"In IMT Enugu, Petitions Serve as Tactic to hide Reality" By: FELIX OGUEJIOFOR ABUGU

 

As the Rector of the Institute of Management and Technology (IMT), Enugu, Austin Nweze, an Accounting Professor, prepares to bow out this June, after an eventful eight years on the saddle as boss of the nation’s foremost State polytechnic, two choices have come up for consideration by the Governing Council of the IMT and the Enugu State government as a whole: whether to accept as more credible Nweze’s account of his stewardship which contains, for instance, such detail as the total revenue of over N17bn in eight years, N5bn of that internally generated, or the dubious contents of a salacious anonymous petition accusing the outgoing Rector and his management team of using petty voucher ‘frauds’, according to the petitioner, to steal some N60m from the Institute, within the same period under revenue.

While this is not to say that a financial malfeasance is inconsequential simply because the amount involved is comparatively small, it also speaks to the fact that because allegations of fraud and abuse of office against any person or group are often a serious matter and usually of interest to constituted authorities, they must never be frivolous but must be made with every sense of altruism and responsibility and driven by a patriotic zeal to truly unearth what is hidden but certainly not to witch-hunt. It also speaks to the social legal, even social justice, dictum that those who allege must prove.

The salacious allegations against Prof. Nweze and his team in an unsigned petition currently circulating on whatsApp platforms originating from Enugu, are not only frivolous and untenable  because the petitioner lacked the courage of his convictions and left the document unsigned, but also, perhaps even more tellingly, because the allegations are like an old broth re-warmed and served as new. We have passed this way before.

In the past, there had been similar attempts to criminalise administrative processes initiated by the IMT management team led by the Rector, in the exercise of their powers to authorize the spending of money to run the school by relevant personnel within legal limits. Those attempts turned out to have been made in vain because, in the end, none of them amounted to much in the estimation of the agencies petitioned to. Thus, the petitions  to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in 2017 and 2018; to the Enugu Zonal Office and Abuja Headquarters of ICPC in 2018, 2021, 2022 and 2023; to Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) Headquarters in 2018; to the  State Criminal Investigation Department (CID), Enugu, in 2020; to Department of State Services (DSS), Enugu Office, in 2019 and 2021 and to the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), Kaduna, in 2019, all against Professor Nweze came to naught because the relevant agencies found no merit in them.

There were also petitions to the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB), Headquarters, Abuja in 2019 and 2020; to the Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Enugu State, in 2018 and 2022; to the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment in 2022 and 2023 and to the Visitor and Executive Governor of Enugu State in 2023 against the IMT Rector, with none of these 10 petitions written over a period of seven years amounting, in the estimation of the agencies and personalities so petitioned, to any moment.

So, what exactly is new? In August last year, the Enugu State government, barely three months in office, had set up what it called ‘Committee of Inquiry into the Accounts, Management Practices and Staff Conduct’ of the Institute of Management and Technology (IMT), Enugu to, according to the State Governor, Mr. Peter Mbah, “ensure a certain level of credibility in the institution.”

Inaugurating the Committee at the Government House, Enugu, on Monday, August 21, 2023, Mbah, who was represented by the Secretary to the State Government (SSG), Prof. Chidiebere Onyia, expressed his confidence in the ability of the leadership and members of the Committee to deliver on their mandate, adding: “The work you are going to do will set a new course for that institution and for the rest of the action the government will take in the higher education space in Enugu State.”

Now, if the allegations in the latest anonymous petition against Prof. Nweze aren’t new (as, indeed, they are not, just a few added exaggerations and wild claims) why did the petitioner(s) not have the courage (or perhaps the facts), to present their case against the Rector before the investigative panel and convince the panel to slam Nweze with an official indictment? Why wait until now to deploy a psychological sleight of hand in the form of an unsigned, baleful petition with outrageous claims, to corral the Governing Council or the State Government into shaming Professor Nweze perhaps with a dismissal, barely a month to his completion of what, from every available statistic, has been described by many as an eventful eight-year tour of duty?

Anyone who has read the latest petition from IMT’s petition-writer-in-chief (even though unsigned, everyone knows whence the petition cometh – the apple, it is said, does not fall far from the tree) under the inciting title of ‘PROF. A. U. NWEZE DARES THE IMPLEMENTATION COMMITTEE AND THE GOVERNMENT – REFUSES TO SHEATHE HIS IMPUNITY, is wont to see the venom it is dripping with; it is full of bile and replete with outlandish claims that are clearly at variance with the obvious commitment and purposefulness of the outgoing Nweze management that propelled IMT to a degree-awarding institution (in eight courses) and to number 2 State polytechnic in Nigeria and number 7 overall, from 29 as at 2016 when Nweze and team took over.

