•Ibrahim Photo: Sun News Publishing

More Stories on This Section

The chairman, National Insurance Corporation (NICON), Barrister Jimoh Ibrahim, has sensationally opened another flank in the controversy that attended the sale of the Kaduna and Port Harcourt refineries to Bluester Oil Services, a consortium promoted by businessmen, Alhaji Aliko Dangote and Femi Otedola of Zenon Oil and Gas among others.

Although the consortium announced last week that it was withdrawing interest in the refineries, Ibrahim is unimpressed, saying that by its conduct during its controversial purchase of the refineries, Bluester elevated personal interest over that of the country.

While insisting that he had expected "strategic thinking" on the part of Bluester as soon as the deal got mired in controversy, it was his view that the consortium “should have pulled out before the labour crisis. The nation did not need to go into strike for one week because of one individual or two. You know that national interest overrides personal interest.”

Ibrahim, who is also the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Global Fleet, an oil servicing company, dismissed claims by Dangote in a recent interview with our sister publication, Saturday Sun that he (Dangote) is a billionaire, saying no Nigerian businessman is a billionaire in the true sense of the word.
In the first of the two part serial in Saturday Sun, Dangote had said: “ I wouldn’t call myself the richest man in Africa. I would allow Forbes magazine to say so. But I have seen them saying that Oprah Winfrey is the richest black person in the world, and she is worth $1.5 billion. I think by the grace of God, I am much, much richer than her.”
But reacting to this claim, the NICON boss said: “Which billionaires? Myself? Femi? Aliko? There’s no billionaire among all of us. We owe banks. Have we finished paying our debts? If you have not finished paying your debts and you are celebrating that you are a billionaire, what useless billionaire? We borrow money from the banks to trade. We created this heavy debt portfolio in the banks and we’ve got to pay this money back to the banks so that the young entrepreneurs can come and borrow too.
“Let’s stop embarrassing the public. Nobody is a billionaire. You borrow money, you have not finished paying and you’re looking at you assets vis-à-vis your debts. You’re having assets that are not producing anything. Some people have assets that are worth N100 billion that have not produced anything in the last ten years. What useless asset is that one? Honestly, with due respect, apart from the old people - the Ibrus, the Dantatas and all these old elderly people - we haven’t got billionaires in our generation yet.”
The Ondo State-born business mogul also revealed the high-wire intrigues that saw him lose out in his bid to acquire shares of African Petroleum (AP) despite having 53 filling stations to Otedola of Zenon Oil and Gas who owns only four stations.

Excerpts:

A lot has been said and written in the last few days about the fiasco that attended your bid for African Petroleum shares. Some people are alleging there’s more to it than meets the eye?
It’s not every thing that you bid for that you get and I think we must appreciate that as a principle of life. Yes we bided for it. There was merit in our case. The arrangement was that as at the time we applied to buy 28% shares from NNPC, we had about 150 stations in AP; our own stations branded in AP colours. Our trading with AP dated back to about four years. So, we’d been together for a long time. This is not the first time we ever attempted to buy AP shares. When my good friend, Peter Okocha, was there, we attempted to buy shares that were eventually sold to another party.
It is not as if AP was dying. The MD was doing a good job but our fear was that we could no longer continue to put our stations in AP without branding our own. Having invested over N80 billion in stations across the nation, we felt we must brand.
We reasoned that if we have to take all these stations out, there might be some feasibility challenges. So, we wrote to the Petroleum Minister and he made a case to the Federal Executive Council. Market price then was N63. We accepted because we felt that we could add value to the business of AP that could take the share value to that price. At that time too, the current management of AP was working assiduously well to ensure that the price got there. We got the approval. Mr. President signed. We got the letter from the Minister.
As at the time I called the Director General of the Nigerian Stock Exchange, she said she was in Dubai. One morning, I picked up the papers and read that (President Olusegun) Obasanjo had cancelled sales of shares of AP to Jimoh Ibrahim. I called Mr. President and he explained to me that it was just a little problem. In his usual language, he said ‘it had a K-leg’ but that he would try and straighten it. Money had been collected from us at that time and I thought that was all. The next thing I heard was that it had been sold to another party. The amount we paid then was N17.5 billion only to learn it had been sold. We don’t engage in do-or-die in business. We are intellectuals, so we took it from there and we also don’t want to create problems for AP. We had a smooth transition of taking our stations and branding them in our own colours and move on. The young man (Mr. Femi Otedola) that bought it has only four petrol stations. We have 53. So, we are not mates and cannot be mates in that industry. He has a depot and we have a depot.

