For their sheer audacity, his antics are likely to earn him a prominent place among the leaders who in the past four decades are believed to have stolen or misspent $400 billion in government money, most of it the profits from Nigeria’s oil reserves.

“It is a new low,” said Gani Fawehinmi, one of Nigeria’s most prominent lawyers and a longtime campaigner for good governance. “And in Nigeria that is saying something.”

Mr. Alamieyeseigha is suspected of siphoning millions of dollars in cash and buying an oil refinery in Ecuador along with several houses in London, California and South Africa. He has denied stealing money from the state.

The sordid saga of the governor comes as the federal government has engaged in a broad effort to rehabilitate the country’s image around the world.

Long associated with rampant corruption and kleptocratic governments, Nigeria has year in and year out gotten one of the worst scores in Transparency International’s world corruption perception index, though this year its rating improved slightly.

Corruption touches virtually every aspect of Nigerian life, from the millions of sham e-mail messages sent each year by people claiming to be Nigerian officials seeking help with transferring large sums of money out of the country, to the police officers who routinely set up roadblocks, sometimes every few hundred yards, to extract bribes of 20 naira, about 15 cents, from drivers.

In the past year President Olusegun Obasanjo has ratcheted up the fight against corruption, and several high officials have been ensnared in criminal investigations.

The president of the Senate was forced from office after he was accused of taking a bribe from the education minister to pass an inflated budget. The inspector general of the national police was charged with stealing $140 million, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and was sentenced this week to six months in jail. The government even formed a partnership with Microsoft to crack down on the notorious e-mail frauds.

But the Alamieyeseigha scandal has in some ways eclipsed those gains and led many to wonder whether democracy will ever make government here more accountable.

“Looting from the people is not a new thing,” said Kayode Fayemi of the Center for Democracy and Development, an advocacy group. “We are used to that. But for people who claim to be representatives of their own people to commit this barefaced robbery is shameful. Where is the rule of law?”

Mr. Alamieyeseigha (pronounced al-uh-mess-EE-ya) was arrested in London on Sept. 15 and charged by British authorities with three counts of money laundering. He was released on bail but was forced to surrender his passport.

His next court date was scheduled for Dec. 8, but on Nov. 20 he mysteriously materialized in Yenagoa, the capital of Bayelsa state, telling a crowd of supporters who assembled outside the governor’s mansion here on Nov. 22: “I cannot tell you how I was brought here. It is a mystery. All the glory goes to God.”

Asked for further clarification, his spokesman, a former environmental activist and human rights lawyer named Oronto Douglas, repeated the governor’s assertion.

“He told me God brought him home,” Mr. Douglas said, sounding a little dazed. Asked if he believed the governor’s story, Mr. Douglas said, “As a Christian I believe in miracles.”

Mr. Alamieyeseigha has said the accusations against him are politically motivated. He is an ally of Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who hopes to succeed President Obasanjo in 2007 but is locked in a bitter political feud with him. Mr. Obasanjo is barred from running again because of a constitutional two-term limit.

The scandal of Mr. Alamieyeseigha’s arrest and flight from London has gripped the nation. At the Ekiti Motor Park bus stop in Yenagoa, men gathered around a bustling newsstand to read breathless newspaper stories printed under banner headlines.

“Can you imagine, dressed as a woman?” one reader, Julius K. Wanami, murmured. “It is a disgrace.”

Bishop Anslem, who is 29 and has a university degree in industrial electronics but has never had a steady job, sucked his teeth as he read The Punch, a popular newspaper. “This is what happens when you have leaders who are interested only in themselves,” he said. “They take the money and we see none of it.”

Mr. Alamieyeseigha is one of Nigeria’s 36 governors, a princely class of men who enjoy immunity from prosecution because of a clause in the Constitution. In theory, state legislatures can impeach governors, and in fact a move is under way to remove Mr. Alamieyeseigha. But more often governors are kingmakers who control the legislatures by helping the members get elected, effectively buying their loyalty.

“There is no real system of checks and balances,” said Anyakwee Nsirimovu, executive director of the Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, based in the Niger Delta. “The legislatures owe all their allegiance to the governors, who control state money.”

Here in Mr. Alamieyeseigha’s state of Bayelsa, that means serious money. Under a Nigerian law enacted to help develop the oil-rich but long-neglected Niger Delta, 13 percent of the revenue generated in any state is returned there for development. Bayelsa produces 30 percent of the country’s oil, and with recent sky-high oil prices, the state budget this year ballooned to $560 million, compared with nearly $300 million in 2003.

But the money has not brought widespread development. It has mostly paid for white elephants like mansions for the governor and his deputy. The 2005 budget sets aside $8.5 million to construct those two houses, along with more than $2 million for furnishings.

And that is just this year. Since 2002 the state has spent more than $25 million on the governor’s mansion, according to budgets on file in Yenagoa’s tiny public library. The fence enclosing the two houses alone cost $5.7 million.

A glossy, mostly wordless booklet issued by Mr. Alamieyeseigha’s press office, “A Legacy of Selfless Service,” includes artist’s renderings of the houses, depicting fantasias of waterfalls, fountains and artificial lakes. At the construction site where the governor’s house is nearing completion, workers raced to lay thousands of square feet of imported granite tiles and mahogany ceiling panels.

Meanwhile, the Poverty Eradication Committee, whose purpose is not explained, has a budget of about $23,000, according to the 2005 spending plan, which is posted on the state’s Web site,www.bayelsagov.com. That is a little more than half of what is budgeted for toiletries for state officials.

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Read full article at New York Times which was published on November 29, 2005.

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.