net liquidated value of forfeited assets, including luxury real estate in California and New York and the Galactica Star superyacht.
- Second: Nigeria: where the EFCC secured forfeiture from her of more than 80 properties, worth roughly $80 million, alongside $153 million in cash. Diezani is challenging those forfeitures, arguing she was never properly served notice.
- Third: Nigeria’s Crude Oil Swap Programme she superintendedfrom 2010 to 2015, in which the government deployed two overlapping Offshore Processing Agreements. It is estimated that between 2010 and 2014, NNPC channelled into the deals over 352 million barrels of oil worth $35 billion, while shutting out relevant government agencies like the Ministry of Finance, the Department of Petroleum Resources, the Accountant-General, and the Central Bank.
The opaque system would become highly controversial, and in February 2014, then-Central Bank Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi told the National Assembly that approximately $20 billion in oil revenues had not been remitted to the Federation Account between January 2012 and July 2013 alone.
A subsequent January 2012 to July 2013 PwC forensic audit commissioned by Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala left many questions unanswered, but did find that NNPC owed the government at least $1.48 billion in unremitted payments.
A separate audit by the Auditor-General found that NNPC withheld approximately $16.2 billion from crude oil sales in 2014 alone, and that $235.7 million in gas revenues had been transferred to undisclosed escrow accounts.
In case anyone has forgotten, the swap scheme also allegedly provided the direct vehicle for the Aluko-Omokore transactions that is at the heart of the EFCC corruption case.
The Strategic Alliance Agreements awarded to their Atlantic Energy companies, allegedly linked to Diezani, were structured as crude lifting arrangements under this same NNPC subsidiary framework.
In May 2018, the Buhari Presidency accused Diezani, Omokore, and Aluko, and Alison-Madueke of a $3 billion heist.
“In a strategic alliance contract by the NNPC, three people, Jide Omokore, Kola Aluko and former Petroleum Minister, Diezani Allison-Madueke, made away with 3 billion dollars from Nigerian oil that was lifted without paying to the federal government, this is besides the fact that royalties and taxes were not paid,” said Laolu Akande, a Senior Special Assistant to the President on media and publicity.
“Just for clarity, I quote the Vice President,” he continued. “Grand corruption remains the most enduring threat to our economy. Three billion US dollars was stolen in what was called the strategic alliance contracts in 2013; three Nigerians were responsible. Today, three billion dollars is one trillion Naira, and our budget is 7 trillion!
This means the former minister has a lot to say, especially given that her UK acquittal has emboldened her.
She told the BBC, “I knew that I had never done anything nefarious and I had never done any of the heinous things I was being accused of doing.”
According to her, “They destroyed my reputation and my integrity.”
Of her US asset-forfeiture, she said, “I was never given the opportunity to fight that because I wasn’t even charged” and that the contracts were subject to “the exact due process that they are supposed to go through.”
And of the $153m and more than 80 Nigeria properties, she said, “The assets that have been forfeited were not actually traced directly to me…I don’t know what has happened to these matters at all. It’s now that I’ll have the freedom to find out what exactly has gone on there.”
If she truly believes that her reputation and integrity have been assaulted, this is the time to fight back in Nigeria. Because the real problem is that the allegations she faces on three continents disguise as corruption when they are really about greed, as I detailed nine years ago at the beginning of the US asset forfeiture case.
I agree with the former Minister that “God will be God and God is not a man that he should lie.”
Because it is man that sins. And because of this, it is man that seeks forgiveness by confessing that sin, no matter how heinous, with his tongue.
But we are not God. We are people. We do not want to mistake our friends for our foes. We want to separate those who deserve our prayers from those who have earned perpetual disgust and revulsion.