By Bashir Adefaka
“It is therefore up to President Buhari and his government team to realise this fact and not allow them to escape. How they do this? In court, all looters should be the ones to prove how they get their allegedly looted money not the prosecutors. That is the area they use technicality to win against the State. It must stop. No prosecutor knows how a thief steals. It is the thief that should tell the court what job he does that he is able to amass the kind of wealth he is being tried for. And anyone who proves stubborn should be put in his right place.”
It is no longer history that Nigeria, since the take-off of Muhammadu Buahri Administration on May 29, 2015, has witnessed several hardened and desperate almost unprecedented dangerous politicking against his government. What is news is that why they take to such never-seen-before undemocratic practice. All of these politickings are no less than attempt by looters who decided to take to hardened criticisms hiding under the democratic claims of playing opposition politics. They started early, as far back as May 30, 2015 so that by the time they would be put to question over their wicked looting and created insecurity in the land of the nation, they will now cry out and say the governing Party and its government are persecuting the opposition.
Any keen watcher of event in the buildup to the general elections would recall how the then government officials, who were mainly People’s Democratic Party (PDP) politicians including Dr. Doyin Okupe, Femi Fani-Kayode, Ayodele Fayose, Nyesom Wike, Asari Dokubo, etc, all of them acting the scripts of their Ph.D holding President and Leader Goodluck Ebele Jonathan became so concerned and interested about who would emerge the Presidential Candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC). They were so concerned at that time that an Oyo politician now Member of the House of Representatives from Igbeti on the platform of APC, Otunba Bosun Oladele, had to intervene saying the PDP had no business bothering about who would emerge APC candidate except that they had something to hide.
The PDP were so inconsistently agitated and self-inflicted with worries as, even before the APC primaries, they were already running their damagers against the person of General Muhammadu Buhari at that time with heavily sponsored television, radio and newspapers advertorials even using the late daughter of the General to whip him and all of that.
What PDP did at that time was better called “dirty” politics, never experienced in any democratic society of the world but, despite the huge false propaganda, they failed to bring down the Presidential destiny of General Buhari. Not even the bombing of his convoy, which was later allegedly paid for by PDP Federal Government supervised by Asari Dokubo with over 47 lives lost, succeeded in stopping the emergence of the Daura, Katsina State-born former Military Head of State of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
In the end, Buhari emerged and, before ‘Jack’ was called, “Mallam” Muhammadu Buhari had picked “Pastor” Yemi Osinbajo and the struggle proper began. PDP then moved beyond the political terrain right into the Church giving all manners of contracts to General Overseers and they include the GO of Winners Chapel, Oyedepo, who became nice-man repairing Federal and state roads (although axis which favoured his Church business) and was distributing electricity transformers to communities around his Winner Chapel Ota area to the extent that many community people no longer believed in getting transformers from government as they were always writing application letters to Oyedepo for transformers for their community electrification.
Another Church contractor of the era was Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, who was also the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). Oritsejafor was fought by many other pastors and prophets for positioning only himself around President Jonathan blocking others from accessing the Villa. He was later discovered to be the major contractor buying and supplying weapons and other military equipment to the Nigerian Armed Forces although, much as that was ongoing, troops of the Nigerian Army were still, because of lack of modern equipment, being defeated at battle thereby chased away into the territory of a neighbouring country of Cameroon as a result of overpowering firepower of the Boko Haram insurgents.
President Jonathan then made a request for PDP’s David Mark-led Senate to approve a $1 billion loan for him to prosecute the Boko Haram war which was granted. Despite the $1 billion approved and taken by that administration, February 28, 2015 general elections were still postponed for six weeks because Boko Haram had, this time, taken over 27 Local Governments across North East and had hoisted their flag on the soil of the place they then called their own Nation. Little did anybody know that asking for $1 billion loan to fight Boko Haram was just an effort at face value as billions of dollars had been taken through the offices of National Security Adviser (NSA) and Diector-General, National Intelligence Agency (NIA), instead of actually using same to fully equip the military and our police to fight the terrorists to save the souls of innocent citizens that died during the course of the challenges, which were (as now exposed by the Buhari government) distributed mainly into the individual pockets of PDP leaders and officials.
It was worse that, while the opposition APC was raising money through ICT-based means and persecuted by the PDP government which blocked their means of generating funds for their campaigns, no single PDP person spent his personal money for 2015 campaigns of the then much touted “Africa’s biggest party”, whose main business was Turn-by-Turn Nigeria Limited. All the money that was spent on those PDP campaigns were taken at will, and with impunity without recourse to the fear of posterity, and spent so much that Musiliu Obanikoro, then Minister of State II Defence took N700 million to run a one-day anti-Boko Haram rally in Lagos, Femi Fani-Kayode took N850 million by virtue of his office as Director of Media for the Goodluck Jonathan Presidential Campaign Organisation, Raymond Dokpesi took N2.6 billion for publicity purposes which was mainly the damagers he ran on AIT/Raypower and supported then by NTA under PDP government.
