Mrs. Hajiya Maryam Sani Abacha has put to lie, claim in some quarters that her late husband, General Sani Abacha was part of the annulment of the June 12, 1993 Presidential election.
The June 12 presidential election, widely believed to have been won by late Chief MKO Abiola, the Aare Onakakanfo of Yoruba land in the Southwest, was annuled by the government of the military President, General Ibrahim Babangida.
Answering questions in an interview on TVC, Maryam Abacha blamed other actors in government at the time for making the decision.
According to her, attributing such a defining national decision to Abacha unnecessarily bloated Abacha’s authority to unrealistic levels.
She expressed regret that Nigerians easily fall hook, line and sinker to lies that were being spinned by the people in government.
Such other lie, she said, is the “looting script.”
“I pray for Nigerians. I pray for all of us. I pray that we should have goodness in our hearts. We should stop telling lies and blaming people.
Maryam outrightly dismissed allegations leveled against her late husband of looting Nigerian treasury while in power.
According to her, the financial controversies that have been woven around her husband were misunderstood, insisting that no money was embezzled during his administration.
Funds, popularly referred to as the “Abacha loot,” have been recovered from Switzerland, America and Britain and used for various social investment programs.
Maryam Abacha insisted that there has never been evidence presented over a period in which her husband was in charge of the affairs of the country to prove charges of financial impropriety.
…Mrs Maryam Abacha
She challenged credibility of publicly mentioned witnesses and documents.
“Who is the witness of the monies that were being stashed?.
“Did you see the signature or the evidence of any monies stashed abroad? And the monies that my husband kept for Nigeria, in a few months, the monies vanished. People are not talking about that.”
She said that charges against her husband might be a result of deeper social cleavages, including ethnic as well as religious biases.
“Why are we so bad towards each other? Because somebody is a northerner or a southerner, somebody is a Muslim or a Christian, or somebody is nice or… It’s not fair.”