Some observers are of the opinion that the whole deal reeks of favouritism. Is that a correct reading?
Whatever is there, whether it is favouritism or illiteracy or stupidity, the important thing is that it is an error of judgment on the part of those who are involved. What we needed AP for was not to run A.P in fairness but we felt that we could also develop our own brand with time and then use AP as a master that Global Fleet was going to take tutelage from and then come out with our own brand network. So, we weren’t going to change management as such because oil is different from insurance. You know how many litres come in, you know how many litres go out but we would have managed the crisis among the shareholders. All we need to say to the shareholder is that ‘Look, this is the number of stations that we have and they add value so we want to do more again.’ That would have been good news and they would be happy with that because 33% doesn’t give you control of any company knowing fully well that AfriBank has 20 or 23%. So, there was no way we were going to assume duties there because we know that we have 28%, AfriBank has 23% and definitely, I know that the management of AP would want to do public offer later. I believe that if they do public offer and offer that would mean that you need to get more money but one good thing that gives me comfort in the transaction is that as soon as NNPC returned our draft to us, we returned it to our bank the next day and you know there’s a lot involved for N17.5 billion to be borrowed from a bank. So, the money was returned to the bank and the bank was very delighted and pleased with us. In fact, I must tell you that they were so generous that they reverted the interest that was earlier charged. That is how good our bankers can be to us and a demonstration of the kind of goodwill we enjoy.

Still on the sale of public assets, the sale of Kaduna and Port Harcourt refineries equally generated so much controversy such that the buyers had to vacate their interest. What lesson has that taught us?
I expected strategic thinking. Immediately that controversy came up, they should have pulled out before the labour crisis. The nation did not need to go into strike for one week because of one individual or two. You know that national interest overrides personal interest. In fact, with the cancellation of the refinery sale by the authorities as widely reported by the media, it shows that the problem is not with the refineries but the privatisation process. Quite frankly, the reported pull-out by Bluestar is what I would call a post-motem withdrawal, medicine after death, an embarrassment to strategic thinking. One would have expected that the withdrawal should have been before the labour strike. That would have spared the nation the trauma of a four-day strike and also saved the fledgling Yar'Adua administration a lot of discomfort.

