By FELIX OGUEJIOFOR ABUGU
From, as it were, the blast of the whistle, I never believed that the ceaseless, breathless harassment of the former CBN Governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, by the Bola Tinubu Administration over Emefiele’s part in the immediate past Administration of Muhammadu Buhari as Nigeria’s Number 1 Banker, had anything to do with any anti-corruption crusade by this government. As a matter of fact, Tinubu himself never mentioned anti-corruption as one of his fortes while on the campaign stomps and delivering those oft-incomprehensible electioneering speeches of his. And not even an Emefiele-is-guilty verdict in this heavily tainted trial in which this government would appear to have been walking from the answer in the past 10 months, will make one hold a contrary opinion: to all intents and purposes, this is a vindictive government.
And my opinion is my opinion, make no mistake about it. I hardly claim to speak for those who find time to read what I write. But I want to believe that in this very instance, there aren’t too many who won’t see Emefiele’s trial as a sham, certainly not after his investigation in the past 10 months by DSS, EFCC, Special Investigator Jim Obazee and now DELOITTE, an international business management consultant, with billions of naira and millions of dollars spent without any concrete evidence to nail the former CBN Governor. In fact, I refuse to be persuaded that this government already had enough dirt on Emefiele to take him in by June 10 last year, barely 11 days after Tinubu’s inauguration and a day after the former CBN Governor was suspended from office. I am more inclined to believe that, by his actions against Emefiele, obviously driven by personal venom against the former CBN Governor, our president was only serving notice not of his anti-corruption credentials but of his predilection for a bruising fight with, and merciless conquest of, his enemy, for not forgiving a hurt, real or imagined, but ruthlessly dealing with anyone who dared to trifle with him.
It is inconceivable, I insist, that less than two weeks after his inauguration, President Tinubu already had enough information on Emefiele’s alleged unilateral forex deals, with the attendant corruption, one of the most recurring charges against him, as to warrant the relentless hounding of the nation’s former Chief Banker the Jagaban Borgu would appear to have brought to bear on his presidential conducts. That they did not initially have (as they obviously do not have now) proven evidence against Emefiele clearly showed in the rather ridiculous charges they preferred against the man, including the fact that he was in possession of an illegal firearm, a Dane gun! Even now that they have finally arraigned the man with a fresh 26-count charge after the first set became rather too childish to stand, it had to take Emefiele’s five months in illegal detention, 10 months of DSS, EFCC, Jim Obazee’s Special CBN Investigation and DELOITTE ‘inquisitions’ and billions of naira and millions of scarce dollars down the drain for the federal government to finally press charges (all of which he pleaded not guilty to) against Emefiele. Many from other saner climes would certainly wonder aloud at our kind of jurisprudence!
What the more discerning Nigerians may since have come to the conclusion about, and have continued to hold up as the inalienable truth in, this debilitating Emefiele saga is that Emefiele is being hounded, even dehumanized, by the Tinubu Administration for two reasons. One is to completely discredit him and, by so doing, obfuscate the fact that President Tinubu acted out of order when he precipitously removed Emefiele who was occupying a tenured office as CBN Governor. The other is simply to punish and further discredit Emefiele for the “unforgivable” sin of presiding over a current policy, the naira redesign project of the immediate past Muhammadu Buhari’s rudderless administration, which then APC presidential candidate Bola Tinubu claimed, in January last year, at a campaign rally in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, was a plot to stop him from winning the February 25, 2023 presidential election. The policy was promoted by the Buhari government as a means of making politicians return stashed cash into CBN vaults, since the redesigned notes meant the stashed old notes could no longer be used. In this way, Buhari hoped to stop politicians from using such stashed loads of cash to buy votes. He, however, was too weak to effectively implement the laudable policy. But, by claiming that the policy was specifically designed to scuttle his presidential ambition, wasn’t Tinubu, wittingly or unwittingly, admitting that he had, indeed, stashed away plenty of cash to buy votes, a plot the naira redesign had obviously stymied?
