The Dame has validated APC’s blame game… Forever!

We outlined 12 times President Muhammadu Buhari’s blame game has been on point. The President has virtually blamed every one else for Nigeria’s present problems.

Almost every member of the present administration from media advisor, Garba Shehu to Minister of Works, Power and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, has blamed the past administration for everything that has gone wrong with the economy.

And just when you are about to ask every single one of them to STOP and move on, wife of the former President, ‘Dame’ Patience Jonathan goes on to implicate herself in a $20million dollar scandal waiting to blow up.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) discovered four accounts which they traced to a former Special Adviser to the President on Domestic Affairs in a fraud case.

The monies in the accounts belonging to four different companies amount to a total of $31.4 million. Of course they had to probe. And in so doing, they placed a ‘No Debit Order’ on the said account lodged with Skye Bank Plc.

The matter had not gone very far at the Federal High Court where it was instituted (and still hasn’t) but the Dame has slapped the EFCC as well as Skye bank with a NGN200million Fundamental Human Rights claim praying the court to enforce her Fundamental rights to …well, own the said monies.

Not bad. She is well within her rights to bring the action but not without consequences. The series of backlash that have followed her claiming the money (and some more) haven’t been very kind.

By the time she went further to suggest that the sum in question, totalling $15 million, was for medical bills and personal purchases, Nigerians had had it.

So much that a tweep asked the question below.

Whether the anti-graft agency, EFCC orchestrated the probe just so the former ‘first lady’ could drag herself in, is yet to become clear. The head of the Commission, Ibrahim Magu has asked how the former first lady can accuse EFCC of harassing her when they did not know, at the time of freezing the accounts, that they belonged to her.

He said, “the accounts do not bear her name neither do they carry her BVN (Bank Verification Number).”

These are the same accounts that Patience Jonathan’s lawyers have admitted that she’s been spending from “without any let or hindrance”.

Beyond the backlash and anger of Nigerians expressed virtually, Chairman, Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption, Professor Itse Sagay (SAN), has raised even more questions.

According to him, if Patience Jonathan claims ownership of the monies (and she has) then she must be probed by the EFCC on how she, a civil servant who has never held a government position, could have acquired monies running into billions of Naira.

It looks like the Dame has shot herself in the foot. Even if she were to claim that the funds were acquired from her multi-billion Naira Aridolf Hotel in Yenagoa, then, she would also have raised the question as to how, again, using Professor Sagay’s words, she, a civil servant who has never held a government position, could have acquired so much money to build a hotel like that.

A question we should have been asking before now anyway. But then, the President had said that his campaign to bring looters to book was not going to extend to the immediate past administration, and that includes Patience Jonathan. So how is it that she is the subject of this scandal? Oh wait! Because she implicated herself, that’s why.

Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, is out in Kwara State claiming it would be wrong to assume that the Federal government is investigating the Jonathans. In his words, “it is not as if anybody has gone out to probe Mrs. Jonathan directly or indirectly. Rather Mrs. Jonathan was the one that said ‘that money for which you are accusing Mr. X actually belongs to me. So, you cannot start talking of prosecution or persecution.”

All true. But it is easy to foresee more scathing statements like this coming from the members of the present administration.

They wouldn’t only use it to buttress the claims that much of the funds, that should have been used to run the country, went into pockets of powerful individuals.

They’ll cite it as an example of how the past administration is to blame for much of the rot the President has set himself the task of cleaning.

 

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