Keyamo, who are the jet drug traffickers? Every day Nigerians are bombarded with pronouncements on high crimes allegedly committed against the country by powerful individuals. But no names are mentioned and hardly anyone is prosecuted and jailed.
Festus Keyamo has joined the club. The club of government officials who drop bombs on the masses and make their eyes pop with hopeless expectations. On the club register are presidents, vice-presidents, ministers, and top agency functionaries. They think alike and sound alike as though coordinated by an unseen hand. Speaking before a battery of media cameras and recorders, they make statements like, “We have discovered the real enemies of our country. We have unmasked unpatriotic citizens frustrating the good efforts of government, stealing money and committing all manner of atrocities.”
Roused up, the people wait to see or hear the names of those criminals, to see them in court and sentenced to long jail terms. It will be a huge relief to a much abused and misruled people. But nothing happens. The following day, another member of the club drops another bomb. And the cycle continues.
On June 28, Mr Keyamo, who is minister of aviation and aerospace development, announced that a report showed private jet operators were using their airplanes to traffic hard drugs and launder money. This has increased drug trafficking, money laundering, and other illegalities, he said.
Drug trafficking is endemic in Nigeria. Pictures of bundles, bags and cakes of narcotics are frequently displayed on newspaper front pages alongside suspected couriers comprising men (sometimes grandfathers), women (even pregnant ones), students and other everyday-people. With Mr Keyamo’s bombshell, the problem is getting worse. What to do? The minister set up a powerful task force to spot the genuine non-commercial flight operators from the dodgy ones, to check their licences, and, among other things, to find out why such illegal activities persist despite regulations.
But nowhere in his announcement did Mr Keyamo name the airlines ferrying the hard drugs and laundered cash. Nor did he identify the owners of the jets, nor say whether they had been arrested. To be sure, jets are not toys you pick up at Onitsha Main Market in Anambra State or at Oshodi in Lagos. They are huge and expensive acquisitions of the rich and powerful, and which take off and land in full glare of security agents and airport operators. What does Mr Keyamo know? Upon what was his announcement based? Fact or rumour? A lawyer, even a senior advocate, Mr Keyamo knows that the obligation of proof outweighs the liberty of allegation. As a minister, there’s even more obligation to act decisively than to make fruitless announcements that get nothing done. But our man is fine with just saying what the bad guys are up to but not naming the bad guys or saying what is being done about them.
Mr Keyamo is only a new inductee in the club. Older and weightier members set the tone long ago. On January 8, 2012, then-President Goodluck Jonathan said the terror group Boko Haram had infiltrated his government. “Some continue to dip their hands and eat with you and you won’t even know the person who will point a gun at you or plant a bomb behind your house,” he said then. We thought the end had come. The statement generated so much backlash that Dr Jonathan was forced to clarify. The terrorists were not in his cabinet, he said, they only infiltrated the wider government.
What did it matter? And what did he do about the group, whether in his inner circle or in the wider realms of the government? Dr Jonathan neither named the terrorists nor curbed their thirst for blood and mayhem. It is reckoned that the terror group helped to deny him a second term after the abduction of over 200 Chibok schoolgirls on one fateful night in 2014. Till date, they continue to cause havoc.
When Muhammadu Buhari took over in 2015, the rhetoric was: “We must kill corruption or corruption will kill us?” Mr Integrity had come to judgment, we chanted. Some arrests were made, a few judges’ homes raided at midnight. Two former state governors were jailed, then pardoned. But after eight years in office, the jury is out on whether Mr Integrity indeed killed corruption or corruption had the better of him.
In this elite club, the song seems to be maintaining the motion even if there is no movement, a tune the agencies of government know like the national anthem. Take the police and the Department of State Services or DSS. How often do they come up with releases that they have uncovered, yes, uncovered, a plot by some unpatriotic citizens to cause mayhem in the country. But typically, no names are mentioned and no one is taken to court.
In 2022 the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said it discovered an illegal oil connection that had been in operation for nine years. NINE YEARS in operation without detection! The BBC reported that about 108,000 barrels of crude oil (some say more) are stolen daily in Nigeria. The discovery of that illegal oil connection has not helped in catching any powerful oil thief or stopped the theft.
Recently, while visiting his Ijaw traditional ruler in Oporoza, Warri, Delta State, Seriake Dickson, a senator and former two-term governor of Bayelsa State, told the king: “Those big players behind crude oil theft are not from the region [the Niger Delta] but are based in Lagos, Abuja and other parts of the world.” Mr Dickson sounds like a credible source of valuable information. But what is the information? He did not name the big thieves based in Lagos, Abuja or elsewhere. Did the security agents press him to reveal the identity of those who have been bleeding the nation for decades? Of what value is the senator’s announcement?
Ola Olukoyede, who took over the reins at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Nigeria’s foremost anti-graft agency, barely a year ago, has been bemoaning the spate and depth of corruption in the country. “When I look at some case files and see the humongous amount of money stolen, I wonder how we are still surviving. If you see some case files you will weep,” he told a visiting management team of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) on Tuesday. For months, Mr Olukoyede and his men have been unable to bring the former governor of Kogi State Yahaya Bello to trial after naming him in an over N80 billion alleged fraud case.
Mr Keyamo and members of his club should name the criminals or spare the suffering masses an earful of empty announcements.