Emefiele: Victim Of Vicious Political Witch-hunt

By Steve Osuji

HUNTING FOR EVIDENCE AFTER DETENTION: It’s exactly 100 days today since he has been under President Bola Tinubu’s supervised detention.

On the 10th of June,  former CBN governor, Mr Godwin Emefiele was literally abducted from his Ikoyi, Lagos home by men of the Department of State Services, DSS, and chaperoned to Abuja, handcuffs and all.

Since then he has not returned home. He has not been released. Over half a dozen court orders for him to be released or granted bail have been ignored by the Bola Tinubu administration. And the president professes to be a democrat. Maybe there are democrats who are not supposed to obey court orders or who are above the law.

WHAT’S EMEFIELE’S OFFENCE?: Why is Emefiele being detained for so long without trial? Why is President Tinubu so mean and vicious towards Emefiele? No other CBN governor has been so treated with such indignity and ignominy. Straight away, analysts suggest that this is a witch-hunt,  an outright vendetta against the former CBN governor for supporting President Muhammadu Buhari’s naira redesign policy of late last year which curbed vote-buying during the February 25th 2O23 Presidential Election.  It is said that in APC’s bad blood politics,  Buhari didn’t want his party’s candidate, Tinubu to win but knowing that he had enormous cash power to buy up the votes, the sudden naira redesign was a ploy to stymie cash flow and damage Tinubu’s chances at the polls. It is said that Tinubu who hadn’t lost any election in Lagos before lost the last one because there wasn’t sufficient cash to push to the voters.

100 DAYS OF SEARCHING FOR EVIDENCE TO NAIL EMEFIELE : Other than the above, not even 100 days of intense and relentless investigation has produced an actionable offence against Emefiele. This is a checklist of offences so far proffered against Emefiele which never held water in court.

▪︎ DSS first accused him of terrorism financing and economic sabotage bordering on security breach. They quietly dropped the charge apparently because it was a ruse.

▪︎ Next, after about six weeks of detention and investigation, which included ransacking his homes, they charge him with possession of firearms and ammunition. The evidence turned out to he a shotgun, more like a toy gun. The DSS must have been too embarrassed to show up in court with a laughable evidence such as this against a former governor of a country’s apex bank.

▪︎ The evidence hunt continued and a forensic audit was initiated at the CBN. And voila! DSS eventually found the ‘smoking gun’! They claimed they had unearth a procurement deal amounting to about N6.1 billion which Emefiele approved as CBN governor. This watery evidence must have crashed as they soon found out that CBN is run by a board and not a dictator. There’s a chain of approving authorities.

▪︎ A report and accounts of the bank from 2016 to 2023 was hurriedly released in the bid to nail the suspended Emefiele, but the report had nothing incriminating on the former CBN chief.

▪︎ Currently, a special investigator, Mr. Jim   Obazee, former chairman of the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN) has been put on the job to nail Emefiele by all means. He has been scouring the books of the CBN and that of all Government Business Entities (GBE) for a couple of months but nothing unearthed!

However,  a media propaganda has been set off that a N7 trillion fraud involving Emefiele is about to be unravelled. For months of detention by the DSS, nothing could be found to prosecute Mr Emefiele; all the forensic auditing so far has yielded nothing, but the media is filled with outlandish headlines of the greatest fraud in the history of Nigeria.

PRESSED TO RESIGN UNDER DURESS: The president had committed an illegality ab initio by suspending Emefiele without any serious offence or infraction of the statutes since the office is a tenured one. The three months required for the acting position had elapsed without any headway, Emefiele was forced to resign while in detention. Tenured deputy governors were also pushed out on flimsy excuses. But it has come out that some part of the plot was to clear out the CBN and install Tinubu’s men.

That assignment seems concluded as Femi Cardoso, a Tinubu’s boy, has been appointed substantive CBN Governor with four new deputies made in Tinubu’s image. Thus has the CBN been completely captured.

SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE MINDLESS VENDETTA AGAINST EMEFIELE: The DSS is the first victim of this blind pursuit of Emefiele. The once pristine agency has been reduced to the lapdog of the presidency. And they are  doing the job without any shame or sense of self esteem.

Second,  they have proven to be unruly and lawless in doing the bidding of the president. They have disobeyed every law order made against them over the Emefiele case. They seem to violate the rights and freedom of Nigerians with a new found fervour, engendering autocracy. No law of the land allows the DSS to detain any Nigerian indefinitely!

They have also taken over the job of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). The investigation and prosecution of Emefiele borders on economic sabotage and has nothing to do with internal security.

Apart from the EFCC,  the judiciary has been denigrate and battered in this singular pursuit of personal vendetta of Mr. President. The judiciary is made a mockery of as its orders are ignored with impunity.

The financial system is also being disembowelled with auditing searchlight targeted at individuals instead of a holistic x-ray of the system.

Finally, the Tinubu administration is currently being remarked for its narrow-minded, vindictive hunt-down of perceived political enemies instead of reforming the entire system for the good of all. We aver that no Nigerian public official can survive the scrutiny Emefiele has been subjected to. Not even the president. Clamping a former CBN governor into detention for 100 days without any concrete charge and without nary a bail doesn’t do good to a government or a country at that. Governance by witch-hunt makes everyone a witch!

Osuji, an accomplished Journalist, Writer, Columnist, was Media Adviser to former Imo State Governor, Rt. Hon. Emeka Ihedioha