The nation has been told of how top officials in the Federal Ministry of Health shared 300million naira being the unspent sum in the capital vote of the 2007 financial year. And such has caused a lot of indignation across beard The sharing was in utter defiance of President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua's directive that all unutilized funds in the budget be returned to the government.

The presidential order was in response to the practice of top officials in government awarding spurious contracts towards the end of every year as a clever way of looting national resources. The immediate past Health Minister, Mrs Adenike Grange, a professor of paediatrics and technocrat who has been working in the international community and some other people are currently standing trial at the Federal High Court in Abuja for abuse of office and corruption.

With due respect to the court, one dare say that only a super human being could have failed to succumb to this very temptatation, given the circumstances in which Professor Grange was working.

Hers is not a case of avarice. It is rather a case of innocence, if not naivety. Prior to her ministerial appointment, she had never worked in the civil service as she has all her life been working as a medical doctor, researcher and scholar. Consequently she relied heavily on very senior civil servants. One of them, who hails from the same geopolitical zone as she, exploited this lack of experience for his own personal benefit.
You see, there are so many perks attached to high political office in Nigeria . The whole thing seems to border on the obscene. The top brass in the police and military, directors general and ministers are routinely allocated, for instance, big plots of land in choice places such as Maitama and Asokoro districts in the nation's capital of Abuja . All kinds of allowances are regularly paid out to them.

That was why Mrs Grange did not quite suspect foul play when this particular director came up with the idea of sharing a whopping N300m which was smartly presented as Christmas welfare package for the Ministry of Health staff. She must have thought it was one of the several perks of being a top government official in Nigeria . Hence, she directed that her share be given out to junior civil servants.
She trusted a particular director because, apart from his fine academic qualifications, he hails from the same geopolitical political zone and has spent some three decades in service. But this director is unfortunately inelegant in character. When he worked closely with a particular minister of state in a different ministry, the nation bled through their various dubious devices.

His ability to package bogus business proposals is legendary. For instance, he was instrumental in convincing both The Presidency and the relevant ministry to set up a specialized academy to work with closely with Bells University , owned by General Olusegun Obasanjo who was then Nigeria 's president. The then president approved the proposal with alacrity. And the government quickly began to finance it. As you are reading this short article, the academy is being established. Guess the chairman? Of course, you are right.

The magic of all this is that this director is not prepared by experience or training to work professionally in this specialized field. Even when he was appointed the academy chairman, he was not the director in-charge of the department in the ministry setting up the academy. He understands the pre-eminence of greed in most Nigerian leaders and plays on it to grab whatever he wants. Indeed, the time has come for the government to investigate the expenditure of the funds of this academy, which scandalously iss not backed by law!

Before this very director was redeployed to the Health Ministry, he ceaselessly harassed top officials of the various wealthy parastatals supervised by his ministry over funds. He succeeded on various occasions in getting these parastatals to provide estacodes for his incessant travels.

In other words, two or three parastatals would differently pay for a particular trip which his ministry may have paid for. In fact, there is a widespread belief that he did not attend many of the conferences which, in any case, were unnecessary and irrelevant to his schedule of duties. The conferences were often in obscure and far-away countries and for unduly long durations, meaning higher estacodes.

Some two years ago, he wangled his way to the headship of a committee which a wealthy ministry set up to look into complaints of management disputes in one of the richest parastat”led to play ball as he demanded, his committee wrote a scathing report against them.

It was so unconscionable that the senior minister who all along did not get involved in the entire politics set up a committee to review the report. The findings and receommendations of the first committee were predictably turned down. Chief Cornelius Adebayo, the Minister of Communication and Transportation and a very upright citizen, went a step further to write a letter of commendation to one of the "indicted" officers. It was the right thing to do.
"Everyday day is for the thief, but one day is for the owner of the house" is a common Nigerian saying. Every person who has known this fellow as a public servant knew quite well that someday his cup would be full, and the law of karma would take its course.

As Chinua Achebe would say, this director has stolen in a way that the owner of the assets is bound to know and take action quickly. What is regrettable about the whole thing, however, is that the director is now falling with an otherwise model lady like Nike Grange. The erstwhile minister made the costly mistake of allowing him to get near her. But this is the problem with the Nigerian condition.

We allow people who do not share our personal values and who have no integrity to be close to us--all in the name of ethnic solidarity. We are often under the illusion that someone who speaks our indigenous language is automatically our "brother' or "sister" and, therefore, cannot betray or mislead us.

How wrong! How one wishes that this director had fallen alone or with his ilk. But to drag the name of Prof Grange into the mud is very pitiable.
In his statement to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the director whose conduct is under review here stated the amount each officer collected and the various meetings held over the "staff welfare" deal. But he claimed in the statement that it was another director who initiated it all. This claim is typical of him. It is a lie.

There is honour even among thieves, but not as far as this person is concerned. His somewhat comprehensive statement to the EFCC shows clearly that he was the initiator and coordinator of the scam. Even when sums of money were returned by the beneficiaries on the EFCC directive, it was to his office that everything was returned.

The same person claimed that he did not know anything about the companies used as fronts to defraud the Nigerian people. Yet, when EFCC operatives raided his home, they discovered he owns at least one of the firms but uses the name of his son as the promoter.

It is quite a pity that Prof Grange has been misled by this character. In spite of everything, one considers the 67-year old accomplished lady a model. We sympathise with her.

Smith writes from Lagos.