By Josef Omorotionmwan
AVAILABLE evidence readily supports the absurd fact that Nigeria is increasingly becoming the safest haven for high profile crimes and big time criminals. Thus, Nigeria provides the best investment climate for crooks.

The penultimate week, precisely on Thursday, February 23, 2012, Albert Stanley, former head of the US Contracting Firm, KBR, was sentenced to 30 months imprisonment over the bribing of Nigerian officials for the award of contract.

Between 1994 and 2004, the US company paid $180 million to Nigerian officials to secure $6 billion in contracts for the Bonny Island Liquefied Natural Gas, LNG, project in the Niger Delta.

Besides the harsh terms of imprisonment for a man who is already 69 years old, the former Chief Executive Officer of the engineering giant is paying $10.8 million in restitution under the judgment, which was handed down in a Houston federal court.

Albert Stanley pleaded guilty to violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud. KBR and its parent body, Halliburton, have also agreed to pay $579 million fine after pleading guilty to corruption charges in Nigeria.

We are clearly reminded of the case of that man who slept inside the house and saw many witches and wizards while the person who slept outside saw nothing. We have been constantly inundated with the abstract fact that it takes two to tango.

Yet, many years after the bribe givers have been languishing in jail back home in their country, the bribe takers in Nigeria are moving about in full freedom and they must have coasted home the various national merit awards – awards of infamy so called. The greatest assurance we have here is in the usual sacrament of the EFCC spokesman, Femi Babafemi: “The EFCC is still pursuing a case against a number of Nigerians,” who it says, “accepted bribes from the US Firm”.

Even at the risk of accusations of unfairness for citing isolated cases on issues that are commonplace and which have virtually become a way of life in Nigeria, it is still appropriate to think a few years back and remind us of the celebrated case of German Siemens, AG, where Siemens agreed in 2008, to pay a penalty of $1.3 billion to the US and German authorities who accused the firm and three subsidiaries of paying thousands of dollars in bribes from 2001-2007.

Back home in Germany, two chief executive officers of the German firm have been under lock and key, cooling off in German prisons, after paying various sums in restitution to the German authorities.

The Germans came to Nigeria, bribed Nigerians and they are being punished in their country for doing so. The Nigerians took the bribes neat, ‘ate’ the bribes and they are being rewarded for doing so.

The best assurance we have got from the sacrament of the EFCC spokesman, Babafemi, is that “the EFCC is investigating the involvement of prominent Nigerians in the Siemens bribery case… EFCC has summoned three former ministers who are alleged to have been implicated in the scandal for interrogation”. Funny enough, the agency did not name the three former ministers.

As usual, the spokesman came hard: “The EFCC will get to the root of the scandal and prosecute whoever is found to have soiled his hands”. After all these years, we are still trying to get to the root while the Germans have since uprooted the entire tree and they have burnt the tree and its roots to fire their criminal justice system. And their engine of social justice is moving smoothly.

The system in Nigeria is nauseat-ing, absolutely so! Nigeria holds a clear record. We know of no other country in the entire world where policemen are afraid to arrest offenders and judges are afraid to commit criminals to prison.

We also know of no other place where the aphorism that it does not make any economic sense to pay a lawyer when you can buy a judge is so apt and, by extension, it does not even make any sense to buy a judge when you can talk to a PDP politician.

Why worry in a clime, where as a matter of deliberate government policy, it is apparent that our arms and ammunition as well as all the correctional agencies are used to protect corrupt government officials?

By now, Chief James Ononefe Ibori must be biting his fingers for his miscalculations. Except that he is not from the old Benin East Division, he would have been reminding himself that offenders in the area, after committing so many atrocities, would run to Isi for protection unknown to them that the tough  shrines have their roots in Isi – from which no one escapes.

Ibori should have known that the best place to be celebrated for big time crimes is Nigeria. See how the British authorities are messing him up over an “ordinary” money laundering issue for which an Oghara customary court, so to say, would have let him off the hook. After all, the EFCC first arrested him in 2007 but a judge threw out the charges brought against him.

But just when he was to be re-arrested, he “borrowed leg” and fled to Dubai where he was quickly detained and extradited to Britain following an arrest warrant by the British Government.

His travails have just begun. He has only pled guilty to 10 of the 17 charges; the rest are still hanging. He is due for sentencing soon after Easter. We hear he is entitled to some 10 years imprisonment. And confiscation hearing comes up in August.

What is happening to our criminal justice system? What is a nation now run virtually on ad hoc committees still waiting for? If we continue like this, there is just no hope!