Furthermore, Governor Ayodele Fayose, who earlier in 2014 had been funded on his governorship project with $35 million still from the blood money from NSA’s office, joined by paying what someone estimated at N20 million per placement of wraparound adverts in selected newspapers including Punch, Sun, Vanguard etc already announcing and celebrating the obituary of would-be APC Candidate Muhammadu Buhari. They did more and I will not be forgiven if I fail to mention how a particular woman in the person of Diezani Allison-Madueke bought an estate running into 13 billion pounds sterling in London. I was aware of this right from when they were in power far before Buhari government now exposed it and then told us later that apart from London property, she had bought almost all the houses in Banana Estate of Lagos. That was the nature of the government before Muhammadu Buhari-led APC Federal Government. Yet you have some journalists who still packed this woman, Diezani, as cancer-ridden patient and so trying to seek public sympathy to enable her escape justice. By the way she was then packaged, she looked like would die the next day but the former Minister of Petroleum Resources is still alive today. What manner of media men do we have today?! Will Baba Babatunde Jose and the likes of Chief Bisi Onabanjo be happy with these infested journalists if they have opportunity to wake up again and see what is happening today? Reason living journalism fathers like Chief Segun Osoba, Chief Edie Aderinokun, Alhaji Kola Animasaun, Chief Tola Adeniyi, Alhaji Femi Abbas, Alhaji Yekin Jimoh, Mr. Ben Laurence, Sir Bisi Lawrence, Igwe Alex Nwokedi, Uncle Sam Amuka-Pemu and others should please rise to the challenge and call these today journalists to order.
These same people now having realized the weight of their sins and crimes have taken to unreasonable criticisms to the extent that some of them even had the gut to challenge the APC Federal Government to mention one person who stole money under the watch of their PDP Federal Government or keep quiet permanently. But when the APC government gave them a List of the First Six, the very person who called for that list, National Chairman of the PDP Uche Secondus, topped the list became the first person that kicked and threatened to sue the person of Alhaji Lai Mohammed who released the list as Minister of Information and Culture. As he was preparing his suit papers, Lai Mohammed released another but bigger list and Secondus ran to court where he slammed him with N500 million as if Mohammed was doing that for person gain only for another enlisted looter to come up and slam the same Lai Mohammed with suit of N1 billion and even Olisa Metuh, whose voluntary confession to stealing of N400 million has no hiding place, had to threaten the Minister also to remove his name from the list. Then Femi Fani-Kayode too did. What a shameless people in a sector of Nigerian politics!
In order to get away with their crimes of looting the country raw thereby plunging it into recession, they resorted to sponsoring insecurity in a way that diverted the attention of Nigerians from the progresses the Buhari administration was making in the fight against Boko Haram, fixing the economy, fight against corruption and we began to have the Niger Delta Avengers who blew oil installations that national daily output fell from 2.4 million barrel per day (BPD) to 800,000 bpd and all the refineries that had already been fixed under five months of Buhari in office became ineffective as pipelines supplying crude oil into the facilities were blown off. Unfortunately, these same PDP people, still leaking the wounds of their election defeat earlier in the year 2015, jumped up in support of the economic terrorism. They even claimed it was democratic right they exercised by whipping sentiments against the effort of President Buhari to use military measure to stop the Avengers who later became exposed as having been established right from the time of Jonathan government in expectation that they would be handy in event Buhari won the election, which was what they did.
The current Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu was one of the supporters. Femi Fani-Kayode was another. Ayodele Fayose was one. And as the government was getting out of that with just a military exercise, IPOB started and it was the same Ekweremadu, Fani-Kayode and Fayose that were seen behind it until another military experience in term of Python Dance forced them into their enclave. It therefore became worrisome that a people who want to rule their own country could have, for cheer selfish interest, been satisfied to destroy the same country they want to rule economically, politically, socially and morally. That was exactly the nature of the opposition politics that we have seen especially as 2019 thickens. It therefore makes one wonder who will allow things like this to go on and say it is democracy at play. No way!
Lest I conclude, these hardened, desperate politicians running dangerous politics with fake news, hate speeches, dangerous rumours and even sponsoring and promoting killings of innocent citizens tagging the killers as “herdsmen” or “Northerners” or “Muslims” just to smear the chances of the President ahead of 2019 are doing so because they are working on the intelligence level of majority of the Nigerian masses who do not have the culture of probity. They just take information as it comes without asking questions and the Nigerian Media community makes the situation worse by allowing itself to be compromised by the ill-gotten wealth of the looters. And where the media is not sincere with the nation’s environment where it operates, what you have is that, much as the government of the day is doing a lot for the good of the people, the people themselves being saved from the hooks and grips of the wicked, self-acclaimed “Owners of the Society” will themselves be the fighters against the government that is sacrificing all it has to save them. That is why it appears there is louder voice fighting Buhari government than supporting it.
But Nigerians are also wonderful people, once they have carefully prepared facts and they can match them with the realities on ground, they quickly adjust. It is the reason those efforts by Niger Delta Avengers, IPOB, reactivated Boko Haram insurgency, Christian Association of Nigeria/PDP-designed “herdsmen” imbroglio and twists of the President’s statements as well as meetings of Bukola Saraki, Dino Melaye, Ibrahim Babangida, Atiku Abubakar, Olusegun Obasanjo, TY Danjuma and others including those in the coalition of Retired Christian Generals have failed their initiators and sponsors. This nature of Nigerians also unknown to Obasanjo, he wrote his 18-page letter thinking it would ginger the already mounted confusion without knowing that the Muhammadu Buhari government is not by self volition but one aided directly from the presence of the Almighty Allah.
So, they take to incessant criticisms ahead of time so that by the time the Government will begin to clampdown on them, they will now cry out saying, “The APC government is fighting us because we are opposition”. That, they have done already and it is the reason lawyers like Barrister Monday Onyekachi Ubani, respected for his straightforwardness in the Project of Change Nigeria have easily fallen for the sentiments and are now at par with those who are struggling hard to whip up sentiments to escape justice.
It is therefore up to President Buhari and his government team to realise this fact and not allow them to escape. How they do this? In court, all looters should be the ones to prove how they get their allegedly looted money not the prosecutors. That is the area they use technicality to win against the State. It must stop. No prosecutor knows how a thief steals. It is the thief that should tell the court what job he does that he is able to amass the kind of wealth he is being tried for. And anyone who proves stubborn should be put in his right place.
* Adefaka is a Lagos-based media practitioner.
