President Muhammed Buhari’s war against corruption has not been going on without doubts in the minds of Nigerians to the effect that he may not be waging any genuine anti-graft war in the country. This is even as the Economic & Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) under Ibrahim Magu is being seen as being biased and selective in carrying out its duties.

Many feel that what PMB is doing in the name or under the guise of anti-graft war is to select his personal and political enemies or those he perceived to pose threats to his over bearing rule and hand them over to the cat’s paw-EFCC to insult, publicly disgrace, humiliate, embarrass, persecute, witch hunt and later brand as prosecution for corruption.

To me, it was just a way of beautifying impunity. This is when you peep into such cases like the detention of Alex Samundu Badeh, erstwhile chief of defence Staff, CDS. What justification will PMB give for punishing Alex Badeh who suffered severe personal and family losses to insurgency and the reinstatement of the Army Divisional Commander whose naïve and obstinate directives led to the ambushing and wastage of many patriotic and dedicated Nigerian army officers?

The untidy manner, lack of due diligence, seeming media trial, inconsistency in allegations, desperation for new allegations, prolonged detention, near impossible bail conditions for the former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Sabundu Badeh by EFCC underscores the prevailing opinion in the country that Nigeria is now be heading for civilian dictatorship, who uses state apparatus like EFCC to harass and flog to submission anybody likely to raise a valid eyebrow to the oppression of Nigerian citizens under different guises.

Recently, Justice Halilu of the High Court of Abuja Federal Capital Territory, had cause to slam and berate the EFCC for turning itself into a “Police Station” and a cog in the wheel of the rights of crime suspects, when the Judge was ordering for the immediate release of former President Jonathan’s ADC, Col Ojogbane Adegbe from EFCC’S dungeon.

As a matter of fact, PMB, EFCC and Nigerian State have been outrageously unfair to Alex Sabundu Badeh, who had served his fatherland meritoriously and by dint of hard work rose to the positions of Chief of Air Force and Chief of Defence Staff respectively and who suffocated the insurgents during his tenure, before he left office.

Assuming there are genuine cases against Badeh, what is wrong in arresting him today and arraigning him in the court the next day as stipulated by law and allow him to face the court and challenge the allegations. Abinitio, there appears to be the working of a conspiracy theory to nail Badeh and others the regimes possibly hates their faces.

The Probe Panel to investigate the so called $2.1billion was a kangaroo one because the Panel for one day did not invite the so called indicted people for clarification. The much the Panel did was to sit and find PMB’s enemies guilty of fraud. This jegune justice by the Kangaroo Panel will surely not pass the litmus test of Nigerian judicial firework.

The poor and unprofessional handling of Badeh’s case by EFCC is very suspicious and curious. Badeh, a patriot and faithful Nigerian promptly, quickly and willingly turned himself to EFCC for questioning and had severally thundered his willingness to co-operate with EFCC on any matter bordering his role as Public Officer. Why has he been kept in EFCC dungeon since February 8^th, 2015 without arraigning him to court and without any evidence of linking him to any irresponsible utterance or conduct that may warrant his long detention if not that the Nigerian State wanted the humiliation of citizen Badeh. Even when Badeh went to court to challenge his detention, EFCC used the backdoor and obtained a black market detention order against him from a Magistrate court.

Why EFCC rushing of Badeh from Abuja to Lagos under the guise of searching the laundered properties by Badeh when the so-called anti-graft Agency was not sure of its facts. The worse aspect of this was that EFCC dramatized the Abuja-Lagos movement as if it was concrete and genuine when in actual fact EFCC recorded zero point in it except the tarnishing and damaging of the good personal and family name, gallantry aviation reputation and distinguished public officer’s record of Badeh.

The disturbing aspect of the entire drama is that the initial allegations for his invitation bordering on procurement of used aircrafts and uniforms and breaches of Procurement Act had been watered down with the new allegations of money laundering in properties as contained in the 10 charges preferred against him by EFCC. The whole episode appears to be an orchestrated plan to nail or manufacture allegations to nail Badeh at all cost.

Left for EFCC, they would have allowed Badeh to rust in detention knowing his precarious health conditions, but the public opprobrium generated against EFCC for the terrible handling of Badeh made the anti-graft Agency to pretentiously charge him to court and the drama of the entire sham continues in the court as we hear contradictory stories on the presence or otherwise of the judge to handle the matter.