The other argument by the labour against the sale was that they were grossly undervalued. You are an insider in the industry. Honestly, what is your take?
Honestly, with due respect, I don’t know much about devaluation but what I know is that we have bought only two items from BPE since privatization commenced. In those two items, we bided in the takeover of NICON Insurance, for instance. The reserve price was $20 million. We bought it for $46.8 million. The next bid to our offer was IGI with $19 million. The next to that was $17 million by Zenith. If you add the bid of those gentlemen, they are not up to the price we offered and today, I can tell you one thing, if government will audit the place and return my money back to us, we will gladly relinquish ownership. That is to tell you that there is nothing like any under-head deal or under-valuation in our case. People must understand the rationale behind privatization. Let’s take the case of NICON. Under the 2005 account, it was in the red to the tune of N6 billion. One year after we came in, we have brought it down to N3 billion positive and shareholders deposit of over N11 billion.
Now, you have pension to pay, about N11 billion. So, your purchase price plus the price of insolvency plus the liability in pension plus the recapitalisation is the price you are offering to buy NICON Insurance and all the core assets of NICON Insurance were not part of the sales traded like NICON Hilton Hotel. They are not part. They were stripped from the baggage handed us. BPE are the technocrats in this matter and the employed valuer in the case of the refinery almost put the price at negative. That I think has to do with the data submitted to the valuer from NNPC. So, these are technical issues that must be well handled. But the issue of price? Yes, if you look at what government has said in recent times, how do you buy the refinery at the price that was offered? $160 million for Kaduna refinery? For what reason? It is not right. If you put NICON plus the Le’Meridien Hotel together it is about $130 million.
By and large, the issue, I think, is that we must be fair to our conscience when we take on public assets and I think that’s the reason why Nigerians don’t have the patience to understand the merits. I think that if they had pulled out before the labour crisis, they would have even saved their names. The asset is not a do-or-die affair. Anything I buy from government body and they want it back tomorrow, no problem. Once they pay me my money plus interest, you can come and audit the place. If I’ve not sold any asset, let’s discuss it and then you give me my money back and I’ll go and put it in another place. Government asset is not the only place where you can practise entrepreneurship. You can also create new companies and then start and grow them. We started Global Fleet here. When we were buying petrol stations from individuals, nobody wrote any article to condemn us. We were buying stations and renovating them; bringing them back to life, and so were able to employ about 4,800 people in one year and then move the employment to about 6,000 before we started buying any government assets.

The media also reported a sharp exchange between you and the president of Dangote Group the other day over his allegation that NNPC is a haven of corruption?
My comment is that I don’t see it that way. I don’t see NNPC as a corrupt institution not because I do business. I don’t have a cargo with NNPC. On the contrary, it is Aliko Dangote who does business with NNPC with his Low Pour Fuel Oil (LPFO). When I say NNPC is run by technocrats and intellectuals, I mean. Engineer Funso Kupolokun, for instance, has a deep knowledge of the industry. These are intellectuals. It is against this backdrop that I speak.

When you mention intellectuals, people with knowledge, people are bound to read meanings to that...
NNPC is run by intellectuals. Is kupolokun not an intellectual? Is Idris not an intellectual? Is the operation man not an intellectual? These are learned people. You just don’t come around and slam people. With due respect, I don’t agree with Aliko that they are a bunch of criminals. Aliko does business with them. Can he deny that? He takes LPFO from NNPC, so, maybe he knows better. I’ve not done any business with NNPC apart from the AP deal. I don’t buy my petrol bloc products from them. I buy from Total but with my little interaction with them, they are the best of brains that this country can ever produce. Business is done with intellectual capacity. Because they do not support your getting the refineries, they are now corrupt but before, when you were getting LPFO, then they were not corrupt. You need to give further and better particulars about those corrupt practices.

Still on the controversy, there is this growing feeling or thinking that Obasanjo has created a clan of billionaires who as it were, made their money from unfair competition. When the list is drawn, people like Barrister Jimoh Ibrahim are listed. How do you see this?
I’m disappointed sometimes when they put my name on the list of illiterates who claim to be billionaires because I appreciate it if you put my picture along with my colleagues from the universities who may not have anything today, but tomorrow belongs to them. So, I don’t like seeing my picture with people who have diploma and all this type of rubbish.

