HOW OBASANJO, ATIKU KILLED NITEL FOR MTN, BY EX-OFFICIAL

IF one-time General Manager (Operations) of the defunct Nigerian Telecommunications (NITEL), Engr. S. O. Ogundele has his way, former President Olusegun Obasanjo and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar will be held responsible for the misfortune that led to the death of the national carrier.

Ogundele, in a statement to a social news organisation Huhuonline.com, blamed the collapse of NITEL on alleged under-the-table deals by both former leaders whom he accused of making the country incur huge financial losses.

The allegation was described as a big lie last night by Alhaji Garba Shehu, the spokesman of the former Vice President.

Alhaji Shehu, in an interview with the Nigerian Compass, said that Ogundele’s claim is a rehash of an attempt by former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Malam Nasir El-Rufai, to escape responsibility for the NITEL debacle.

El-Rufai was the helmsman of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) which handled the sale of NITEL at the time.

Ogundele made the declaration in reaction to recent public spat between Alhaji Abubakar and El Rufai.

His statement read in part:
“The Nigerian Newspapers, hard copies and online, and several web blogs and social media were awash on Tuesday April 2, 2013 with reports and comments, on the claims and counterclaims by the former Vice President of Nigeria, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and Malam Nasir El Rufai the former Director General of the BPE on who or what ran NITEL aground.

“Nigerians will not forget in a hurry that the Nigerian Telecommunications Ltd. (NITEL) was Nigeria’s only telecommunications provider for almost half a century and by the time it was run aground more than six billion US Dollars that was invested in NITEL by the Nigerian tax payers through various governments went down the drain. Since NITEL became comatose, the Federal Government has behaved as if nothing has happened! Nigerians were left to be entertained by two of the dramatis personae in the NITEL saga dancing naked in the market place.

“I wish to emphasize without any fear of contradiction that despite the irregularities that may have surrounded the appointment of Messrs. Pentascope to manage NITEL or the competence of Pentascope to undertake such an assignment at a point in time, Pentascope was not responsible for the bankruptcy of NITEL as being widely orchestrated to undiscerning Nigerians and divert attention from the real culprits, the criminal gang in the Nigerian telecom sector.

The bankruptcy of NITEL was initiated by the criminal gang in the Nigerian Telecommunications sector long before the Management Contract of Pentascope to manage NITEL. Members of the criminal gang are mainly in the Nigerian Communications Commissions (NCC) and NITEL with some of them being failed NITEL Contractors. Their paymasters are the private telecommunications operators especially MTN. NITEL was already on the path to financial bankruptcy since 2001 because of the acts of commission and omission of this group.

“Professor Bajoga the former Managing Director of NITEL and I were actually retired from service mainly because the criminal gang in the Nigerian telecommunications sector wanted us out of the way for refusing to play ball in allowing NITEL networks to be used free of charge by the Private telecommunications operators the same way Nigeria Airways was destroyed when Private Operators were introduced into that sector and used Nigerian Airways call sign and other aviation service facilities free of charge until Nigerian Airways went bankrupt. The NITEL saga is however more serious because the criminal gang in the telecommunications sector knew that they were deliberately undermining National security in the process.

“International financial institutions are aware of the way and manner the Nigerian telecommunications criminal gang was scamming NITEL. This was why the consortium, International Investors Limited of London (IIL) and Transcorp had difficulties in raising funds to pay for NITEL transactions. The irony however is that the consultant to Transcorp was the same consultant that produced the misleading and unintelligent report for NCC equating Interconnection as Termination for a reported fee of ten million Naira in late 1999 which formed the bedrock of the criminal gang’s scamming of NITEL.

“I was the NITEL Deputy General Manager / General Manager (Operations) heading NITEL technical team on regulatory issues with NCC from 1994 until April 2000, I was fully aware of the criminal intent of the criminal gang against NITEL in flagrant violation of explicit Nigerian Laws and International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Recommendations on the issue of Interconnection. With my direct participation on the telecommunications regulatory issue I could predict NITEL’s bankruptcy since 2001. It is therefore morally reprehensible for anybody to blame Pentascope for an event already preprogrammed. 

