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Tuesday 1 October 2024
Monday 9 September 2024
Saturday 27 July 2024
Corruption: How Buhari’s men stopped investigation of billion dollar fraud cases — Obla
Vangaurd
•Investigation of the failure of an oil company to pay the balance of $1.9 billion from an oil block it purchased in 2014 for $2.5 billion
•Investigation of the 80 armoured plated Mercedes Benz S Class found in the premises of an Abuja-based federal director.
•Investigation of some Directors in the defunct Petroleum Equalization Fund whom we found had over $5 billion in their accounts
•Investigation of $12.5 million contract awarded by the Nigerian Ports Authority to a company owned by a former Senator and now Governor to dredge the channel leading from the Atlantic Ocean into Calabar port
•Investigation of oil companies that refused to remit over $3 billion as royalties to the federal government
•Investigation of the purchase of a House in Asokoro Abuja by a then-serving federal permanent secretary
•Investigation of offshores assets of some members of the National Assembly
•Investigation of the failure of commercial banks to remit over N38 trillion collected by them as stamp duties as of 2019
•Investigation of illegal take over of the building belonging to the National Board for Technical Education in Maitama, Abuja by a Nigerian billionaire from Katsina State
By Johnbosco Agbakwuru
Barrister Okoi Obono-Obla was appointed Chairman of the Special Investigation Panel for the Recovery of Public Property by former President Muhammadu Buhari but was booted out a few months after his appointment.
The patrons of corruption in Nigeria in collusion with fifth columnists in the previous regime were not at ease with my patriotic zeal, courage, resolute, strong character, and uncompromising approach to my schedule and decided to push me out by all means.
It started as far as January 2018 when I was served a letter from the former Attorney General of the Federation directing me what I should not do including waiting for mandate because I could investigate any matter. I was also stopped from talking to the media. It doesn’t need clairvoyance to tell one that all was not well when you are directed to wait for a mandate before you investigate cases of financial crime, economic sabotage, or grand corruption.
I was investigating some dangerous cases that had remained a no-go area for a long time. Some of them included the $7 billion that was given to banks as bailouts since 2016, which they had refused to pay back; investigating the report of the Judicial Commission into how Nigeria Airways was bankrupted but which report was left to gather dust in government shelves, the failure of oil companies to pay to the federal government royalties and other rental fees amounting to more than $3 billion to mention just but a few.
Sunday 9 June 2024
Monday 1 April 2024
Nigeria's Chibok girls: Parents of kidnapped children heartbroken - again
BBC AFRIKA
Ten years after Boko Haram gunmen abducted his daughter from her school in the Nigerian town of Chibok, Yama Bullum feels as if he has lost her once again.
His daughter, Jinkai Yama, was one of 276 girls kidnapped from the secondary school in the early hours of 14 April 2014 by the Islamist fighters.
Fifty-seven of them escaped shortly afterwards. Then between 2016 and 2018 an additional 108 were either rescued by the military or released through negotiations.
Ninety-one others remain missing, but Ms Yama is one of 20 "Chibok girls" rescued over the last two years from Boko Haram hideouts in Sambisa Forest in north-eastern Borno state, the epicentre of the 15-year insurgency.
But her father has been outraged to discover that like some of other recently freed women, she has decided to remain married to one of the fighters who once held her captive.
These couples now reside in the city of Maiduguri - Borno's capital, 125km (78 miles) north of the remote town of Chibok - in housing organised by the state's governor Babagana Umaru Zulum.
"I am not happy with what the governor did. The girls managed to come out of the forest and the governor married them off again. Her mother is very angry," Mr Bullum said.
He found out when his daughter called him up to tell him last August - and handed over the phone asking him to talk to her husband, the former insurgent.
Until then, Mr Bullum had assumed she was with other freed Chibok captives and her three children in a special welfare programme.
Like a number of other Chibok parents, Mr Bullum is disturbed by what seems to be the Nigerian government's approval of marriages between their rescued daughters and the men who abducted them.
Allowing the freed women to live with their former captors as wives, while their accommodation is provided by the government, is perceived by the parents as Governor Zulum sacrificing their daughters in the quest for stability in the region.
They see these marriages as a way to appease the former militants.
Most of the girls taken from the Chibok school were Christian.
Some people in Chibok are saying: 'How is it possible after the rescue of the girls they are still remaining in the Muslim faith?'"