So far, EFCC had preferred a 10 count charge of money laundering against him, further accusing him of removing N3.9billion from the accounts of the Nigerian Air Force between January-December 2013. Badeh had quickly replied denying the corruption allegations against him and accusing the Federal Government of persecution. This is an interesting case which the court will decide in due course but the oppressive manner EFCC handled it made it highly shocking to sane minds. I think Ibrahim Magu is brutalizing people brought before him to appease the oppressive appetites of his master so that his appointment will be confirmed since he is on acting capacity in EFCC.

From Abuja to Lagos and from Lagos back to Abuja, from one allegation to entirely different allegations, etc. Who is sure that EFCC has strong points against Badeh? From the beginning EFCC appears to be unsure of what it is saying against Badeh and that will be the alibi of EFCC in the law court if Badeh’s lawyers work very hard.

In the next few months, we shall be watching the fate of a Defence czar and icon who strongly defended his country against the dreaded Boko Haram menace and a well-tested pilot who successfully piloted series of aircrafts without any hitch conveying top government functionaries including Heads of States and top dignitaries and diplomats on local and international official assignments from 1992 to 2004 when he was a member of the Presidential fleet. As Chief of Air Staff and Chief of Defence Staff, Badeh got many national and international accolades for the military & Nigeria respectively through numerous professional exploits.

innoebirim@gmail.com. [myad]

