Revealed: Buhari rejected Tony Blair’s offer to sell Israeli drones to defeat Boko Haram

• *Former PM Tony Blair’s role as Middle East peace envoy opened doors for him. 
•  *How Nigeria’s President Buhari snubbed former British Prime Minister Tony Blair 
• *How Tony Barr charmed ex president Goodluck Jonathan and swindled Nigeria 
• *Blair’s dirty deals with corrupt African and Middle East governments 
• *The former British Prime Minister ‘blurred’ the lines between his charity work and commercial interests
• *in 2015 he flew to Nigeria to meet the new president, Muhammadu Buhari And offered to sell Israeli drones and equipment to help defeat Boko Haram

Above photo: Nigerian President-elect  Muhammadu Buhari (pictured left), former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Vice President-elect Yemi Osinbajo (right), talk to the media in Abuja, May 2015. 

The future looked bright. In June 2007, Tony Blair bequeathed his premiership to Gordon Brown. 

Not only did Blair’s role as a Middle East peace envoy open doors, but the two charities he set up after leaving office were proving to be useful calling cards.

There was his Faith Foundation, which was meant to encourage tolerance between the religions, and his Africa Governance Initiative (AGI) — through which he hoped to advise leaders on how to run their GGovernments 

To them, his approach was nearly always the same: using millions donated to AGI by charities or foreign government aid agencies, he’d set up a ‘delivery unit’ for them — based on a unit run by educationalist Michael Barber, that he’d created while in Downing Street.

So often did he peddle this line that Barber’s book, How To Run A Government, soon became a ‘must read’ across the developing world.

But what Blair never bothered to tell all the dictators and presidents was that the Downing Street delivery unit had not been a conspicuous success. Indeed, it had been closed down after just four years.

As well as promoting his charities, Blair also worked hard at increasing his fortune.

He maintained there was a strict line drawn between his charities and private work; but in practice this line was blurred, as was his frequent use of British embassies paid for by the taxpayer.

Take, for instance, one of his more recent ventures.

In May 2015, Blair flew to Nigeria to meet the new president, Muhammadu Buhari, on a jet chartered by Evgeny Lebedev, who owns the London Evening Standard with his father, a former KGB colonel.

After a night at the Hilton Hotel, Blair called the following morning on the British High Commissioner.

Dropping in on British embassies had by then become a familiar routine: in every country Blair visits, he expects the embassy to provide him with a comprehensive security briefing and occasionally even overnight accommodation.

But although he was advising sovereign governments in ways that could conflict with British interests, no one at Whitehall had dared to end this perk.

At the Nigerian embassy, Blair was keen to discover more about the threat posed by Boko Haram, the Islamic terror group murdering hundreds of civilians in the north of the country.

Then, armed with the classified information, he sped in a motor cavalcade to the president’s office. It was their first meeting. Blair introduced himself grandly as ‘Britain’s most successful Prime Minister’ and then launched into his practised sales pitch.

‘I pioneered the skills to make government work effectively,’ he told the president. ‘The Delivery Unit is the leader’s weapon to make his government effective across the civil service and country.’

He offered to establish a delivery unit within Buhari’s government, with paid staff. But the president — a former army general and military dictator famous for imprisoning his opponents without trial — looked bored.

So did Lebedev, who had only come along because he was interested in Blair’s charity work fighting the Ebola virus.

‘Could you all leave us alone now?’ Blair announced suddenly. ‘I have a personal message for the president from David Cameron.’

But it was nothing of the kind.

Twenty minutes later, Buhari emerged looking noticeably disgruntled.

Blair, he told an aide, had used his access to tout for business on behalf of his private company, Tony Blair Associates.

Without so much as a blush, he had offered to sell the president Israeli drones and other military equipment to help defeat the Boko Haram uprising. ‘Blair is just after business,’ muttered Buhari.

During the drive back to the airport, the local organiser for Blair’s AGI charity asked whether he was mixing charity and business. ‘We don’t do business in Africa,’ Blair replied.

