Justice Christopher Butcher is a
merciless and ruthless butcher. The British judge, who awarded a landmark sum
of $9.6 billion as damages to an obscure Irish firm known as Process and
Industrial Development (P&ID), is more ruthless than the butchers in Lagos
abattoir.
 |
| *President Buhari |
The racist judgment Butcher handed down on
Nigeria on August 16, 2019 in favour of his kinsmen would lead many of the 154
million Nigerians already living below poverty line to the slaughter slab. It
would push millions more below poverty line and start them on the road to the
slaughter slab.
Christopher Butcher’s judgment is the 21st
century version of slave trade. It would trigger unbearable suffering and mass
exodus that would put Nigerians in a desperate position to accept whatever is
offered them in exchange for food and shelter in the white man’s land.
When P&ID extorts $9.6 billion from
Nigeria on the orders of the butcher in London, the first thing that would
happen is massive depreciation of the naira as the Central Bank of Nigeria
(CBN) becomes incapable of defending the naira in the foreign exchange market.
Payment of Butcher’s fraudulent award would deplete Nigeria’s foreign reserves
to the extent that the CBN would be forced to devalue the naira to something
close to N500 to the dollar.
With Nigeria as an import dependent economy,
inflation would simply spiral out of control and price basic food items out of
the reach of the 154 million Nigerians living below poverty line. Hunger would
plague the land while the health of the poor would deteriorate due to
malnutrition. Thousands would die as poverty envelops the land.
The contract that handed P&ID the historic
award is replete with inveterate irregularities. The Nigerian National
Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), owners of the oil fields that P&ID was to get
the gas supply from, was not a party to the dubious contract.
The contract is an illegal transaction because
it was not endorsed by the federal executive council (FEC).
Former President Goodluck Jonathan noticed the
myriads of irregularities in the agreement and ordered a renegotiation. It was
obvious that the contract was designed to fail to enable P&ID claim
billions of dollars and share with its Nigerian collaborators. That probably
explains why the Irish company promptly rejected a renegotiation barely one
month after the underhand deal was slapped together. P&ID headed for
arbitration panel rather than renegotiate the fraudulent contract. Butcher
ignored those facts in his racist ruling.
His judgment lacks any iota of morality.
He has empowered a company that came to Nigeria with an empty brief case to go
home and enrich Britain and Ireland with $9.6 billion without putting down a
pin as investment.
In Nigeria, a number of the gas-powered plants
were completed before work started on the pipeline that would deliver the gas
to them. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo commissioned a gas-powered
electricity generating plant in the south-west during the dying days of his
administration. The gas pipelines from the oil fields in the Niger Delta
that eventually supplied the plant were laid after the commissioning
formalities. Nigeria has done it before. It could have done it again in
the case of P&ID if the company had built the plant in the first place.
Consequently, the party that failed to build
the plant that could be fed by gas through the pipelines takes more of the
blame for the breach of contract. The plant should have been built before the
pipelines. Ignoring that factor renders the decisions of Leonard Hofmann,
Anthony Evans and Butcher, fraudulent and racist.
Besides, the Irish company could not have
started making profit in the venture until the completion of the gas plant
about three years later. The ruling of the arbitration panel and Butcher awards
P&ID the damages for prospective profit even before work on the plant could
have started.
The outrageous award is premised on fraudulent
business projections. There is no way a company’s profit could remain constant
for 20 years. It normally fluctuates. There were massive losses in the industry
between 2015 and 2017 as oil price tumbled below $30 per barrel at a certain
point. Many firms in the industry collapsed during the period. P&ID could
have followed that path if it had lumbered off the ground. The future promises
to be even more turbulent.
P&ID could therefore not have made the
same amount of profit for 20 years. Bayo Ojo, the Nigerian member of the
arbitration panel considered this factor in his minority ruling and awarded
P&ID the sum of $250 million as damages for breach of contract.
Evans and Hoffman, the two whites in the
arbitration panel, were bent on pleasing their kinsmen. They had no reason to
be sympathetic to Nigeria and the 154 million people toiling below poverty
line. They overruled Ojo in a majority decision that awarded P&ID the
historic sum of $6.6 billion as damages.
The racist arbitrators and the judge ignored
the mountain of evidence and handed the idle firm a gargantuan award that could
push Nigeria’s level of poverty to calamitous proportions.
Butcher, Evans, Hofmann and P&ID’s
conspiracy must be challenged in a rather radical manner by toeing the path of
China. Economic sabotage should carry the death penalty like in China.
The federal government contends that some
Nigerians are conspiring with P&ID to rip-off Nigeria and share the
loot.
Government should send a bill to the National
Assembly for an act making economic sabotage a crime punishable by death.
Nigerians who conspired with P&ID should be tried on the new law and
sentenced appropriately. The convicts would therefore be dangled before
P&ID as ransom for the $9.6 billion the company wants to extort from
Nigeria. They would only be freed if P&ID renounces its demand for the
fraudulent award.
*Mr. Uwah is a commentator on public issues
(jerryuwah81@gmail.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment