By Steve Osuji
EMEFIELE AS SCAPEGOAT:
The Tinubu administration which can be better described as a house of sleaze seems to have created a buffer and a punching bag for its graft-sodden state.
Even our so-called Senate President, Godswill Akpabio has found his voice. He has just revealed to us that former CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele’s crimes are so bad that government is unsure what to charge him with. Perhaps there are no crimes afterall.
It gets curiouser. It seems that as the Tinubu government sinks deeper, it loses touch with reality.
How could Akpabio forget that he was part of the failed Buhari administration?
Hear him: Tinubu inherited an economic mess from President Muhammadu Buhari, and Emefiele is to be blamed. The economic situation left by Emefiele was terrible.
Akpabio seems to forget that he was the last minister of Niger Delta Affairs and no notable project was recorded by him for four years. Not in the Ministry, not in NDDC. In fact, NDDC board was not convened under Akpabio’s watch.
If Akpabio has forgotten how he pole-vaulted to APC, we can remind him a bit. EFCC happened upon his humongous loot as governor of Akwa Ibom State. He was about to he detained when he fled to Paris to meet Tinubu who after helping himself to his fill on Akpabio’s loot, took him to London to see President Buhari… he was allowed to join APC and his sins were immediately forgiven. But not before he had agreed to use a chunk of the funds he stole from Akwa Ibom people to bankroll President Buhari’s 2019 reelection. This earned Akpabio the Niger Delta Affairs ministerial slot. It has also kept him in power today as Senate President.
This is Akpabio’s current political history. He forgets he’s the poster boy of corruption of this dispensation, the dark emblem of this lurid age.
SOME BACKGROUND TO THE EMEFIELE STORY: Let us recap the Emefiele story a bit: Between June 10, and December 23, 2O23, a period of over six months, Mr Godwin Emefiele, was in the custody of President Bola Tinubu’s federal government. Emefiele who was governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), was virtually abducted from his Ikoyi, Lagos home by the DSS (Department of State Service) and hauled to Abuja. While the DSS kept Emefiele in detention they turned his person and his residences upside-down and inside out for about four months.
They found nothing incriminating against him. The world is still waiting for Nigeria’s supposedly intelligence agency to recant and apologise to Emefiele who they accused of financing terrorism and committing economic crimes. Well, they found a little ‘toy’ gun after tearing down his residences.
Thankfully, the courts threw all these silly allegations out.
Thankfully again, a court recently granted Emefiele N100m in damages against the federal government for violation of his rights.
Apparently not satisfied with the DSS doodling with Emefiele for one month without “expected” results, President Bola Tinubu in July last year, recruited Mr Jim Obazee as so-called Special Financial Investigator even as Emefiele was still held in the cages of the DSS.
Obazee who was fired in 2017 as Executive Secretary of the Financial Regulatory Commission of Nigeria (FRCN) was ostensibly detailed to comb through the Emefiele era at the CBN. Shorn of all the lies about investigating other Government Business Entities (GBEs), Obazee zeroed in on the nine-year stint of Emefiele at the CBN.
Again Obazee seemed not to find anything tangible to nail Emefiele, but like a man on a mission, the so-called investigator started releasing snippets of spurious findings to the media to achieve a propaganda motive of damaging Emefiele and to safe face for a failed investigation.
No official public presentation of the report of the investigation; no review panel, no white paper, yet the Federal Government hastily implemented the so-called report by dismantling the management and board of four money deposit banks: Union, Titan, Polaris and Keystone banks.
OBAZEE: A HATCHET MAN AND HIS DECEITFUL REPORT:
Just like the investigator has a record of doing hatchet jobs in the past, this one too has been described by financial experts as a poor outing. Recall that the same Obazee was used in the past by different presidents to hound former CBN Governor, Lamido Sanusi and Atedo Peterside of Stanbic-IBTC.
Back to the current report, most of about a dozen issues raised against Emefiele, have come across as lacking in substance, even on the face of it. Let’s consider a few.