‘Don’t worry. Only AGI and charitable work. We only do business in the Middle East and Asia.’ 

Two weeks later, the local AGI organiser called Buhari’s office to ask whether the president wanted to go ahead with a delivery unit. He was rebuffed.

‘The president was not happy with Blair pushing the Israeli business,’ Buhari’s office warned him.

Anyone else might have desisted; not the eternally optimistic Blair. 

Six weeks later, in London, he met Bukola Saraki, the president of the Nigerian senate and third most powerful person in the country.

This time, as he discussed opportunities to introduce investors from the Middle East to Nigeria, he was more successful. ‘We’d like that,’ said Saraki — who was fully aware that Blair now also represented a wealth fund based in Abu Dhabi.

In his quest for profitable work, Blair sometimes agreed to give well-paid speeches — including an address in Orlando, Florida, to the International Sanitary Supply Association — manufacturers of lavatory cleaners. 

But for the most part, he concentrated on offering advice to sheikhs, presidents and dictators.

He was pushing at an open door — after all, few other people in the world could confide to potential clients that they had access to President Obama and other world leaders.

His impeccable credentials helped win him a £20 million deal with Kuwait to review the country’s economy. Selected Kuwaiti experts were hired for the project and flown to London for training.

His visitors were directed to conduct exhaustive research in Kuwait to identify the country’s problems. Then they were asked to visit Singapore in order to study the country’s excellent education system, and South Korea to study the health system.

Blair’s eventual report — ‘Kuwait Vision 2035’ — was greeted with derision. It was a lengthy repetition of Kuwait’s well- known problems, concluding with a series of impractical solutions, according to critics. 

To save face, the country’s rulers buried the report.

Not surprisingly, Blair was discovering that trading access to earn millions of pounds could be a grubby business.

 U.I. Energy of South Korea wanted his help to secure an oil contract.

No matter that the company was later embroiled in a corruption scandal — Blair accepted the fee.

From another company called PetroSaudi, he was paid £41,000 a month plus 2 per cent commission on any deals he brokered with Chinese officials.

It was short-lived: PetroSaudi was subsequently accused of bribing Malaysian politicians.

Another of Blair’s lucrative deals, in 2011, was with Nursultan Nazarbayev, the dictator of Kazakhstan, whom he’d once welcomed to Downing Street.

Unfortunately, soon after the ex-PM started working for him, Kazakh security forces shot dead 14 unarmed protesters and wounded 60 others. There were also reports of opponents being tortured.

‘I don’t dismiss the human rights stuff,’ said Blair, trying to justify his connection with the dictator.

‘These are points we make. There’s a whole new generation of administrators there who are reformers, and we’re working with them.’

In an hour-long video about Nazarbayev, Blair could be seen sitting happily beside him, and repeatedly eulogising him. He also arranged for his old crony Alastair Campbell and former Downing Street spokesman Tim Allan to promote the despot.

The following year, Nazarbayev asked Blair for advice about a speech he was about to make in Cambridge. How should he address the killing of the 14 civilians?

‘Tragic though they were,’ Blair wrote, ‘that should not obscure the enormous progress that Kazakhstan has made.’

While expanding his empire, Blair has also added greatly to the fortunes of his original employer, J.P. Morgan.

Back in 2010, he asked for a one-on-one meeting with the then Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan — ostensibly to offer the services of AGI and the Faith Foundation to help reconcile the country’s Muslims and Christians.

Again, he was given an intelligence briefing by the British embassy in advance. 

But having charmed the president and — in the words of Jonathan’s staff — satisfied his ego, Blair then introduced him to J.P. Morgan chief Jamie Dimon.

To this day, he continues to be feted as a celebrity in destitute African countries run by corrupt leaders and dictators — the very people he pledged as Prime Minister to remove. But in the rest of the world his stock is besmirched.

 Elombah.com with excerpts from the UK Daily Mail