So, you feel diminished when you are listed along Aliko Dangote, Femi Otedola et al?
I feel heavily diminished. What is the basis? One of them said his father was very rich, his grandfather was very rich. My father is not rich. My father is a bricklayer. My mother is a food seller. So, why are you putting my picture among them? Aren’t you embarrassing me? I had my L.L.B. from Ife, have my BL in Nigeria. I attended Harvard where I studied Taxation for one year and I came out with some good results. Why are you putting my picture among illiterates? I have been conferred with some doctorate degrees; about three of them from various universities. I’m not saying that I am the best but at least, I’ve not disappointed my generation because I went to school. So, why are you putting my picture along all these people with diploma in printing? The argument the other time was that I didn’t join (Lagos) Boat Club. What is boat club? I’m from the riverine area (Ondo State) so what am I going to do with boat? My house in VGC is waterfront. We’ve been living there for over 11 years. So, how can I go and buy boat now and be riding it at a time when I’m supposed to be employing more university graduates?
I am turning my attention to the academic industry. People that work with us here are like professors. So, don’t come and compare them with people who don’t even have education. Now, coming to the Obasanjo billionaires club, Obasanjo did economic reforms, that was good. In the first instance, the press is wrong to say that we are billionaires. Which billionaires? Myself? Femi? Aliko? There’s no billionaire among all of us.

How do you mean?
We owe banks. Have we finished paying our debts? If you have not finished paying your debts and you are celebrating that you are a billionaire, what useless billionaire? We borrow money from the banks to trade. We created this heavy debt portfolio in the banks and we’ve got to pay this money back to the banks so that the young entrepreneurs can come and borrow too. And, how can you go and be buying boat with overdraft? Are you not a mad man? This money is borrowed from the bank. Let’s stop embarrassing the public. Nobody is a billionaire. You borrow money, you have not finished paying and you’re looking at you assets vis-à-vis your debts. You’re having assets that are not producing anything. Some people have assets that are worth N100 billion that have not produced anything in the last ten years. What useless asset is that one? Honestly, with due respect, apart from the old people - the Ibrus, the Dantatas and all these old elderly people - we haven’t got billionaires in our generation yet.

Some say that you guys are also rent-seekers whose strategy is to cultivate people in government?
I’ve never been to the Presidential Villa except when I bought NICON. I decided to appear in the Villa for the first time six months after the purchase. We thought that, as the insurer of the presidential jet, we should talk to them at the Villa.

But Alhaji Dangote postulated that it is impossible for a business man to completely isolate himself from people in power?
In fact, the joy of a good businessman is to isolate himself from power. Allow those who are running government to run their government, you go and run your business. Out of respect and courtesy, they will write and invite you. This is when you are celebrated. You don’t go there and be loitering around. For what reason? I read in the interview Dangote saying in that interview that you cannot even sue government let alone fight it. Maybe, Dangote took a strange coffee that morning to have said that. Is the government above the law? It depends on who the president is. If the president is a garrulous president, then you can have problems but look at the person of Yar’Adua who is a university graduate and read Applied Chemistry. Did he say you should not take him to court? Even after taking him (Yar'Adua) to court, he still described Buhari as his elder brother. Did he go around arresting those who took him to court? He said I’m a servant leader. He said I have to obey the rule of law. When Andy Uba’s judgment was delivered, how many minutes did he take him to execute it? We all saw how quickly he executed the judgment. If you take him to court he won’t stop you. You just prove your point in court. Now, this man is saying I want to do things in accordance with the law. So, if, for instance, government didn’t treat you rightly in an activity, you take government to court and get judgment because government will also have its own lawyer to defend it in court. That is when government becomes interesting. Didn’t America take Bill Gates to court over anti-trust law? Was there any disaster or problem there? It’s only in developing countries that government and businessmen cannot go to court. Why can they not go to court?

You also said that some of the billionaires who used to feature prominently in the media are lately withdrawing. Are you suggesting, therefore, that the order has changed?
Under this government, it is not business as usual, I can tell you.

Are you then foreseeing a situation whereby those who, may be, made their money from speculation under the last order fizzling out?
I’ve said it before that there’s a storm around business whose survival depends on intellectual capacity. It’s a big storm.

