SERAP noted that it is an opportunity for the anti-graft agency to show that former heads of state and other high-ranking public officials are not immune from investigation and prosecution for allegations of grand corruption in Nigeria.

“This probe is something, which SERAP has consistently called for. Nigerians have for far too long been denied justice and the opportunity to get to the bottom of why they continue to pay the price for corruption in the electricity sector–staying in darkness, but still made to pay crazy electricity bills.”

According to reports, the EFCC has begun the probe of the $16 billion power project of the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo. While some put the exact cost of the project at $16 billion others say it is $13.8 billion. Key contractors and about 18 top public officers allegedly involved in the power project scam during the Obasanjo administration, and those of former Presidents Umaru Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan, may also be arrested.

SERAP, in a statement signed on Sunday by its deputy director, Kolawole Oluwadare, said: “The probe is timely, especially coming at a time of citizens’ frustrations at persistent allegations of corruption and the impacts on their human rights. Investigating allegations of grand corruption and prosecuting former heads of state and other high-ranking officials where such allegations show relevant and sufficient admissible evidence would address the grave travesty that has for many years occurred in the power sector.”

The organization also added: “The EFCC should urgently invite anyone suspected to be involved for questioning. The agency should also expand the probe to cover the alleged squandering of a total of N11 trillion in the power sector between 1999 and 2015, and the unresolved case of the reported missing $12.4 billion oil windfall, allegedly spent between 1988 and 1993 by the government of former military dictator, General Ibrahim Babangida.”

“The EFCC has the full support of Nigerians in its efforts to hold high-ranking public officials to account for grand corruption, and if consistently, fairly and diligently pursued, this probe would contribute to ending impunity for corruption, and to mobilizing and encouraging youth civic engagement in the anti-graft fight in the country. SERAP stands ready to work with the EFCC in pursuing all allegations of grand corruption.

“SERAP notes that former presidents have routinely faced corruption charges in countries like Iceland, Kyrgyzstan, Brazil, Montenegro, South Korea, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Slovakia, Peru, and Mauritius, and the probe by the EFCC would mean this list would grow even further to include Nigeria.

“Impunity for grand corruption will continue as long as high-ranking public officials go largely unpunished for their alleged crimes. It is by pursuing these allegations and taking the evidence before the court that the truth will be revealed and justice best served. Addressing impunity in the power sector should be total. This would help to further public perception of fairness and thoroughness.

“Lack of regular electricity supply in the country had occasioned many other problems, including lack of access to potable water. The failure by successive governments to tell Nigerians the truth about allegations of corruption in the power sector amounts to a failure to ensure that electricity services are progressively made available, on the basis of equality and non-discrimination.

“In November 2016, SERAP petitioned the former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen, urging him to probe the alleged spending of the $16 billion. In April 2017, SERAP sent President Muhammadu Buhari an open letter, advising him to take allegations of corruption in the power sector to the international criminal courts to ensure that justice is served.

“SERAP has also called on Mr Buhari to refer the alleged $16 billion spending on electricity between 1999 and 2007 to the EFCC. Mr Buhari subsequently raised questions over the issues, saying that ‘one of the former Heads of State was bragging that he spent more than 15 billion American dollars, not naira, on power. Where is the power? Where is the power?

“In August 2017, SERAP published a report, ‘From Darkness to Darkness: How Nigerians are Paying the Price for Corruption in the Electricity Sector’, which revealed how over N11 trillion meant to provide regular electricity supply was allegedly squandered under the governments of former presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan”, the statement concluded.

Meanwhile, the said report reads: “The Obasanjo’s administration spent $10 billion on NIPP with no results in terms of increase in power generation. $13.278,937,409.94 was expended on the power sector in eight years while unfunded commitments amounted to $12 billion.

“The Federal Government then budgeted a whopping N16 billion for the various reforms under Liyel Imoke (2003 to 2007) which went down the drains as it failed to generate the needed amount of electricity or meet the set goals. Imoke was alleged to have personally collected the sum of $7.8 million for the execution of the contract for the construction of the Jos-Yola Transmission Line, which was never executed. There were documented/reported allegations of corruption against Imoke that fizzled-out shortly thereafter.”

