The Rise and Fall of Ani
by
He and I have only one thing in common. He is a Calabar man. I am a honourary Calabar man. But this piece is not about personal matters, not about what I have in common with former Minister of Finance under General Sani Abacha: I mean Chief (Dr.) Chartered Accountant Anthony Asuquo Okon Nsa Ani Eniang Offiong. He is a rich man. You could say I am a struggling, archetypal Nigerian, as embattled as you my dear friend, working so hard to get every bit of your N40 out of this newspaper you have just bought. Ani is a traditional Chief. I am "untitled". The only title I have is a proper, professional one, duly earned, not one of those feathers they put on people's heads to give them a false ego, and turn their heads. Chief Ani, you already know, is an accountant. I am a journalist, a gentleman of the press, not a press boy please. Only ignorant people still call journalists "press boys". Anthony Ani has also had the misfortune of working for late General Sani Abacha, and for his administration: both of which were considered irresponsible, venal, evil. For the past few weeks, he has been working so hard to disown the General and clear his name. He is making a bad job of it. Finally, that is what this piece is all about. This roundabout introduction is my own way of saying that I have nothing against Chief Ani's person but I don't like his politics, particularly the kind of dishonest politics he seems to be playing at the moment.
Someone needs to remind the Chief of what his fellow Chief, the late M. K. O. Abiola had said when he was asked whether he had carefully thought about the risks involved in politics. M. K. O. had weighed the question, and treated it with a loaded piece of wit. "Any man", he said, "who does not want to get wet, should not go near water." It looks like Ani is trying to set a world record to disprove this wise statement. He is struggling to dry-clean himself after the wetness of the Abacha era but sorry this Calabar man has only jumped from water to mud. If he doesn't shut up, if he continues to "weep" in public as he seems to be doing, he is bound to jump from the mud into a swamp. I sympathise with the Chief. Again, that is what this piece is all about. The thing to do is to take a second look at how Chief Ani rose to become an important figure in Nigerian politics, and how with his own mouth he has now revealed what he and others did to take Nigeria back to the dark ages.
Anthony Ani, as he is more popular known, was General Abacha's Minister of Finance. He was a most favoured Minister. There were speculations that he was one of the very few who had direct access to that Head of State. Not many people, not even government officials could see, General Abacha. Cabinet meetings were never held. If any serious government business took place at all, it was in one of those guest houses where we were told General Abacha attended to pressing matters of state. But Ani was a lucky one. He had access and influence. According to him, the Head of State once asked him to redo the budget. General Abacha could only have given such assignment to a man whose loyalty to him was not in doubt. Abacha was afraid of even his own shadow.
But Anthony Ani survived. He was a very busy Minister of Finance. If he was not turning things upside down at the nation's ports, he was busy quarreling with Dan Etete, his opposite number in the Ministry of Petroleum Resources. Even when the cabinet was dissolved, there were strong indications that Ani would be retained. He was at a time being promoted as a potential Prime Minister, with General Abacha as President. On June 8, the hands of the living God forestalled that. There is no doubt in my mind that Chief Ani enjoyed every minute of his tenure as Abacha's Minister. He was confident, slightly cocky, in that kind of manner only a man who has been promised something by the boss could be. Not surprisingly, Ani was always eager to promote General Abacha. He called him a visionary. He attributed what he called the success of his ministry's reforms at the ports to General Abacha's positive leadership. Listening to Ani as Minister of Finance was a virtual encounter with power and its magical value:
Government is "determined", government has "decided", government has "ordered", government is "prepared to defend"… these were the kind of phrases Chief Ani spiced his speeches with.
But now he is singing a different song. He doesn't seem to have a good voice for singing, but he is singing all the same, like a broken canary, and insisting that we must all listen to his tales. What does Anthony Ani want? What is he seeking? Pity? Understanding? Or is this just guilt and catharsis rolled into an unholy combination? The other day, he invited journalists to his home in Ikoyi where he practically disowned General Abacha, cleared himself of all improprieties, and put the blame for the failure of the Abacha government on the heads of Abacha himself, the Central Bank of Nigeria, and Ismaila Gwarzo, former National Security Adviser. Ani wants to put the past behind him. He sounds like a saint, who found himself in the midst of bandits and became a victim of their Godlessness. What kind of man is this who would call a man a messiah and a visionary in his presence only to dismiss him as a scoundrel behind his back?
Anthony Ani was an Abacha man. But now he says Abacha failed because he listened to a kitchen cabinet of bad advisers. What Ani would not want us to believe is that he was a Chief cook inside that kitchen. A man who was asked to redo the budget, and who had the kind of access his colleagues did not have, is certainly a member of a kitchen. He may not have eaten inside that kitchen, but at least he savoured the aroma of whatever came out of it, and our point is that Abacha's kitchen so called was a bad one. It smells, and whoever went near it is part of it. It doesn't matter how they put a spin on the face of history. Ani's tactics are rather cheap. Would he have disowned General Abacha if the man were still alive? Nigerians love to take advantage of the dead. We like to revise history. It is easy to do so because dead men do not throw sand. You can kick, whip and abuse the dead since the dead is dead anyway, but there is something amoral about the way Anthony Ani is going about it.