You’re also described as Obasanjo boy. Do you see that as a complement or an insult?
I don’t regard being called an Obasanjo boy an insult. Yes, you can call me an Obasanjo boy. I can’t deny Obasanjo because of any other president. I’ve told you the good thing I like about Obasanjo; the economic reform that led to the consolidation of banks in Nigeria. And we must give a lot of praise to Soludo for consolidating the banks.
If the bank doesn’t give us money to trade, there is no way you can make the money. You can’t be whoever you’re claiming to be now. We borrow the money of the poor people to trade and it would be suicidal if we refuse to return the money to the banks so that they can lend to other people. Now, people say what about collateral? It all has to be in investment class. I don’t see any collateral you require to borrow money from the bank. That’s why I’m happy that I have pushed some of my friends and colleagues to be in the multi-million column now. I told them. ‘What are you doing?’ If they are bidding for any thing, go and bid even if it’s not a government asset. Even if it is a private asset, go and bid. The moment they give you the letter that you are successful in the offer, give it to the bank, the bank will fund it. Use the property as collateral for what you are buying, you’ll be okay and you join the club but it’s not a club of billionaires. So, you have to understand it. Until you return the money from the bank, you cannot celebrate any billion. For you to now come around and say they’re billionaires or that one is the richest in Africa, I don’t understand what you are saying. Maybe, they’re drunk or took unusual coffee, I don’t know. I can’t imagine somebody saying he is sheik in the oil industry and he has only four filling stations. Isn’t that an embarrassment for God’s sake? Do you expect the international community to be reading this kind of thing in the paper? I’m not saying they’re not doing well or criticising them. All I’m saying is that let’s do things in the right way, in a way that will not deceive the public. That’s all I’m saying. Again, nobody can say ‘I’m the king of money in Nigeria.’ How can you be the king of money? Some people say that they are powerful; their forefathers were billionaires and all that and then you still go and borrow money from the bank.
This explains why someone will say he is a billionaire, yet he gives little or nothing back to the society in terms of charity. See what Bill Gates is doing today in America with the billions he gives to charity. See what Opra Winfrey did the other day in South Africa when he showered millions of dollar on a school for the under-privileged. The so-called billionaires in Nigeria cannot do that because his billions are actually bank loans.
So, if your forefather had all the money, why should you go and borrow our people’s money from the bank? Why are you looking for stock market to get money by selling shares? These are not what Nigerians want to hear at this critical time in our national history.

From what you are saying, there seems to be a lot of distortions and make-believe in corporate Nigeria today and you are, therefore, going to invite the EFCC?
EFCC has the right to pounce on any body’s business and ask for his source of wealth. Under the law, EFCC has the right. I don’t see any reason why EFCC should not visit the private business people. They should visit anybody. They have the right. The law gives them the power. They should beam their search-lights on all these so-called billionaires and in the next few years from now, they should force them to return the borrowed money to the banks because if they don’t pay back those banks, the banks could die and EFCC is to prevent economic crime. Borrowing from the bank and not paying back is an economic crime. So, we must pay back. After we have finished paying, then we can celebrate, have a dinner. What happens is that because they give that false impression, the public is now blaming them for not giving more to charity and giving to the needy yet they can’t explain why. The reason is that it is overdraft. You can’t give overdraft to the needy. Bill Gates can give a lot of money to charity in America because Bill Gates has finished paying his loans. Instead of us to tell the public the truth so that they’ll have sympathy for us, we are deceiving the public everyday that we are billionaires, which useless billionaire? We are just people who borrow money.
The important thing as far as I’m concerned is that, you must pay the debt back. I am paying and I’m about to finish paying my own next year. Walahi, nobody among these so-called billionaires will still owe banks in Nigeria. I will set up a special task force. They must pay because the problem is that there are lots of young people who want the money. You talk about people who left the university and have ideas. You have people who left the universities and have ideas and yet the banks say they don’t have money. But you have somebody who owes banks about N170 billion. If you give N1 billion to each person, that’s a lot of people. If you give this money to young entrepreneurs to work with, you’ll be stunned at the number of employment they’ll generate. How can somebody sit over N170 billion as debt and he’s still claiming he’s a billionaire, thatd he’s almighty, the richest and in a garrulous manner? Education is very good. In the olden days, it was never like this. Late Chief Moshood Abiola was a chartered accountant. You could see entrepreneuralship in total display. In the news business, he was running Concord. He owned Abiola Bookshop, oil and gas. He took government to court and government took him to court also. Remember the Ibru days? Mike put his brothers in various businesses all over the place, hotels here and there. Look at Sunbomi Balogun who created a lot of opportunities for people and was not making this kind of noise. None of them ever came out to say I’m the richest. Let’s fear God. God is the owner of money, power and land. When did we claim authority or jurisdiction?