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The post SERAP reacts to $16bn power projects, backs EFCC’s decision to probe past govts’ spending appeared first on MegaIcon Magazine.

The first is that, President Muhammadu Buhari may be the last Nigerian president. We will get so riled as a people by this daily bloodshed inflicted on us by an evading army of bloodthirsty Fulani nomads, sauced by Buhari’s obvious unpretentious Fulani leader leadership of Nigeria, that the hurt regions will demand, with a baffling stubbornness, their right to go their different ways. This equation is still mutating in the womb of time. Second, and the most apparent, which is also related to the former, is that Buhari is certainly unfolding as an un-Nigerian Nigerian president. We do not need a diviner to look into the Ouija-board for us to know the apparentness of these obvious permutations. I will explain presently.

Mrs. Funke Olakunrin was said to have been killed by yet unidentified but suspected Fulani herdsmen along the Ondo-Ore road. The killers, according to a modus operandi that is a profile of their brutality in the South West of Nigeria, were said to have suddenly emerged from their bush domicile, taken over the highway and began sporadic and indiscriminate shooting at oncoming vehicles. In the process, Mrs. Olakunrin was hit.

As I write this, the omnibus reactions from Buhari’s regimented information machinery is yet to be unleashed on the information highway. They will, assuredly. Buhari will express his regrets at this nefarious activity – a la his information night soil men; he will talk tough; he may even order the Inspector General of Police to vacate his “slimming, hard-working session” (excuse me while I laugh!) to make Ondo State his temporary office. His Man Friday, Yemi Osinbajo, may even be hurriedly suborned to visit Pa Fasoranti to advertise a governmental contrite face, talk tough in the process and get photo-ops suggestive of government’s decision to rout the banditry. Mark my words: You will never hear Buhari, the Nigerian President, personally verbalizing these alleged regrets.

Second, there will never be, as there has never been, any arrest to be made. Third, the Buhari online cyber leopards will be unleashed on the stratosphere to bay our blood. They will straddle the information highway with justifications, rationalizations and permutations to explain off this unfortunate killing. Their recruits, many of whom hail from Fasoranti’s ethnic stock, will tell us how even in America, such killings are no big deal. Anyone like us who volunteers an opinion contrary to legitimizing Buhari’s Fulani ascendancy, they will argue with certainty of algebra, yesterday held a meeting with Atiku Abubakar, bribed with huge sacks of dollars to say what they are saying. All Progressives Congress (APC) governors in the South West will convoke on Fasoranti’s house like mourning Salamanders to shed crocodile tears; they may even call an emergency meeting “to address the menacing insecurity” in the region. They are all a familiar route of the tragedy of the dead burying their dead that has become our lot as Nigerians under Buhari.

The killers of Nigerians, said to be Fulani by their victims, have literally strewn themselves round many parts of the country. Why South West is the core place of harbor they chose to moor their deadly ship is yet inexplicable. Hardly does a week pass without this apparent alien force, deadly and without any iota of humanity, unleashing weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth on their victims. It will appear that their banditry and blood-thirstiness are gaining notoriety by the day, encouraged by a government that is ostensibly not bothered by the incessant blood spillage and is thus flinging its hands up in surrender.

Things have gone really very bad in Nigeria under Buhari. The most bothersome is that neither he nor any member of his government is bothered about the calamity that this portends. The division and ethnic fissures in the country have become hugely pronounced in the last four years. Issues that separate us are the most dominant of the things that link us together today.  There has never been a moment – perhaps, except during the civil war – when divisions of ethnicity, religion and political party affiliations have been this pronounced. Buhari is apparently not bothered. In his silence, his pronouncements, body language, appointments and other indices of governance, he does not pretend that he is not an Un-Nigerian Nigerian President. He is Fulani, Hausa and then probably Nigerian, in that order. The last, for him, is secondary.