One of the things he has done is to oblige us with details about how General Abacha and Ismaila Gwarzo siphoned about $1.1 billion out of the country's external reserves under the cover of "security". The money was taken instalmentally and transferred to personal accounts abroad. He as Finance Minister knew about it, and he had advised that a committee be set up to oversee the disbursement of the money. No such committee was formed, the money was withdrawn anyway. But this is not really what Ani wants us to know. His real objective is to present himself again as a saint and patriot, and he has since pointed out how it was, he, the financial wizard, who has helped the present administration to recover about $750million out of the stolen money. As he put it: "I have to carry out serious financial engineering (whatever that means) and I discovered how part of the money was taken out of Nigeria (really?). I reported this to General Abubakar (so?) and sought his permission to allow me to search, discover and bring back this money to Nigeria which he kindly approved. (I see!) Only the Federal Government can confirm or deny the truthfulness of Ani's claim but what I would like to know is: why is Ani crying out at this time?
Why did he have to wait for so long? Why did he not resign his appointment in protest? Why did he not blow the lid on General Abacha? The sum of over a billion dollars is too large a chunk of the national treasury. No one would have blamed Ani if he had spoken up at the time. If the issue is that he could not have walked out on a military government, if that is what he is saying, then what he is actually saying is that he is not a principled man at all.
Ani has also made the thoroughly useless point that he is in a way responsible for the scrapping of the Petroleum Ministry. Why? According to him, because of his criticisms of that Ministry under Dan Etete. If this is true, then Ani has done a very bad thing. Simply because he has helped to create a situation whereby for the first time in decades, the most powerful man in the land is the one also in charge of the nation's wealth, which in fact makes General Abubakar, the most privileged Nigerian Head of State ever. He could if he so wishes, do whatever he likes with oil wealth. Perhaps that's why he was able to take a wicked look at the dead ones of Jesse, the other week, and dismiss them as saboteurs. I agree. When a man sits on all that oil wealth, any rat or cockroach who looks like he has been trying to steal a bowl out of that same oil is bound to look like a saboteur. If Ani is telling the truth, that is what he has helped to achieve. I am simply not impressed. The way those who served and promoted Abacha have been re-constructing their relationship with the man says more about they themselves and not Abacha.
My suspicion is that Anthony Ani is not telling everything that he knows. He is not in fact telling us what he should be telling us. He is telling us only what he thinks we would like to hear, and what will serve his own interests. What we need to do is to arrest all Abacha men, starting with Anthony Ani and Gwarzo, without further delay. From what Ani has said, it is at least obvious that he was an accessory before and after the fact of the looting of the national treasury. He and the others, including that boy called Daniel Kanu, should be arraigned before a proper judicial commission. They should be made to answer questions. Whoever is found guilty should be penalised accordingly. Stealing from the treasury under false pretense is 419, pure and simple, being an accessory to it is just as bad, collecting stolen money is even worse. If Abacha is found guilty, he too should be penalised and his sentence recorded for posterity's sake. But if we allow the Anis of this world to set up their own courts and issue judgements as Ani is doing, or if we allow the Gwarzos to return their loot and go free, then we would have established a dangerous precedent. Ani in particular, should be made to tell us about all the money spent on ECOMOG during Abacha's tenure. What about withdrawals made for the Family Support Programme, and FEAP? What of all the estacodes that Ani's ministry approved?
Ani we are further told has also stumbled on the wisdom that the Central Bank was able to disburse funds under General Abacha without recourse to the Ministry of Finance because of the way it is structured. He therefore wants the CBN re-structured to strengthen the Ministry's control over it. Na lie. It is precisely what Ani is recommending that makes the CBN so manipulable. I would have expected Ani to know this, but obviously, he doesn't. The kind of CBN he wants will still be a pawn in the power game between the ministry and the Presidency. Eventually, money is stolen and everyone blames everyone else. The only way to rescue the CBN from the politicians in power is to make it fully independent, to enforce internal controls, and for those in power to realise that the CBN is not a personal bank, but a public property.
Finally, Chief Ani has been telling whoever cares to listen how he was such a successful Minister of Finance. He is supposed to be the miracle worker who reduced inflation, interest rates and budget deficits. He also allegedly stabilised the exchange rate, increased our foreign reserves, and sanitised the nation's ports. Voodoo economics: that is the kind of economics that Ani's Ministry of Finance practised. I repeat, it was all voodoo: that kind of economics that sounds so magical and sweet, but is built on a foundation of tricks and deception. If Ani was such a fantastic Minister of Finance, why didn't we see his miracle in our lives? What we remember is that under him, money was stolen regularly, even the external reserve was not spared. With money going into private pockets, foreign accounts and personal vaults, there wasn't enough money to run government and the country.
Whatever was available was spent on Youths Earnestly Asking for Abacha, the importation of Indian prostitutes as well as Abacha television, Abacha soap, Abacha rice; the production of coup videos, pro-Abacha rallies across the country, yeye advertisements in foreign newspapers, and Mrs. Abacha's pet projects. That was the kind of economy that Ani supervised. He is not the thief-catcher he says he is. He wasn't a good Minister of Finance at all. He was an Abacha man. That is what he is.
April 1996