By your submission, you’re trying to be modest. By all standards, you’re a successful young man... (cuts in)
Anybody who has a university degree is a successful person if he worked for his degree. Any illiterate that is holding billion of naira today is only holding it in blind trust for the educated youths. They’re coming very soon to collect that money from them because they have ideas. How? By buying off the assets from them. You see the way young people are developing in entrepreneuralship and in governance? Look at governance today, you celebrate people like El-Rufai. You go to the East and you pick people like Oby Ezekwesili. These guys that use their brains for government, when they start businesses of their own, it will be so competitive that if you lack the intellectual capacity, then you know that you have to sell.

On a final note, if you were to set priorities for the new government in terms of how to jumpstart the economy, what would you say?
I’ve said it severally that Mr. President has started very well. I’ve never been to Yar’Adua. I can’t say I don’t know him. I had a handshake with him once. Then, we crossed each other. He doesn’t know me as a person. He has started well but one thing that is important to me is that he must convert the Board of Inland Revenue to a full-fledged Ministry of Tax. You can call it Ministry of Revenue and Taxation. If you say you are the richest billionaire, you also have to tell us how much you pay in taxes. You must tell us. Bill Gates once said "I am ready to pay $1 million to America if they will not go further to talk about this anti-trust law". $1 million per day as special tax. He defined a tax for himself. So, there’s a need to have the Board of Inland Revenue converted to full-fledged Ministry of Taxation. If not because Nuhu Ribadu is occupied in EFCC, he would have been a good candidate for the Ministry of Taxation. He would now go to each of these companies and open their books for the last six years and see their level of tax compliance and if you have not complied, pay what is charged against you and you’ll see how rich our nation is. There’ll be no need to look for money to do legitimate business once people are asked to pay their taxes. This is the area where I think Obasanjo didn’t do enough. I’m not particularly happy that he did not talk about taxation throughout. You must have the capacity to generate domestic income to finance domestic expenses.

Now, our domestic income is about 20% of our domestic expenses. That means we depend on the international community for 80% of our spending. This is an unacceptable standard. So, the earlier we realised that we need to enhance our domestic income to finance our domestic expenses, the better it is for us. The president should send an executive bill to the National Assembly. Use these unemployed graduates as revenue policing officers who would be posted to various companies. So, if First Bank has 500 branches, we have 500 tax officers there in each of the branches. That’s another set of people employed. This will reduce the problem of unemployment. We must involve ourselves in welfare economic programmes.

I think it is very easy to solve unemployment. Mr. President can say to the entrepreneurs 'If you employ up to 20,000 I will give you a waiver on your company contracts". This is an incentive. We should create jobs and the only way to create jobs is to make the ministers work assiduously on welfarist programmes.
We entrepreneurs should allow the president to do his own job. The bankers who loiter the corridor of Aso Rock should go back to their banks and run their business and allow the president to concentrate. N25 billion capital base for banks is good. But the president must set up another set of banks.

This set of banks can be called Category B which should be dedicated to artisans and not the complicated micro-finance banks we have now. In fact, it should not end with Category B, we should also have Category C to cater for people like my mother who will not be able to use the ATM card. (Professor Charles) Soludo must do this. We must be able to accommodate the common man in our banks.