The petitioner also described Nweze’s leadership as ‘cursed’. Such extreme, hate-mongering language! But cursed? The leadership that, for the first time in the history of the 51 year-old foremost state polytechnic in Nigeria, galvanized a state government into revolutionizing teaching and research in IMT with upgraded infrastructure and equipment on which billions of naira were spent is cursed?  The leadership that mobilized the most funds from TETFUND for lecturers’ further studies (Master’s and Ph.D) at home and outside; for international conferences by lecturers and for institute-based researches by lecturers, all amounting to nearly N2bn, is cursed?  The leadership that attracted the most physical projects by TETFUND, the most interventions in goods procurements, including vehicles and teaching aids and ICT by the same TETFUND, amounting to over N3bn over all, is cursed?

But assuming that beyond the criminalization of administrative processes by singling out for censure genuine approvals made by approving authorities within the confines the law, the IMT petition-writer-in-chief had other ‘good’ reasons to cry out against perceived infractions of the law in Out of Pocket expenses (OPES) approvals in IMT, doesn’t it sound rather preposterous that this tendency had already become so serious as to warrant his petitioning against Professor Nweze to the EFCC way back in 2017, barely one year after the forensic accountant mounted the saddle as Rector of the IMT? We already mentioned that for six or seven years – from 2017 to 2023 – possibly this very anonymous petitioner had accused Professor Nweze of unprintable financial vices in petitions that the anti-graft agencies simply dismissed for lack of merit. What it all means then, in my view, that this wholesale castigation of Professor Nweze and his team packaged as altruistic petitions by concerned IMT insiders was from the very beginning, a witch-hunt tool against Nweze in the hands of those who had good reasons to perpetually keep the outgoing IMT Rector on his toes thereby diverting the authorities’ and the public’s attention from those reprobate, well-advertised reprobate IMT destroyers’ already smelly, well-documented financial malfeasance that had rendered the Institute comatose for years until Nweze came to the rescue.

The point, therefore, is that IMT’s cursed leadership has certainly never been Nweze’s at all. Rather, whatever ‘cursed’ leaderships the polytechnic has had over time have been those provided by the petitioner’s kinsmen one of whom was even sacked for mismanaging  the Institute’s resources with careless abandon, aided but later capriciously abandoned, to be sure, by a suspected member of the invidious IMT petition-writing gang.

It was the petitioner’s kinsmen, not Nweze, who:

a)    Could not properly account for TETFUND’s 2010 1bn Special Intervention in IMT.  With Nweze’s insistent appeals, persuasion and even cajoles, TETFUND returned to IMT.

b)   Operated 100 different bank accounts, among them 28 concealed ones. Needless to say that those accounts became conduit pipes for official graft by the petitioner’s kinsmen who ran IMT then until Nweze came and pruned the number to a manageable 10 in all, recovering, in the process, some N84,095,598 being excessive/fraudulent debits to IMT bank accounts.

c)    Frustrated every effort to get to the roots of some suspicious transactions, such as the N140,000,000 suspected to have been misappropriated at a particular bank branch in Enugu where there were a series of debits to IMT account but no corresponding credits, and another N33,000,000 that went the same way in another branch of another bank also in Enugu.

d)   Ran a 21st Century IMT like some JIGBO shop at Nkwoagu, what with payrolls still being prepared manually (pen on paper!), with white fluid et al on almost every other page of the foolscap sheets, an eyesore that Nweze removed as soon as he came on board.

e)   Other examples abound – of the leadership curses that Nweze saved IMT from when he came on board, not the other way round. To IMT, Austin Nweze came with blessings not curses, to be sure.

It has been said that he who seeks to come to equity must come with clean hands. It says a lot about our sense of fairness, even of propriety, that an IMT petitioner would query the power of the Rector to approve a N400,000 expenditure for the Deputy Rector with an alleged outstanding N2m advance for a training programme in Jos, the Plateau State capital,  but would conveniently forget that a principal officer of the Institute had a N55m IOU to retire since 2008-2010 but would appear to have refused to retire it, even defying an express order of the State government to retire the fund, including an approval given to the Institute’s Management to drag him to the EFCC. Such temerity!

