Tompolo: Akinyemi Berated over Comment on Pipeline Surveillance Contract

Emameh Gabriel in Abuja

The Chief Executive Officer of Reynold Gibson International Company Limited, Lagos, Mr. Toyin Babalakin, has flayed the former Foreign Affairs Minister, Prof Bolaji Akinyemi and his group, Academy of International Affairs, over comments on federal government’s surveillance contract award to Tompolo. 

The Academy of International Affairs recently challenged President Muhammadu Buhari to set up a judicial board of inquiry to address the root cause of crude oil theft and fuel subsidy scandal.

The academy described the federal government’s decision to award pipeline surveillance contract to Tantita Security Services Limited, a private company owned by former leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, Mr. Government Ekpemupolo (a.k.a Tompolo), as an exercise in futility, observing that “to ask some of those suspects involved in this scandal to go round in search of illegal pipelines and oil criminals.”

But in a press statement that was made available to journalists, Babalakin asked “where the former minister and his associates had been while the country’s natural resource and treasury were plundered at will by big business ventures managing the nations crude reserve.

He said: “Only after this nation had moved on in its formative epochs in the creation and transformation of Nigeria from a colonial dependency, through the optimistic era of drum and trumpet nationalism, to the period that people like Bolaji Akinyemi began to be involved in framing its international thoughts, which period largely saw more of national fragmentation, and the emergence of a largely distorted national narrative.

“This has continued to belie the facts of our national integration in which the dynamics of identity politics created competing versions of domestic hegemonies in a manner that almost destroyed the gains of the pyrrhic victory, which gave this nation independence in 1960.”  

Babalakin fumed that “at this age and time, one would have thought that Professor Bolaji Akinyemi will enter a national historical discourse as a responsible senior citizen to help it in its search for national affirmation.

“But he appears not to have chosen this noble path as the press release he hideously framed through a proxy Academy of international Affairs, perhaps concocted by him, to drive a neo colonial new world order that promotes big business agenda, against the recent award of pipeline surveillance contract to Tantita Security Services limited, by the NNPCL, seem to suggest otherwise.”

Babalakin further explained that “a word of witness – set in a thoroughly historical context will soon show the characteristic helplessness of his press release, which in diverse moments only

accentuate the structure of the domination of the class he represents.

“Truth is, no one needs to be unenlightened by the methodology of Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi. While he should have emerged as one of the hidden figures of our national life, critical to getting this nation on the path of innovation and sound political and economic rectitude, he has chosen the rather undesirable role to be boring; an attitude that saw to his premature ouster as Nigeria’s Minister of External Affairs in 1987.

“What is the purpose of Prof Bolaji Akinyemi to request President Muhammadu Buhari to reject the pipeline surveillance contract awarded to Tantita? When superficially analysed, it reveals a very disturbing fetishistic trend and unravels a concealed tendency through which Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi, realises his values and reproduces the domination of his class.”

According to Babalakin,  “the illusion of the autonomy of this academy,  as well as the process by which they undertake their vicious enterprise, partly instantiates the translation of domination into hegemony, for this illusory autonomy masks the actual social relations and power relations which drive the purpose for the press release. 

“To illustrate, the evident hostility of the character of his press release makes it urgent to ask under what purpose was the press release made to serve. Where were Prof. Akinyemi and his cronies in the Academy of International Affairs when eighty percent of oil revenues found its way to private pockets; when the nation began to face dwindling foreign reserves and our subnational entities began depending on Paris Loan Refund to pay workers’ salaries and engage in critical infrastructural developments in their subnational entities? 

“Without wasting time in making difficult conjectures, it is apparent that the egoistic pursuit of wanting to determine who gets what, where and how, seemed to be the inalienable inspiration of this touted academy of retired senior citizens who live by dehumanizing other patriotic intentions.” 

Babalakin then retorted that “it is instructive we ask how did it miss the Academy of International Affairs; a group that claims it was established for open and private debate on the emerging new world order, not to make any open denunciation of the criminal way the last surveillance contractor Messrs Ocean Marine disposed itself in managing the entire ecosystem of that contract- they neither questioned the big business attitude of that corporate entity nor called for any judicial inquiry into the amount of oil that could not be accounted for under its watch.”