Buhari opens up on ‘P&ID affair’, reveals Abba Kyari, Malami’s ‘roles’

 Immediate past President, Muhammadu Buhari, on Sunday, opened up on the efforts of its then government to ensure that Nigeria did not lose out in the arbitration dispute with Process & Industrial Development (P&ID).

Buhari, in an article titled ‘A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE’ shared on his verified X handle on Sunday, said he had to tasked Abba Kyari- then chief- of-staff (now late) and Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami on special assignment over the issue, adding that it would have cost the USD15 billion if P&ID had succeeded in its legal action.

He said : “RARELY in modern times can so few have tried to take so much from so many. If Nigeria had lost its arbitration dispute with Process & Industrial Development in a London court on 23 October, it would have cost our people close to USD15 billion.

We won, and all decent people can sleep easier as a result. Justice Robin Knowles said Nigeria had been the victim of a monstrous fraud. But it was a close-run thing.

As the judge said: “I end the case acutely conscious of how readily the outcome could have been different, and of the enormous resources ultimately required from Nigeria as the successful party to make good its challenge.”

But ordinary Nigerians never took the decisions that ended up before Justice Knowles. Had Nigeria lost, it would have required schools not to be built, nurses not to be trained and roads not to repaired, on an epic scale, to pay a handful of contractors, lawyers and their allies – for a project that never broke ground.

How did it get to this point? How did Nigeria prevail? Was this a one-off, or par for a shabby and distasteful course? What are the lessons for the future?

The ‘P&ID Affair’ was already firmly set by the time I came into office in 2015. A company registered in the British Virgin Islands that no one had heard of, with hardly any staff or assets, had won a contract to build a gas processing plant in Cross Rivers. The company was owned by Irish intermediaries who knew Nigeria well and had done business in everything from healthcare to fixing tanks.