OPINION: The Ninety-Five Seats (1)
By Ustaz Abubakr Siddeeq Muhammad
A Note to Readers: I had promised to continue this week with the Makkah Mission and the Preference form, and to tell you what to expect when the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah at last releases its guidelines for Hajj 2027.
The fixing of the unified rates, the allocation of facilities, and the final selection of a service provider.
That promise stands, but it must wait. A matter has arisen here at home of such urgency to the future of our association, and to the integrity of the whole industry, that it cannot be deferred even by a week.
I therefore hold that series over until this present subject is fully laid out, and I ask the reader’s patience.
For five weeks, this column has followed a delegation of Nigerian tour operators through the holy cities.
In The Makkah Notebook, I narrated how our National Executive Council dispatched a team of the BoT, the NEC and the lead companies to Saudi Arabia to negotiate not to ratify the choice of service providers for Hajj 2027.
How four companies were examined and one, Jabal Omar, dropped for want of commitment; and how Ithraa Al-Jood, Manasek Al Mashaer and Rawaf Mina were adopted, with the final choice deferred until the Ministry should publish its unified rates.
In The Makkah Mission and the Night Encounter, I took you into my room at the Address Hotel, where, being the last man left in the holy city, I summoned two of those companies to me by night and put hard questions to them.
And in The Makkah Mission and the Preference Form, I described the emergency meeting our Board convened when the Ministry released its Preference Form with forty-eight hours’ notice, and the haste with which nearly all the lead companies had settled upon a provider before the house was properly called.
This week, the scene shifts from Makkah to Nigeria, and from the choice of a Saudi provider to a matter much closer to home: the allocation of ninety-five Hajj seats to a company belonging to the President of our own association a company which, on his own admission, never applied for them.
For the reader who stands outside this industry, I must first explain how the trade works, for the gravity of the matter cannot be felt without it.
How the Seats Are Won
Each year, the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah allots Nigeria a national quota of pilgrims. Our regulator, the National Hajj Commission of Nigeria (NAHCON), then licenses tour operators and divides that quota among those who qualify.
The process is not a formality. An operator must apply within a fixed window, file its papers, and lodge a bank guarantee, money deposited as a pledge that it will not abandon its pilgrims mid-season.
Only those who apply in time and satisfy the published criteria are meant to receive seats. In our corner of the trade, operators work what is called the B2B2C model: a lead company stands behind a wide network of sub-agents, and upon that network the livelihoods of many families depend.
Now the fact. Ninety-five seats were allocated to Al-Firdaus Hajj and Umrah Services Ltd, a company belonging to the President of our association.
The President himself, in an informal text to the Secretary General, has admitted the essentials: that the company did not apply for Hajj 2027; that it missed the bank guarantee deadline while he was in his village, where the network is poor, and afterwards travelled away for reasons of health; and that the company had written only to request a refund of its pre-registration and deposit.
Meanwhile, members who duly applied and lodged their guarantees were turned away for minor errors.
It should also be recorded that our association had, before all this, written to the Commission asking for the criteria by which operators are qualified, and the Commission had declined to supply them, citing confidentiality.
The Question That Will Not Go Away
If a company that did not apply receives ninety-five seats, while companies that applied are refused for a misplaced signature, then, whatever the intention, the appearance before the public is one of favouritism.
And in public life, appearances are not trifles. A regulator’s authority rests not only on doing right but on being seen to do right; the moment operators suspect that the game is rigged, the rules lose their power to bind anyone.
This is why so many of us felt that the honourable course was plain, and it was not complicated: the seats should have been relinquished, and the leadership should have been seen to fight for seats for those members who were refused, rather than to receive a benefit while they went without.
Our members do not ask their leaders to be poor; they ask them not to profit from a process that has wounded the people they lead.
Six Days of Silence
The NEC wrote to the President on 14 and again on 16 October, asking for a formal clarification.
For six days, there was no formal reply, only an informal text message. There followed a written response asserting a right to decline to answer any query at all, on the ground that he had committed no crime under the constitution of our association or of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and inviting the NEC to carry its objection to the Commission.
Here I must be precise, because a confusion has run through this affair from the beginning. The question was never whether the President had committed a crime.
It was whether a leader should be seen to take a benefit that his own members were denied. Those are two different questions, and the second is the older and the sterner.
The criminal law sets the floor of human conduct; leadership asks for the ceiling. A director may break no law and still be unfit for the boardroom; a trustee may be innocent of fraud and yet be in plain breach of his duty.
That is the settled view of every serious governance code in the world, and it is the view our Board was right to take. To answer a question of propriety with a plea of innocence is to answer a question nobody asked.
The Defence, and Why It Misses the Point
The President’s answer was that the whole affair is a gang-up, led by his Deputy, who is said to have coveted the presidency since last year; and that he became unpopular in the NEC because he refused to be used to fight our regulator and preferred dialogue.
Even if every word of that were true, it leaves the central question untouched. A charge of conspiracy is an answer to an accuser; it is no answer to a principle.
Whether or not a deputy is ambitious, the operator who applied and was refused, and the non-applicant who was given ninety-five seats, remain exactly where they were.
And it is a dangerous habit in any institution to meet a question of conduct with a question of motive, for by that road no institution can ever correct itself. Every reform in history has been resisted by somebody who called it a plot.
I say this, though, in fairness: no man was condemned unheard. He was written to twice and given days to reply. He was invited to put his defence on paper.
The machinery of the association did not fall upon him by ambush; it knocked, and knocked again, before it broke down the door.
Natural Justice
Two rules of law, older than any of our constitutions, govern this sort of matter. The first is audi alteram partem, hear the other side. The second is nemo judex in causa sua, no man may be judge in his own cause.
It was in fidelity to those rules that the Board proposed a virtual emergency session rather than a hasty verdict: a session at which the President would be invited to make a formal defence on official letterhead, at which the NEC, through the Deputy President (Hajj) and the Secretary General, would lay out its facts, and at which the Board would also write to the Commission, not to fight it, but to establish the truth asking how a company that never applied came by ninety-five seats.
And it was in the same spirit that the proposition was put that even if the President were found to have acted in good faith under a discretionary power, the seats should still be returned and re-allocated to deserving members who had duly applied, and the President formally cautioned against conflict of interest.
That is the language of a body determined to be just rather than merely strong, and it deserves to be recorded in his favour as much as in ours.
How that session resolved, what became of our Chairman, and what the world’s governance codes teach about a case like this, I shall take up soon.
To be continued.
Ustaz Abubakr Siddeeq Muhammad, is SPOC and Member, Board of Trustees (BoT), Association for Hajj and Umrah Operators of Nigeria (AHUON).
Editor’s Note: This article is an opinion piece by Ustaz Abubakr Siddeeq Muhammad, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Association for Hajj and Umrah Operators of Nigeria (AHUON).
The views and allegations expressed are those of the author and do not represent the position of Hajj Gazette. We will try to independently examine the issues raised, including the allocation of the 95 Hajj seats, the applicable eligibility criteria and the responses of the parties involved.