One would have been surprised if this cheap and tawdry political trickster did not introduce the oft-nauseating sub-ethnic wawa politics into this inebriating self-preservation drama. As always, his concern wasn’t about the gravity of the infraction but about which of the sub-groups received the most punishment for offences committed, forgetting that an infraction could and should be punished on a case by case basis, not democratised. Imagine! Not only that this cowardly petitioner didn’t want any of his kinsmen (of the untouchable, irreproachable Wawa bluebloods!) to be punished for their infractions, he also didn’t think that after working so hard to get TETFUND to resume its interventions in IMT (after the petitioner’s kinsmen misappropriated a whopping 1bn TETFUND special intervention), the Rector of IMT had any authority to discipline persons who misused TETFUND’s grants given to them for activities related to their work in the school where he is Rector? Really? So, because TETFUND decided to treat the misuse of the 1bn intervention the petitioner’s kinsmen misused, probably at the instance of Nweze and other concerned IMT stakeholders, as distressed, this wooly head of a petitioner thinks TETFUND’s funds are simply take-and-run?

Hear him: “Assuming without conceding, that the Rector and his management committee have power to punish infractions related to TETFUND scholarship or any other, do the Rector and the said committee have the support of the law in applying discriminatory punishment on the same offences? Some staff were accused of TETFUND scholarship infractions. They will cease to receive salaries and to refund undisclosed sums of money. A close ally of the Rector from his Senatorial Zone of Enugu North Mr. Ike Festus was also found guilty of same infractions allegedly committed by others from the other senatorial zones of the state but his penalty is only to cease to receive salaries. He was not ordered to refund whatever the Rector’s whims and caprices have predetermined to be refunded.”

“The above is clear proof that Prof. Nweze is grossly unfit for public office,” he surmised.

Now, the cat has been let out of the bag! Without a doubt, it has always been about Nsukka – why would Nsukka be allowed to succeed Udi and make a success of its stewardship. When the tawdry trickster set out from the very first year of Austin Nweze’s takeover as Rector to malign the Accounting Professor with an endless stream of infantile accusations, it was obvious to keen observers of Enugu’s cheap, low-hanging sub-group politics that this was in a disingenuous attempt to hang on to a crumbling stereotype about ndi Nsukka and continue to project people of the cultural zone as incapable of holding a public office. Otherwise, how did Nweze come to epitomize the despicability of payment voucher fraud from the very first year of his assumption of office as IMT Rector yet has remained unindicted for it in all of the eight years of his headship of the famous State polytechnic?

Note again: Professor Nweze was made Rector in June 2016 but before June 2017, the owners of Enugu had starting writing petitions (and they have written  10 of such in seven years) against him to EFCC, ICPC and other anti-graft agencies in the country, apparently in a bid to get him publicly shamed through an ignominious termination of his appointment. And guess what? All these petitions were being written, widely circulated on social media and forwarded to the anti-graft agencies at a time that the Rector was recovering stolen money from his predecessors (kinsmen of the petitioner, I guess), exposing the concealed accounts with which our Wawa bluebloods were siphoning the Institute’s money, and calling some IMT demigods to account for millions of naira collected as IOU but which were yet to be retired some eight years after! How convenient! In a case of do I say not as I do, the anonymous petitioner against Professor Nweze calls for alleged favouritism in mismanaged funds recovery effort but turns a blind eye to the fact that someone has refused to retire a whopping N55m IOUs, granted him over a period of two years – 2008-2010? This petitioner couldn’t have possessed a keener sense of social justice!

Now, those are the people saying Nweze is not fit for public office for the simple reason that he queried the misapplication of TETFUND’s interventions by some members of staff of IMT, and approved work-related funds for his deputy. What a sinister way to create an attention-grabbing subterfuge as a means of diverting attention from one’s putrid essence! Who ‘born’ these people?

So, I ask again: what would the Governing Council of the IMT, the Enugu State government and, indeed, the general public, rather believe: the exaggerated, not to say vacuous, claims in the unsigned, venomous petition possibly written against IMT’s outgoing Rector, Professor Austin Nweze, by the Institute’s known petitioner-in-chief, or Professor Nweze’s account of his stewardship likely to be released with details of how IMT moved from 29th polytechnic in the country before 2016 to 2nd as a state polytechnic in Nigeria and 7th over all, and became a degree-awarding institution under Professor Nweze’s watch as well?

For me, it is a choice between good and evil; between light and darkness. And an unsigned document with salacious assumptions and unproven claims about an individual’s character is evil, indeed.