I may be wrong, but I can’t remember any story that has attracted such wide and intense newspaper coverage in the last five years or so as the so-called abduction of an underage Ese Oruru (14) from her native Bayelsa State by a teenage Yunusa Dahiru (18) to his native Kano State.  Going through the country’s top seven newspapers – The Punch, Thisday, The Nation, Sun, Daily Trust, Vanguard and The Guardian, not necessarily in that order – I recorded no less than 70 pages of news, comments, interviews and editorials on the story between February 28 and last Monday.
Not even the marriage of a not-so-young Senator Ahmed Sani, former Governor of Zamfara State and the pioneer of penal Sharia in the country, to an under-age Egyptian girl in Abuja over five years ago, indeed, not even the globally condemned abduction of over 100 girls from Chibok, Borno State, over a year ago, allegedly by Boko Haram insurgents, has attracted this quantity of newspaper coverage.
Unfortunately, as is invariably the case anytime we allow sentiments and mischief to get the better of our reasoning, the quantity of the newspaper coverage of the story couldn’t have stood in sharper contrast to its abysmal quality.
Last Monday our Literature Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, and radical lawyer and Senior Advocate, Femi Falana, addressed a joint press conference on the story, apparently with the intention of to replacing the intense heat the media have generated by their awful coverage with much needed light. Both of them emphatically condemned attempts to characterize the issue as essentially religious. “The attempt to bring religion into the matter,” one newspaper quoted Falana as saying, “is sheer hypocrisy.”
Soyinka was even more categorical and specific. “Let’s take religion out of this,” The Nation (March 7), said he said. “We are talking about pure criminality and it is my demand, and will always remain my demand, that unless you make an example of people like (Senator Ahmed Sani) Yarima, there would be thousands of Yunusa, the man who abducted Ese.”
One couldn’t agree more with both Soyinka and Falana. Indeed one can go even further to say the two should have added the attempts to tribalize and regionalize the story while condemning the attempts to drag religion into it. However, while I completely agree with them that we should keep religion out of the matter, I must say it seems to me both of them have the wrong culprits in mind.
In condemning the attempt at bringing religion into the matter, both of them specifically named Ishaq Akintola as their chief villain. “People like Akintola,” Falana said during the press conference in question, “are playing on the intelligence of the poor.”
Akintola is a professor of Islamic Eschatology and Director of Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC), a Lagos based civil society organization. In an interview in Sunday PUNCH (March 6), the professor had said Islam has no age barrier for marriage, implying support of the claim that Yunusa forcibly married Ese. “Non-Muslims,” he said, “should keep off Muslim affairs.”
It is true that in Islam, as Akintola said, there is no age barrier in marriage. But I am sure the professor would be the first to agree with me that in a multi-religious and multi-ethnic country like Nigeria, it is difficult, if not impossible, not to mind your neighbour’s business. As he himself admitted, not all marriages in Nigeria are between two persons of the same faith. Even if his claim that only 0.1% of Muslims marry outside their faith is true – and I suspect it is grossly exaggerated – he would, I am sure, be the first to agree with me that the rights of the 0.1% non-Muslims they marry deserve protection.
Even then I believe it is grossly unfair to accuse Akintola of bringing religion into the Yunusa/Ese controversy. On the contrary a complete reading of his Sunday PUNCH interview shows he was totally against doing so. When the episode first broke out, MURIC, as he pointed out, issued a statement that Yunusa should be arrested and prosecuted for abduction because Ese was a minor and a Christian who required her parent’s consent, a condition Sharia says must be met for a marriage to a minor to be valid.
In any case, the fact, as Akintola pointed out, was that no one in authority in Kano, not the Shari’a Council, not the Emir, not the putative groom’s father, nor others some newspapers have accused of forcing Ese to marry Yunusa, agreed to his request. On the contrary, they all did their bits to see Ese returned home to her parents, something the newspapers would not want to acknowledge because doing so would take the sensationalism out of their stories.
So instead of attacking Akintola for pointing out the fact that Islam has no age barrier for marriage, Soyinka and Falana should be blaming the prominent politicians (for example, Senator Ben Murray Bruce), the Christian clergy (for example, Reverend Musa Asake, the Secretary-General of Christian Association of Nigeria) and sections of the media   that framed the issue as one of a Muslim man stealing a Christian girl and forcing her to change her religion to marry her, instead of looking at it as the criminal matter that it is.
Probably the chief villain among newspapers in their clearly biased reporting was PUNCH. “Kano Man,” it trumpeted in the sensational headline of its lead story on February 28, “abducts 14-year old Bayelsa girl, forcefully marries her”! Not only did the newspaper, like many others, convict Yunusa of abduction even before he has had his day in court, they have all echoed the lie that he forced her into marriage when no such thing ever took place.
It is apparent that what we have here is a case of one standard for Muslims and another for none Muslims. And as if to expose the hypocrisy of those who first dressed the Yunusa/Ese case in religious and ethnic garbs, about the very day Ese was finally united with her parents, a daring gang of young men invaded a girl seminary in Lagos and allegedly abducted three girls. You would search all the newspapers in vain to know the religious, ethnic or regional identities of the gang members.
Long before this case there was that of the daring kidnapping of the wife of Steve Nwosu, the Deputy Managing Director of Sun and one of its ace columnists, from his Lagos residence last year. Throughout their wide coverage of the episode, there was not a single word about the religion, region or ethnicity of the suspects. It is not surprising then that his column of March 2 is, at least in my opinion, one of the most sensible things anyone has written about the Yunusa/Ese case, even though I did not completely agree with it.
“No body,” he said halfway through his article, “should go thinking that this malaise is an Islam thing alone. It is not! Many Christian clerics are also into it.”
The biased framing of the Yunusa/Ese story by newspapers implied by Nwosu’s accurate observation is not the only worrisome aspect of it. Equally worrisome is the attempt by the newspapers to paint a pattern of Muslims abducting little Christian girls and forcing them into marriage by dredging up cases of such abductions where none existed.
In its lead story on page 5 of its March 7 edition, for example, The Guardian said a “15-year old Benue girl, Patience Paul, who was abducted since last year and taken to Sokoto, has re-united with her family after the intervention of Governor Aminu Tambuwal and other security agencies.”
Reading this story you will never know that Patience and her parents have been resident in Sokoto for years instead of in their native Benue State. You will also never know that when she wanted to convert to Islam under the influence of a Muslim girl friend, and because she said she was a victim of child abuse at home, the religious authorities in Sokoto refused to oblige her because they said she did not have her parent’s consent.
Instead some of the newspapers went as far as to recklessly accuse the urbane Sultan of Sokoto and head of Nigerian Muslims, Alhaji Sa’ad Abubakar, of hiding her in his palace.
Soyinka and Falana are right to condemn any attempt to bring religion into the Yunusa/Ese saga. But they are wrong to accuse only one side of doing so. [myad]