The Minister of Finance, Shamsideen Usman and his deputy, Remi Babalola, turn their back on a directive from President Umar Yar’Adua to return NICON Insurance plc to its owner, Jimoh Ibrahim. Whose interest are they truly serving: self or national?

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President Umar Musa Yar’Adua is in a quandary. And his worry is: How does he resolve conscientiously, with some hawks around him holding hostage, the lingering issue of NICON Insurance plc which Jimoh Ibrahim, the 42-year-old turnaround expert, raised the huge sum of $46.88 million to buy in 2005 from the Bureau of Public Enterprises?

It is not for want of an effort that the President has not been able to put the NICON affair behind him. But, as is obvious, some powerful forces with ulterior designs on the nation’s leading insurance firm are placing him in a bind. At least, a letter from Yar’Adua nearly two months ago indicated the man had struggled to be at peace with his conscience on the NICON matter. The memo, reference number SH/COS/OP/A/3156 dated 28 February 2008 is as decisively explanatory in its opening notes as it is imperially commanding in its conclusion. To boot, it connotes a sense of urgency.

The letter, signed by retired Major-General Abdullahi Muhammed, Chief of Staff to the President, conveyed the latter’s approval and directive that contending parties on the NICON settle out of court, to which Ibrahim had resorted after Remi Babalola, the Minister of State for Finance, announced government’s take-over of NICON from Ibrahim. The President harped in the letter “that the matter of ownership and recapitalisation,” planks on which the Finance Ministry built its annexation, “is no more a contentious issue.”

Yar’Adua was not unaware of a number of infractions that Babalola and Fola Daniels, the Commissioner at the National Insurance Commission, NAICOM, maintain were responsible for the hijack of the insurance company from its new owner. In the letter, the President stated that “the identified infractions be communicated to all owners of NICON as reason for the intervention and NICON be made to address the breaches in a manner that will not compromise both positions of NAICOM and the insurance industry.”

For full details, demand the 21 April, 2008 issue of TheNEWS from your vendor now.

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