Obong Bassey Albert And The Other Rogues Of Uyo
6 min read
BY: Celestine Mel
The first law of the natural man is, survive. The second is, thrive. The third is, do not steal. The fourth is, if you steal, do not get caught.
Justice Agatha Okeke of the Federal High Court – Uyo, confirmed yesterday that Obong Bassey Albert, the erstwhile senator representing Uyo Senatorial District in the 9th Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, broke the third and fourth natural laws, by stealing and getting caught. He was confirmed, convicted and jailed. He is cooling is criminal heels in the prison. Caught, pants down.
Bassey, who was standing trial on six counts bordering on money laundering and serious financial crimes, was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison on each count, without option of fine. He is also ordered to refund the sum of N204 million to the Akwa Ibom treasury concurrently as he would be serving time in the Ikot Ekpene Correctional Facility, which was paradoxically built and paid for, while he was the State’s Chief Finance Officer – an office and trust that he willfully and shamelessly betrayed.
Since his conviction, opinions have diverged sharply within the state, regarding the propriety of his guilt. While his sympathizers try to shrug off the massive fall of a once-promising rising star from the political leadership space, other camps and opponents are wildly jubilant that indeed, it serves him right. The heavy lessons of the fall of the man that is popularly called OBA, is lost in-between.
According to the facts of the case, it all began when Convict Bassey Albert was serving as Commissioner for Finance in my dear state of Akwa Ibom. He was appointed to double as the Chairman of an Inter-ministerial Direct Labor Coordinating Committee (IMDLCC)- an amorphous corruption-infested contraption, instituted by then governor Akpabio, to preside over the retailing and distribution of contracts to cronies, families, friends and associates of the government.
As a typical “smart” (and wooly) Nigerian, Albert leveraged on the new office to receive kickbacks and bribes, by simply creating and transferring huge amounts of money to some contractors, who in turn funneled the money through the laundry of gifts, cash and the likes, back to him. He ran out of luck in the instant case because the EFCC stumbled on his trail by accident, while they were on the hunt for one Olajide Omokore, a Kogi State-born criminal business man, whose slew of companies have been named in several concluded and on-going corruption cases across Nigeria, including the heist involving Mrs. Alison Madueke – the former petroleum minister under then President Goodluck Jonathan.
According to the EFCC website, Omokore executed a massive Three Billion Naira Contract for Albert’s committee and turned around to procure exotic vehicles valued at N204 million (of that time) for Senator Bassey Albert, in breach of the Money Laundering Prohibition Act 2011. Let us read one of the EFCC charges verbatim:
“That you, Albert Bassey, whilst being the Commissioner for Finance, Akwa Ibom State and Chairman of Akwa Ibom State Inter-Ministerial Direct Labour Coordinating Committee, IMDLCC sometime in December 2012, within the jurisdiction of this Honorable Court, indirectly took possession of a vehicle (Infinity QX 56 BP) valued at N45,000,000.00 at the instance of one Olajide Jones Omokore (whose companies had contracts with Akwa Ibom State Government at that material time), when you reasonably ought to have known that the said vehicle formed part of proceed of unlawful activity (to wit: corruption) and you thereby committed an offence contrary to Section 15 (2) (d) of the Money Laundering (Prohibition) Act, 2011 (as amended) and punishable under Section 15 (3) of the same Act”.
Under cross examination, felon Bassey Albert admitted that he received the said vehicles as “gifts” from Omokore and that he never knew that these were proceeds of crime. That admission, nailed him because ignorance as they say, is not an excuse under the law. The rest is history, as OBA adjusts to his new and future home in Ikot Ekpene Correctional facility presently.
The question then would be, was Bassey Albert the only person who took bribes and stole from the Akwa Ibom treasury? Is he the only looter of our treasury all these years? The answer is certainly, no. Rather, he was simply unlucky to steal with Omokore, who was also stealing with Dieziani. If Omokore was not stealing from too many places, chances are, Bassey Albert would have been walking free and on the loose right now, filling our earlobes with nonsense political vibes, driving around in those blood-sucking SUVs and other lustful lucre. He would have been luxuriating in his booty, unperturbed.
Bassey Albert is one out of so many. His other cohorts are roaming free today, some still in government, some out, all joined together in the unholy wedlock of thievery; impoverishing and coveting the schools that our children would have attended, the hospitals which would have treated our weak and the vulnerable, the bridges that were never constructed and the gratuities which have not been paid, into bullet-proof SUVs and expensive boy-toys, which they throw in our faces.
Between 2007 and today, loads of money have poured into our state from the federation account. Yet, the state ranks top in the billboard of everything bad – unemployment, maternal and child mortality, poverty, HIV prevalence, out-of-school children, etc. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, Akwa Ibom is third in the ranking of states with the most miserable people, behind Sokoto and Adamawa only. Most of the monies to solve these problems were budgeted and released, but they ended up in private accounts of greedy politicians, servicing their expensive lifestyles while the masses reel in poverty. There are no doubts that if the books of account of Akwa Ibom were to be thrown open for proper audit scrutiny, more than half of the past and present operatives in the state since 1999, would all join Bassey Albert in the Ikot Ekpene correctional facility. The scale of their heart-breaking thievery would make an angel commit murder. It is simply a gut-wrenching heist of uncommon proportion, sustained and maintained as normal for far too long.
Tellingly, ordinary everyday folks, who are all victims of the crimes, who have been stunted by the activities of the likes of Bassey Albert, are the ones scavenging the internet today, to invoke the name of God to rationalize excuses for these crimes. What a tragedy.
Public accountability has been near-zero in our state, all of the last two decades. The opacity that trails our procurement system is as thick as thieves. For many years, the EFCC fought to have access to the books of Akwa Ibom treasury, in response to several petitions to that effect. Rather than grant such requests, the State government, through the office of the Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, used the instruments of the law to neutralize every such effort. I can hazard a guess that the only reason for doing so, was to protect other felons in the mold of OBA, from having their days in Court, to the destruction of the society we call home; to the wound of every wretched Udofia and Etok Udo.
I have always maintained that corruption is the biggest existential threat to Nigeria. It is the reason why our economy has gone to the dogs, infrastructure has collapsed, our health centers have become moribund and our lives have been stunted. We have been so used to corruption that all the many victims of the malaise, whose future are stolen by the scourge have developed an uncanny habit to line up on the side of thieves like Bassey Albert, to defend and offer sympathies where they should pour scorn.
I have tried to weave my head around the endemic issues of stealing of public funds in my State and country,, I cannot find any sensible reason to justify the scale that occur daily – people primitively stealing what they would never need in a million lifetimes. For instance, I am sure that OBA never needed four bespoke bullet-proof cars to live a life of fulfilment. He did not need to swim in the high-seas of lucre to be a man. He was a banker before joining government. It means his path was laid for success. So why then did he steal?
* Mel, a chartered banker, wrote from Lagos
