The Chinese continue to collect: “The escalating legal confrontation between Nigeria and Zhongshan Fucheng Industrial Investment Ltd, a Chinese firm, has turned a new leaf, as Zhongshan confiscates another luxury jet owned by Nigeria in Canada. This move is part of a broader campaign by Zhongshan to recover assets as compensation for an unresolved arbitration award.”
This paralysis is coming from Ogun State but nobody knows Ogun or any state outside Nigeria. If the Nigerian government signed a sovereign guarantee on the transactions, Nigeria should step forward, and take over all elements of this arbitration from Ogun State.
Simply, no one cares about what Ogun State is saying now. What matters now is how Nigeria will get itself out of this maze. If you look carefully, it was not only the Chinese company that was affected (yes, Nigerian companies could have been harmed also). However, the difference here is that it was only the Chinese firm which might have received a sovereign guarantee from Nigeria.
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It is a lesson for Nigerian leaders: you do not just abandon projects recklessly. Sure, I am not passing any judgment on this particular case; I am simply saying we need to do better. In Imo State a few years ago, a new governor came and froze a real estate project started by his predecessor, with no feeling that ordinary citizens took loans to invest in that project. In Kano, a governor bulldozed a fully developed project. They did those things and got away, but here, we are learning how it could look when the victims are not Nigerians and Nigerian companies.
Chinese Firm, Zhongshan Fucheng, Seizes Another Nigeria’s Jet in Canada
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When you are more interested in kickbacks and aggrandizement, you often forget to meticulously read a contract document, that’s for those who can even read anyway. In this country, bad behaviours are regularly rewarded, and as our anyhowness became institutionalized, we forgot that Nigeria is not the centre of power. Now a barely known Chinese company is fiddling a nation state of over 200 million people like a children’s toy.
How do states manage to sign contracts with foreign companies without the approval of the office of Attorney General of the Federation? Does Ogun State have enough assets the Nigerian state can liquidate to recover its pillaging from the Chinese? It gets stranger and embarrassing by the day.
Images from a broken mirror.