It looked like Nigeria would have seen the last of mysterious debt claims creeping out of the blues if not for a French court’s order that three business jets including a Dassault Falcon 7X reportedly owned by the country’s air force be seized in the meantime because of a Chinese company’s discontent about a contract being breached.

One of the aircraft was manufactured in France by Dassault Aviation and had a $53million market value as of 2008. Will this luxury class jet be one of the latest casualties of Nigerian officials not tightening their defences or doing their litigation litmus test before entering a deal?

What led to this question being asked is the curse of the federal system that transfers the benefits derived from the sub-national to the centre—other times, their poor judgement too.

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The French court’s instruction may be binding on over 200 million Nigerians but the Financial Times said the problem originated from Ogun State in the southwest specifically. Discontent began to brew when the sub-national allegedly pulled out of a 2013 treaty it signed with Zhongfu, known to be a subsidiary of Zhongshan Fucheng Industrial Investment.

The agreement was for the Chinese company to develop a free trade area in Ogun but that never materialised.

Zhongfu, says the Financial Times report, was to own 60 percent of the joint venture under the terms of the deal. Quite unfortunate for the Asian investor because three years after this deal kicked off, Ogun State reneged and even allegedly launched a campaign of illegal acts which led to the Chinese ditching the entire gig eventually.

So now, after up to 24 months of waiting things out, they want blood. The company reportedly started arbitration proceedings which targeted Nigeria as the rule breaker and not Ogun State. The result of this arbitration yielded, back in 2021, the decision by a three-person panel in London which awarded Zhongfu $70m for the losses. Over the years, the compensation value shifted to an upward trajectory. This now means that the current sum owed by Nigeria has risen to $81m after the interest was added.

Grounds for the claim were obvious in the arbitration panel’s statement which reads that: It is clear that Zhongsan is the effective winner in these arbitral proceedings, in that it has proved its version of events is accurate, it has successfully resisted Nigeria’s jurisdictional and preliminary objections, it has established that it has a valid claim against Nigeria under the Treaty and it has obtained an award for substantial damages.

How this matter sort of came to the limelight was when a Commercial Court judge of the King’s Bench Division of London’s High Court of Justice granted Zhongshan an enforcement order to possess two other assets owned by the Nigerian government in Liverpool, England. These two are estimated to be worth between £1.3m and £1.7m in June.

Altogether, the three Nigerian Air Force (NAF) jets at risk of seizure are a Dassault Falcon 7X, a Boeing 737-7N6/BBJ and an Airbus A330-243. Even though they have the NAF ownership name tag, their aircraft ultimately belong to the Federal Government of Nigeria. Where the jets are currently stationed at both the Paris-Le Bourget and Basel-Mulhouse airports in France, their owners have been usurped from their roles.

Unlike October 2023 when it was quite a close shave avoiding an illegal ₦11billion Process & Industrial Developments Limited (P&ID) claim, events are looking like this time around, the charge might stick.

It had taken four presidential cycles to overcome the preposterous gas supply scam in which the British Virgin Islands-registered P&ID was requesting damages for work it never did. The scheming found room in the era of ailing President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

Back on 11 January 2010 when parties agreed on the deal, there were questions about the president’s health. Whether he was fit to govern instead of a faceless cabal. Exactly eleven days after this deal in good faith was struck, President Yar’Adua was still in Saudi Arabia getting care. In his absence, the Supreme Court of Nigeria in its rule gave the Federal Executive Council two weeks to decide if he was still capable of doing his job.

Questions being asked

Based on the Commercial Court’s ruling, there is no question that Nigeria on paper is the defaulting party in the Zhongfu contract breach incident, but the embarrassment isn’t going only to politicians in power – it goes to ordinary citizens too. How they are from a country that can afford to purchase and maintain a fleet of jets yet they live in hunger.

ALSO READ: Historic victory for Nigeria as Court in the UK overturns $11bn ‘debt’ to P&ID

At Bola Tinubu’s inaugural council meeting as the President of Nigeria on Tuesday 13 August 2024, one of the topics the forum focused on was the 10-day protest to #EndBadGovernance and its national security threat connotations.

It is a week of Nigeria’s shoddy outcomes as seen with the country ending the Paris 2024 Olympic Games without a medal five days ago. The Presidential candidate of the Labour Party in last year’s election spoke up about this, the way he has criticised this latest blip ordering the aircraft seizures.

Peter Obi in multiple tweets razed the terrace with his long-held concern about the quality of leadership in Nigeria – how at various levels hasn’t served any good. The craze over Zhongfu’s contract breach claim is the reason former Anambra State governor Mr Obi is asking what both Ogun state and Federal government did to correct costly flops right before the French court action.

With the answers was a statement from the Presidency posted as another tweet. It was titled Chinese Company’s fraudulent attempt to strip Nigeria’s assets abroad which the government says is the doppelganger of P&ID and efforts are ongoing to address this.

Chinese Company's fraudulent attempt to strip Nigerias assets abroad pic.twitter.com/w6eqc7flxL

— Presidency Nigeria (@NGRPresident) August 15, 2024

Past moves to challenge Zhongfu’s claim led Governor Dapo Abiodun of Ogun State and the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice Prince Lateef Fagbemi to a 3-day meeting in France back in September 2023. Although moves were made, Nigeria saw the problem degenerate still. The country argues that the Chinese vendor, by the time the 2007 contract was revoked eight years later, only erected a perimeter fence on the land earmarked for a free trade zone.

Ayodele Johnson

Ayodelé is a Lagos-based journalist and the Content and Editorial Coordinator at Meiza. All around the megacity, I am steering diverse lifestyle magazine audiences with ingenious hacks and insights that spur fast, informed decisions in their busy lives.