Those who can lend their voice on the side of right and righteousness have shut their mouths, lest they be tar-brushed with ink of tribe or party. You must be a PDP lickspittle to ask Buhari to respect the contours of our nationhood pretentions. Those of us who volunteer opinion, do so at the huge risk of being demonized. Yet, it will be criminal conspiracy to allow this sorry pass under the Buhari government become a model without a voice of dissent.

The way things are playing out in Nigeria, Buhari’s silence on killings in the country, which are becoming really alarming, will continue, probably till 2023. I remember Ilorin, Kwara State-born Ddadakwada music exponent, Late Odolaye Aremu, warning us that with the rain that is yet to subside, no one can claim to be immune from the drench of its merciless downpour. So those who are abetting Buhari in this drive should continue in their follies. I have, countless times, psycho-analyzed Buhari as seeing himself as a Fulani President and not what we thought he should be – the Nigerian President. To reinforce this psychosis, he looks away from the bad of his ethnicity and shovels goods in its way. The RUGA policy is an attempt to do the latter and the killings by herdsmen example the former. In the last 20 years of Nigeria’s democratic experiment, the closest to Buhari as an un-Nigerian Nigerian president is Goodluck Jonathan. But even Jonathan is far way out of the class of Buhari in ethnic irredentism. It took Olusegun Obasanjo a straight ethnic jab out of power to realize what Obafemi Awolowo saw decades ago about him merely queuing up at the bus-stop of people whose orientation is basically provincial. If Obasanjo is accosted in the private today, he will express his regrets.

Umaru Yar’Adua was very nationalistic in his thought process. You will recall that he was the one who began granting Niger Delta militants amnesty. The major blight on Jonathan’s national apparel was when he denied that his kinsmen, the MEND militants were blowing up installations. He also ensconced his government with his native South-South people. It also manifested when this same Niger Delta ascendancy aspiration and Northern Nigeria machination theory of his blinded him from believing security reports on the kidnap of over 200 girls from their dormitory. Jonathan’s variant of Buhari’s irredentism was reinforced further by his wife’s brusque and infelicitous we no dey born pikin trowey thesis.

In the case of Buhari, the rest of Nigeria, except his Fulani/North, were like the farmer who cultivated a groundnut plantation beside a squirrel-infested forest who, after the squirrels mowed down his plantation, now laments his loss. We should have known from the outset that he was irredentist in cognition. We were blindfolded by the quantum of hate provoked against Jonathan by leg-men of Buhari’s party. When Buhari harangued Jonathan for attacking our Boko Haram, upbraided late Oyo State governor, Lam Adesina for “your people attacking my people” on this selfsame Fulani attacks in the North of Oyo State, Buhari was acting the unshakeable script of a permanent mind construct. No matter how many people are killed by these thirsty hound kinsmen of his, the C-in-C will not budge.

What that tells me is that, if and when Buhari eventually leaves office in 2023, whoever takes over from him cannot act out the script of a Nigerian Presidency any longer. If he is Igbo, his people will prevail on him to remember that their own time too had come; if he is Yoruba, his people will tell him to learn from the pitfalls of Obasanjo who believed, to his eternal regret, that he represented a non-existent nation called Nigeria.

I extend my condolences to Pa Fasoranti on this huge loss. The inexplicable way of providence manifested in this avoidable murder. How good would it have been if the child of the person murdered was that of those who tell us daily that there is no Fulani onslaught in the South West or even in Nigeria; that kidnappings and killings by nefarious Fulani herdsmen – of course with the connivance of accursed Yoruba accomplices – are only the rheum off the nostrils of those overblowing it for political advantage?

The post Fasoranti and rise of Nigeria’s un-Nigerian President | By Festus Adedayo first appeared on MegaIcon Magazine.

The post Fasoranti and rise of Nigeria’s un-Nigerian President | By Festus Adedayo appeared first on MegaIcon Magazine.

The post Have you prayed for President Buhari today? first appeared on MegaIcon Magazine.

The post Have you prayed for President Buhari today? appeared first on MegaIcon Magazine.