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| Mr. Tony Eluemunor. |
By Tony Eluemunor
Saturday, 2 November 2019, I
detailed out the meat of the various Police statements Nuhu Ribadu wrote
concerning the whopping $15m bribery he claimed he rejected while he was
Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
His Nigerian statement
contradicted the one he made in London. His successor, Mr. Ibrahim Lamorde, in
his single statement, contradicted Ribadu. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)
staff seconded to EFCC, Mr. James Garba’s statement tallied with Larmorde’s as
both contradicted Ribadu’s. For instance, where Ribadu claimed that Chief James
Onanefe Ibori, the former Governor of Delta state’s boys or servants brought
out the two bags filled with dollars and gave to him, both Lamorde and Garba
made it crystal clear that neither Ibori nor Ribadu was there when they picked
up the money from Andy Ubah’s house as Ubah himself directed his some men to
bring out the money. Garba said that under Ubah’s direction, his boys loaded
the huge but lone bag of money into the booth of Lamorde’s Avensis car.
To make confusion worse confounded,
former President Olusegun Obasanjo wrote in his book, MY WATCH that he
approached Ibori to make restitution to Delta state as a result of which he
brought some money to Ribadu . I wonder why even Obasanjo would have
taken himself so seriously as to put that reasoning which is totally
bereft of common sense into a book that he would want people to take seriously.
Under what law was Obasanjo acting? If none, then why would he expect anyone
not to take that as an obvious fib? Or why would anyone so incriminate himself?
Or, would that not have been a guilty plea even before a case got before any
court? But in case you are asking the obvious question, if that were true, why
did that turn into a bribe to the EFCC chairman?
Then Andy Uba stunned the world
when he called all the others who spoke on the matter, liars. But EFCC
lawyer, Mr. Rotimi Jacobs grandly contradicted all by saying in court that the
EFCC received the bribe money from “unknown agents of Chief James Ibori”.
Unknown agents? I thought Ribadu and Obasanjo had said that the money came,
DIRECTLY, from Ibori? Pray, how many versions should a single event have …if it
is being truthfully rendered?
Hey, I did not set out to just
repeat myself today. I recounted the essence of my write up of last week to
raise another important issue; whether morals do matter in how we evaluate the
achievements of even anti—corruption tsars or graft-fighting Presidents or
those who pretend to do so. And if we fail to, what would stop them from
becoming not just monsters but hypocrites as well? Hypocrtical monsters?
Waoh!
Actually, DO MORALS
MATTER is a title of a book written by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. who is the
University Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He
is a renowned scholar of Politics and International Relations. The publishers,
Oxford University Press, will not release this book into the market until next
year. But its preview in the current edition of the widely
respected Foreign Policy magazine annexed my interest. The book provides the
ethics score card of each American President since 1945. Most especially, the
book establishes a scorecard for each President's ethical decisions.
Hmmm! Does any Nigerian care about
the ethics of our leaders, police and military personnel, judges and lawyers,
Permanent Secretaries? Are our law enforcement agents ethical officers? Does it
matter if they aren’t? Or back to the point, did Ribadu lie in that bribery
allegation? Can his claim that he rejected a $15m bribe stand any real test if
his statements and the statements of the persons I mentioned are seriously
considered?
I decided to walk this path this
Saturday because a few of the reactions to my article in the Saturday Vanguard
of 2 November 2019, from some old students of my secondary school, appear to
show that they did not appreciate the importance of the topic. In fact, two of
them totally missed the whole point. Heh the article also mentioned as an
aside, some journalists at Daily Independence newspaper. I said that an MD of
the newspaper approved the purchase of a newspaper printing press timing belt
for N180 thousand but later cut it down to N120 thousand. In his newspaper’s
management meeting of this week Monday, nobody asked him why he so bushwhacked
the organisation he heads.
Beyond that, just because I brought up some
shenanigans in that organisation, he and his Terrible T Puppet Master (who runs
down every organisation he touches, and who destroys every promising
journalist who dares to do things the riight way, decided to stop the paper
from publishing me. This reminds me of W.B. Yeats “Things fall apart; the
centre cannot hold…The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled
with passionate intensity.” I'm happy I have the conviction to rage against
their passionate intensity.
Now, why is Donald Trump facing
impeachment proceedings? He is accused of trying to pressure Ukraine into
investigating unsubstantiated corruption claims against his political rival,
Joe Biden, and his son who worked with Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Finish.
That is not as bad as the transgressions of a President who falsified events
and cooked up allegations against his political opponents or his pretentious
anti-graft hypocrite who would claim to have rejected a hefty bribe when nobody
bribed him. That is why I keep reminding us to discuss this issue.
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