NPA and the responsible corporate officer

In his landmark judgment in the case of Bode George, the former chairman of the Nigerian Ports Authority, and five others on a 23-count charge of abuse of office, Justice Olubunmi Oyewole affectingly introduced the doctrine of "the responsible corporate officer". He was borrowing creatively from the United States Supreme Court in a 1943 case of UNITED STATES VS DOTTERWEICH.

Lesson from the US

In that case, as the judge commented, "the President of a drug repackaging company was charged with violating the United States Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, although he was not aware that some drugs sold by his company were mislabelled, the court extended liability to him."

Justice Oyewole was trying to make sense, it appears, of the acceptable forms of defence we can tolerate from the leadership core in a community notorious for its illness of grand corruption. Corruption in Nigeria is not a fun issue. It is after all the very basis, as many commentators have claimed, of our misery and backwardness.

One connecting factor

"Today, after one civil war, seven military regimes, and three botched attempts at building real democracy, there is one connecting factor in the failure of all attempts to govern Nigeria - corruption," Nuhu Ribadu, the former boss of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) said at a recent congressional hearing in the United States. He added that "Between 1960 and 1999, Nigerian officials had stolen or wasted more than $440 billion. That is six times the Marshall Plan, the total sum needed to rebuild a devastated Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War."

Mr. Ribadu, who should know better, concludes that "When you look across a nation and a continent riddled with poverty and weak institutions, and you think of what this money could have done - only then can you truly understand the crime of corruption, and the almost inhuman indifference that is required by those who wield it for personal gain."

This is what Justice Oyewole was probably seeing. After all, there in the dock were some of the most powerful and wealthy Nigerians: people who would aptly qualify as ‘the untouchables' in the Nigerian political and business sphere. Olabode George, a trained naval engineer, was a one-time state governor and former deputy national chairman of the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP). The 57-year-old Aminu Dabo trained as an architect at the Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, is a wealthy politician, and is a scion of the Kano extended royalty. There is Abdullahi Aminu Tafida, 55 - a one-time registrar at the Sokoto College of Education, a director of the erstwhile Bank of the North, and a deputy governorship candidate in the last political dispensation.

Zanna Maidaribe, 47, though the youngest on the board, is its vice chairman. He is the noted scion of the powerful Borno aristocratic family. Mr. Maidaribe has a limited formal education, moving from high school in Egypt to a community college in Florida; nevertheless, he returned home to build a huge business empire that spread across many interests including oil and gas where he runs the Cavendish Petroleum.

There is the Ibadan-born Olugbenga Abidoye, the navigator who rose to become a marine captain, and who built a huge business in cargo operations; and then Sule Aliyu, the petroleum marketer from Kogi State who got an ordinary national diploma from the Yaba College of Technology in 1965 but announces himself as an engineer: he has built extensive business interests in engineering works and the oil industry on account of his deep party placement. All these men were and still remain top players in the ruling party.

In a broad view of the matter, the Bode George board at the Nigerian Ports Authority faced charges of corruption defined in the abuse of their office to the tune of N84 billion. That, even by the standards of Nigeria's mega-corruption complex, is a significant entry.

And what defence did they plead? They stuck to the mantra that the management, and not they, was the institution that had power to award contracts; that they were ignorant of certain processes; or that they were inadequately briefed or misled.

Actions and consequences

Unimpressed, the judge went for the jugular. They could not "claim ignorance or simply play Pontius Pilate when obviously irregular contracts placed before them were approved by them without question. It amounts to willful blindness and must have its consequences," he told them flatly.

Thus, by focusing on the doctrine of "the responsible corporate officer", the judge brought to the front burner the central question of the integrity of public officers and their responsibility in the construction of an ethical community.

The courts, through the results of judicial pronouncements, have always been major theatres of social engineering. Now, faced with a largely abject, if not lousy, prosecution performance in the Bode George trial, the judge leaned generously towards the abstract idea of abuse of office, to procure conviction, as against a more substantive charge of contract-splitting which the prosecution questioningly failed to develop.