But who cared? All we remember is that Tinubu boasted that he would win the election, despite the alleged obstacles deliberately placed in his way.
“They hoarded money, they hoarded naira; we will go and vote and we will win. Even if they change the ink on the naira notes, whatever their plans, it will come to naught. We are going to win,” Tinubu was to boast.
And he did, in fact, ‘win’. However, in a round-about, even cowardly act of witch-hunt, the president, rather than unleash his anger on the ‘owner’ of the naira redesign policy, former President Muhammadu Buhari himself, simply took it out on a weaker, hapless Godwin Emefiele, the nation’s monetary policy helmsman whose only offence, obviously, is that he served as CBN Governor under Buhari.
This sledge-hammer-on-a-fly kind of governance style is also called towing the line of least resistance. For, who, really, could speak for Emefiele against an all-powerful, all-conquering President Bola Tinubu whose ‘turn’ to be president Nigeria pulled out all the stops to accede to him? And so, for all of 200 days plus, Tinubu, in an act of vendetta masked as official anti-graft crusade, locked Emefiele away in Kuje Correctional Centre, the FCT, without charges, ignoring a multiple of valid court orders for his release. For a supposed financial crime allegedly committed by Emefiele, Tinubu ill-advisedly deployed the Department of State Security (DSS), the nation’s secret police, rather than the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), to deal with the situation, unconcernedly demonstrating to the Nigerian public, in words, body language et al, that he just couldn’t care less about the law or due process! All he cared, it seemed, was about his overarching power as a Nigerian president with all the temptation for him to act as he pleased.
The point is, besides his misuse of enforcement agencies in Emefelie’s arrest and arraignment, where exactly was the concrete evidence upon which the former CBN Governor was to be successfully prosecuted for the financial malfeasance evident in the alleged ‘unilateral’ allocation of forex by Emefiele while he presided over the CBN as Governor?
It says a lot about the Tinubu Administration’s financial crimes prosecution capabilities that none of the 17 charges dredged up against Emefiele by the CBN Special Investigator, Mr. Jim Obazee, stuck.
Well before his appointment in July last year by President Tinubu as special investigator to probe the activities of the CBN and related entities, Jim Obazee had served as the CEO of the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN) who was, however, sacked in 2017 by former President Buhari for ‘over-stepping’ his boundaries in the conduct of the affairs of his office. It can be said that Obazee was tailor-made for his latest assignment, assuming that President Tinubu needed a man angry enough at former President Buhari over his ignominious sack as the FRCN boss, to want to take a pound of flesh off the effete Katsina-born retired general, even if in an oblique way.
As renowned Editor and columnist, Mr. Steve Osuji, once wrote on the seemingly endless Emefiele saga, “for about 200 days of detention, investigation and indeed, media persecution, no charges against him has stuck: from terror financing to gun running, to helping himself with N7 trillion from the till, all these accusations fell flat even before they were brought before the court.”
Yet, that was not enough to discourage Special Investigator Obazee from coming out with his own rash of largely unproven charges against Emefiele, among them:
*That without authorization funded 593 bank accounts located in the USA, UK and China.
*That there was unapproved cash withdrawal of $6.23 million from the CBN vault purportedly approved by the president to pay foreign election observers.
*That Emiefele and at least 15 other individuals, including his deputy commissioners, were guilty of gross financial misconduct.
*That Mr. Emiefele kept 543.4 million pounds in fixed deposits.
*Manipulation of the naira exchange rate and perpetration of fraud in the e-Naira project of the CBN.
*That the naira redesign was neither recommended by the board of the CBN nor approved by the president.
*That the CBN printed the new N200, N500 and N1000 notes at a cost of N61.5 billion out of which N31.8 billion has been paid to the contractor.
*That the sum of N1.73 billion was spent on questionable legal fees on cases that are directly traceable to the naira redesign and reconfiguration agenda.
*That the sum of 205,000 pounds was paid to a UK firm for naira redesign effort including positioning of watermark, presence of QR codes, different numbering style, and other complex security features.
*That Emefiele indulged in ‘fraudulent’ use of Ways & Means to the tune of N26.627 trillion.