Pentascope or their sponsors merely walked into the trap. A forensic analysis of the so-called 100 billion Naira that Pentascope is being called to account for will be found to have been spent in part to settle the Private Telecommunications Operators  fraudulent invoices that NITEL was not in a position to certify albeit forced to pay against all the norms of commercial transactions.

“The GSM operator, MTN was reported to the former President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki for corrupting the Nigerian Polity by Chief Obasanjo. Of course, Thabo Mbeki insulted Nigerians and Nigeria by giving the former President Chief Obasanjo the diplomatic cold shoulder. Unknown to Obasanjo, at about the same time, MTN submitted a controversial bill of three (3) billion Naira to NITEL for settlement.  NITEL correctly refused to settle the fraudulent so-called traffic exchange bill based on call termination. 

Lo and behold, MTN rubbed salt on injury of Nigerians with Thabo Mbeki’s rebuff of Obasanjo’s complaints by making Nigeria’s presidency MTN marketing and debt collecting officer! MTN routed the same bill that NITEL refused to settle through the PRESIDENCY which promptly acted like MTN debt collecting agency by sending the bill through the Ministry of Communications to compel NITEL to pay. Of course NITEL staff to please “the Oga on Top” promptly parted with three billion Naira. 

What the Presidency that should lead the nation in patriotic example did not know was that at the time MTN submitted the questionable bill of 3 billion Naira for NITEL to settle, MTN was using 22 E1 (2x2MB) NITEL leased circuits to connect its Radio Base Stations in Abuja to Lagos where it had the Mobile switching Centre (MSC) without paying a single kobo to NITEL for those services. But NITEL provided same services to NNPC and other corporate bodies which they were paying for.

Meanwhile, former chief executives, union and group of retirees from the NITEL had recently risen faulted attempts by El-Rufai to deny responsibility for the NITEL debacle.
They accused El-Rufa’i of attempting to push away the blame for the destruction of the telecommunications monopoly from himself.

One of the former Managing Directors of MTEL, the GSM arm of NITEL, Engr.  Kunle Bello who voluntarily resigned so he could avoid the touted new managers, Pentascope said he foresaw the collapse of NITEL/MTEL due to insincere and inconsistent implementation of policies by the El-Rufa'i led BPE.

He described the Pentascope management brought in by El-Rufa'i as an "irredeemable misfortune" upon the telecommunications industry and an unmitigated disaster on NITEL/MTEL staff "who have been dying one after another" due to non-payment of pensions.

Engineer Bello, an ITU telecommunications expert said Pentascope squandered more than N100 billion of NITEL's hard-earned money, besides the loss of revenue without adding a single telephone line.

He challenged the nation's judicial and executive arms of government to rise to the occasion by going after the perpetrators of the fraud. In a statement the group of retirees signed and issued in Abuja, they disagreed with the claim that former Vice President  Abubakar approved the appointment of Pentascope, the failed management consultant hired to manage NITEL in 2003.

The former workers who said they held El-Rufa’i responsible not only for the collapse of NITEL, but also the destruction of their careers, said, the issue at stake was beyond the debate of who signed and who did not. “The issue is who issued or originated the memorandum to the National Council on Privatization (NCP)? How did El-Rufa’i, as DG BPE pick Pentascope to manage NITEL?"

The retirees accused El-Rufa’i of misleading, not only the National Council on Privatization, but also the entire Government of the Federation by presenting Pentascope as a capable management company that could turn around NITEL.

One of such ex-staff members, who spoke with reporters on this issue, Michael Awos who put in 30 years as a technical staff beginning with the defunct P & T said that Pentascope was brought purposely to "siphon money and kill this organisation (NITEL) they had spent all their lives to build."

“He broke and twisted all the rules to make Pentascope win. Penstascope was one and the same with El-Rufa’i. The face of Pentascope was represented by El-Rufai’s two closest friends Mr. Hassan Musa Usman and Tijjani Abdullahi. Pentascope in Holland was a one-man office. It had a single room at its office. It’s Rolling Mast was on top of a Church building.

“El-Rufa’i orchestrated the fall of NITEL because he was bitter he failed to win the bid to build its new Abuja headquarters. He destroyed NITEL because of this and shattered our careers in the process,” the retirees lamented.

