ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter is an excerpt from Judge Kaufman’s (1981: 1) opening sentence in the case titled Texas Trading & Milling Corp v. Federal Republic of Nigeria at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 1981. The case was in retrospect of how a national development project in Nigeria became a global case among disputing commercial entities in the United States and parties in other parts of the world. The excerpt also shows one of the myriad paths the country’s leaders took when they were relocating the national capital from Lagos to Abuja. At the heart of the case was how spending of the national wealth (derived from petroleum exports) plunged the country into chaos. In a way, the chapter shows one more layer of the military’s conspiracy to relocate the country’s capital from Lagos by means of commercially contrived machinations. The military kept itself at a distance from the bad happenings in the Lagos metropolis and presented itself as the savior of the capital’s inhabitants from unbearable living conditions. But how far was the military from the proverbial “smoking gun,” the profit-motivated projects in the guise of national development projects in the country in 1975? How did this layer of the conspiracy happen, and how did it end up in a Circuit Court in the United States?
