By Ray Ekpu
The story
is not one of an earthquake proportion but it seems to cause some excitement in
high and low places. And what is the story? That former President Goodluck
Jonathan is on exile in the Ivory
Coast . He has countered the story sharply
and angrily. “I am not on exile. I have
no cause to go on exile. It is a wicked and malicious report. I was Vice
President for two years and President for six years. I did everything I could
and I served my country very well. This is what they keep saying any time I am
outside the country. I was in Ecuador .
They said I was on exile. This is my second time in Cote
d’ Ivoire and I am rounding up my visit. It is a wicked attempt to link me with
the renewed Niger
Delta crisis.”
*Ray Ekpu (pix:vanguard) |
Let’s
connect the dots. There is a crisis in the Niger Delta. Pipelines are being
broken by militants who seem to have issues with the President Buhari
administration. Jonathan is from Bayelsa, a major theatre of this crisis. Some
of Jonathan’s former executives have been pulled in by the EFCC on allegations
of corruption: Badeh, Diezani Allison-Madueke, Sambo Dasuki, Femi Fani-Kayode,
etc. Could it be that the militants think the government is trying to get their
man? Does the government think these militants are sponsored by Jonathan to
destabilise the government or to prevent the government from getting him if
indeed they think he has some explaining to do about how he ran the country?
Jonathan has
given himself a brilliant self-assessment. The report card issued by him on him
reads A plus. That is reflected in his statement: “I served my country very well.”
But does the EFCC think so? The Nation newspaper quotes an unnamed
EFCC source as saying that although “Jonathan
has been implicated in all transactions under its investigation the
ex-President was not yet its target.” The “yet” in that sentence is very
important, isn’t it?
The truth
of the matter is that going by what has been revealed in court so far Jonathan
must have made some questionable approvals. But no corruption has been directly
traced to him so far. If Jonathan is “implicated in all transactions” so far
investigated as the EFCC claims why is he not yet its target? Is it hoping to get
more worms crawling out of the can? Or is it waiting for orders from “oga at
the top?” or is it gauging the temperature of the Niger Delta or of the country
to be able to determine whether or not to go for the big fish?
Let me give
you a parable. In 1983, Dele Giwa was the editor of the Sunday Concord and I the
Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Concord
group of newspapers. Dele was arrested by Sunday Adewusi’s policemen for
publishing “classified government
information.” I was arrested for an article titled “Sodom
and Gomorrah ”
in which I alerted the public about the tactics of corrupt people: whenever
there was fraud they would set the place on fire to obliterate the evidence.
There was a huge fraud at the Nigerian External Telecommunications and I warned
the government to keep watch lest the arsonists destroy the documents. The
place was set on fire the day after my article was published. One person died
in the incident. I was charged with murder, the press dubbed it “murder by
pen.”
Dele and I
were detained at Ikoyi Prison. Chief Moshood Abiola, the proprietor of Concord was
a member of the National Party of Nigeria, NPN. He had stormed out of the party
when he was schemed out of the presidential race. So the relationship between
Abiola and the government was mortuary-cold. Our arrest and detention were seen
by Abiola as an attempt to get at him. When he came to visit us at Ikoyi prison
he gave us the parable of the ant and a cube of sugar. He said that the reason
ants are only able to nibble at a cube of sugar is that they can’t carry it
away. They would like to swallow the entire cube of sugar but since they can’t
they just nibble at it. He told us he is the real target, the cube of sugar.
Before he left the prison he pushed a wad of naira notes into the hands of the
warder and told him “please give them whatever they want.” When Abiola left,
the warder asked us what we wanted. We both said “cognac.” He brought it at
three times the market cost. Cognac
is a luxury drink. In prison it is a super luxury drink.