The retirees went on to say that the true story of the destruction of their National Carrier had been revealed in two reports by the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Quoting from the report, the retirees said that “rather than using Atiku as scapegoat for the collapse of NITEL to serve his hidden agenda, the concerned group of former NITEL workers advised El-Rufa’i to be honourable enough to accept the responsibility for railroading and blackmailing the former NITEL board and the privatization council into approving a contract that had short-changed Nigerians and children yet unborn.

According to these former NITEL workers, who described themselves as the “human debris of the destruction wrought on NITEL by El-Rufai’s selfish and callous agenda to short-change Nigerians,” the former BPE DG should apologize to Nigerians for his misdeeds.
They recalled that in May 2003, the House of Representatives exposed the underbelly of El-Rufai’s hypocrisy and brazen lies to mislead the federal government and Nigerians about the Pentascope management contract.

The Committee they said, found that the evaluation of the bids was “suspect” and that Pentascope lied on its true legal status and origin, which the group said El-Rufa’i cleverly covered up.

Reacting resentfully at El-Rufai’s deceit, the former NITEL workers said the House of Representatives found that Pentascope was supposedly registered on January 1, 2002, which was a public holiday in European countries.

Despite the inaccuracies and lies by Pentascope, the group accused El-Rufa’i of imposing the Dutch company on a hostile NITEL board, its workers and Nigerians.

According to the group, the Pentascope misadventure led to NITEL profits nose-diving from N15 billion in 2002 and turned it into a loss of N19 billion in 2003.

The group, quoting the House Communications Committee report, also said that NITEL’s turnover dropped from N53 billion to N41 billion.

Despite the dramatic drop in turnover under Pentascope management, the group alleged that direct costs and overhead costs increased from N21.3 billion to N26.3 billion and from N19.4 billion to N30 billion.

The NITEL former staff, therefore, advised El-Rufa’i to focus on these issues rather than using others as a scapegoat, saying that it is not uncommon for leaders to be misled by clever liars into signing something that turned out to be fraudulently arranged to produce a desired outcome.

The retired NITEL workers wonder why El-Rufa’i thinks the House of Representatives, the former NITEL board and others that exposed the fraudulent process of handing over NITEL to Pentascope were wrong and he was right.

Comrade Elias Kazzah, National Adviser of Senior Staff Association of Communications, Transport and Corporations (SSACTC) and President of the NITEL unit of the association, who spoke in the same vein, called on El-Rufa’i to shut up on account of his mismanagement of the PENTASCOPE transaction that led to the demise of the company.

Comrade Kazzah who spoke on behalf of the NITEL union said El-Rufa’i's dubious imposition of Pentascope on NITEL and Nigeria led to huge economic losses to the economy considering the huge remittances of the national carrier to the nation's economy, destroyed careers of a vibrant workforce and also posed security risks.

He said that NITEL was so commercially viable that it contributed to NIPOST and provided support to the ECOMOG troops in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

He recalled that the BPE under the headship of El-Rufa’i rebuffed other options put on the table for revamping NITEL  despite the fact that they had failed at six previous attempts at addressing the NITEL imbroglio.

Comrade Kazzah regretted El-Rufa’i's handling of the controversial management contract insisting that the "coming of  Pentascope was through the backdoor."

He said that to demonstrate its reservation against the deal, NITEL workers blocked the gate of Transcorp Hilton venue of the signing of the management contract between BPE and Pentascope but that El-Rufa’i surreptitiously smuggled the parties to the deal through the back.

He noted that Pentascope came on board with preconceived agenda to have a run on the huge cash both local and foreign currency at the disposal of NITEL at that time and to disorganise and frustrate the network.

Meanwhile, a former Managing Director of NITEL, Professor Buba Bajoga who agreed to speak on record decried the destruction of NITEL as “very painful.”

He said by the time he left the organization as its head in 2000, NITEL was a very viable commercial organization.

"We approved the payment of dividends to government and I remember that I left N15 billion and U.S. Dollar 200 million in the coffers of the organization,” he said.

Professor Bajoga said NITEL made more profit than most banks. “We paid all our bills and were financing all our projects,” he added.

Source: Compass