First, Obazee reported that President Buhari didn’t approve the Naira redesign policy. But Buhari’s approval was in public domain then and now. In a recent interview with the NTA, November 20, 2023, former President Buhari restated that he approved the naira redesign to ensure his “integrity became unquestionable.” Why would Obazee lie about this open fact? Why should we trust his entire report?
Obazee reported that CBN under Emefiele had 593 foreign accounts in the USA, UK and CHINA. Assuming this to be true, are these accounts operated by Emefiele? What quantum of transactions? By whom? And when? These are simple riddles Obazee ought to have resolved to make his report credible in the eyes of reasonable people. If Emefiele had put as much as a thousand dollars in any of these accounts for personal purposes, surely Obazee would have made a mountain of it.
The report also fingered Emefiele for having a hand in the restructure and sale of some banks. This allegation seems to have died on arrival as the CBN never mentioned this serious malfeasance when it changed the board and management of these banks. CBN only told Nigerians that the action had been taken as a result of some unspecified financial infringements by the affected banks’ officials.
One more example of Obazee’s seeming spurious charges against Emefiele is what is described as “fraudulent economic interventions.” The question here is: how could the restriction of access to forex for 44 products Nigeria can produce be termed fraudulent? Why should Nigeria burn forex importing toothpicks, vegetable oils, tomato puree, and such others? Why should CBN provide forex at official rates for the importation of food in 2023?
This is the policy Obazee describes as “fraudulent”. We all have seen the naira fall like humpty-dumpty since this policy was reversed by this government. It’s a fact that naira has fallen by about 75 percent since Emefiele was illegally yanked off his tenured position as CBN governor.
DSS, SPECIAL INVESTIGATOR AND EFCC:
On October 26, 2023, after over four months of intensive investigation with nothing to nail him with, DSS apparently suffered Emefiele fatigue and handed him over to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). As a matter of fact, this is the agency meant to investigate the matter in the first place.
The EFCC quickly rushed to the press and then the court with a N9b procurement fraud against Emefiele. This charge was later to be amended to N1.2 billion. Even this case has fizzled out as witnesses have debunked it.
Apparently frustrated that it can’t place its knee on Emefiele’s neck, EFCC has decided to embark on a nine-year scrutiny of CBN’s foreign exchange transactions.
Wow! Daily forex transactions for nine years? That’s some helluva investigation even an expanded CIA economic unit will never be able to carry through in one year!
EFCC only resorted to harassing major manufacturers like Dangote Group, BUA Group and other heavy users of forex to have them submit their records of the last nine years. Of course what we have here is classic example of EVIDENCE HUNTING AFTER A FALSE CHARGE.
It’s remarkable that nearly a dozen charges previously brought against Emefiele by the DSS, EFCC and Special Investigator, including the finagling of N7.2 trillion, all fell flat. Only one charge is in court now, forgery to obtain $6.2m.
IS EMEFIELE A SAINT OR A SMART ALEC?
We wager that he has to be a SAINT. No other Nigerian public official can withstand this level of scrutiny and investigation without a whale of financial malfeasance to put such a person away for life.
Godwin Emefiele indeed deserves a special commendation for rare integrity and honesty in public office. Nine years as governor of the apex bank and subjected to the most vicious investigation yet no of direct “heavy lifting” or personal gains found against him. This column wagers that Godswill Akpabio can not withstand seven minutes of scrutiny by DSS or EFCC. No minister since Buhari’s administration till date can withstand investigation.
And we ask: why is Betta Edu not being tried? Why is Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo not being tried? What about Sadiya Umar-Farouq, Hadi Sirika, Halima Shehu, etc?
This column also insists for the umpteenth time, that Emefiele is being pursued by Tinubu for implementing Buhari’s naira redesign policy which prevented Tinubu from raising cash for massive vote buying. This is Emefiele main crime and nothing more. This is why Tinubu want to jail Emefiele by hook or crook.
Emefiele has undergone untold persecution and witch-hunt as has been suggested in here the past. In that case, when all this is over, and the climate becomes more civilized around here, Emefiele would be put up for beatification.
Osuji, an accomplished Journalist, Columnist, was on the Editorial Board of The Nation Newspapers. He was, also, Special Adviser, Media to a former Governor of Imo State, The Rt. Honourable Emeka Ihedioha