*That he is guilty of ‘fraudulent’ intervention programmes.
*That he indulged in ‘fraudulent’ expenditures on COVID-19.
*That he is guilty of ‘misrepresentation’ of presidential approval on the NESI Stabilization Strategy Ltd.
*That former President Buhari’s approval was padded to the tune f N198.96 billion, approximating N801.04 billion to N1 trillion.
*That No approvals were received from the former president and yet N500 billion was taken and debited through Ways & Means.
*That the former CBN Governor and four deputies connived to steal outright in order to balance the books of the CBN.
*That there was no approval for the breakdown of N22.72 trillion presented to the 9th National Assembly to illegally scrutinize the Ways and Means financing.
In a January 12, 2024 article also published by AbeyaNews online with the headline, Emefiele: Prosecution or persecution? (2), columnist and visiting member of The Guardian Editorial Board, Dr. Luke Onyekankeyah explained that “the foregoing represents the basket of allegations that have been heaped on the head of Emiefele.”
“The whole thing gives the impression that the CBN was being run like a one-man business enterprise where the CBN Governor had limitless latitude to do whatever he wanted without any form of restriction. But that cannot and should never have been the case for an elite institution like the CBN that has a board of directors. The board is supposed to be made up of eggheads that are versed in financial engineering of which the CBN Governor is just a primus inter-pares (one among equals),” he agonised.
“That is to say, although Emiefele was the head, he had no overriding powers to sway over the entire board members to do his bidding at all times except they all betrayed their integrity and compromised the elevated trust reposed in them. And that would have been unprecedented. Therefore, all the allegations bordering on no approvals and yet the action was implemented raises serious doubts.”
It means, in essence, that in the light of the foregoing, the question about Emefelie’s presumed dictatorial tendencies, a reason he could, as a mere primus inter-pares (one among equals), easily overrule every other member of the CBN Monetary Policy Committee and unilaterally allocate forex as pleased him, does bear repetition here: is forex allocation the responsibility of one man in the CBN? Of course not! We do know that forex allocation in the CBN is not done by one man. Therefore, Emefiele couldn’t have singlehandedly disbursed forex or corrupted the process.
But no matter. Eventually, Emefiele was released from detention on Wednesday, November 8 last year, five months after he was arrested by the Department of State Security (DSS) on 10 June last year and a day after he was suspended as CBN governor. Instructively, DSS only transferred the former CBN boss’s case to the EFCC in late last October, a few weeks before he was freed by an Abuja high court and allowed to go home that Wednesday November 8. Which means that after five months of total misapplication of its investigative resources, the DSS found practically nothing incriminating against Emefiele and had to turn tail and transfer the case to EFCC. In turn, the EFCC also took another five months, apparently with the help of Deloitte, the international accounting firm also hired by government at the cost of millions of dollars, to investigate the former CBN Governor and dredge up a ‘fresh 26-count charge’ against Mr. Emefiele.
The result of the five-month EFCC investigation with the help of DELOITTE came on Wednesday, April 8, 2024, when the anti-corruption agency rearrested Emefiele, remanded him in its custody for another five days and later arraigned him with a fresh 26-count charge, to which the man pleaded not guilty and was thereafter admitted to a N50m bail, with two sureties.
Such a tortuous journey to arrest, detention, freedom and re-arrest! And if you wonder if there could possibly be any other serious economic and financial crimes trial in Nigeria this biased and tarred with the brush of insincerity and corruption, with Godwin Emefiele as the victim of official witch-hunt. Just wondering, given this punishing rigmarole all in a bid to nail a man for serving a government that handed over power to the current government and whose legacies the current president praises to high heavens! Or was Enmefiele not part of the Buhari government whose policies and programmes President Tinubu vowed to continue with and is actually continuing with?
For me, one thing is obvious from all of this: Godwin Emefiele must be a good man, even a patriotic man. Or, how else to describe a man who, after nine years at the helm of the CBN and one year of multidimensional investigations, has yet to have a smoking gun found on him?
