By Jude Opara
Certainly the last may not have been heard concerning the freezing of the accounts of the Osun state government by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC); this is as the presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Prince Adewole Adebayo has called for the resignation of President Bola Tinubu over the saga.
Adebayo who spoke late on Thursday while receiving the G100 delegation to the National Secretariait of the party said, it was curious that President coul issue a fiat directive to the EFCC to unfreeze the account of the state.
He said the development is a clear sign that most of the agencies of government were being controlled by politicians who may be using them to settle political issues.
According to him, the call by some people for the resignation of the EFCC Chairman, Ola Olukayode is misrepresented because the person that should have resigned is President Tinubu who appointed him.
“And resignation? Yes. Well, the person who should resign is President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. I don’t have enough evidence to suggest that the EFCC chairman should resign. The only person who is at fault here is the President himself. Because EFCC is a very difficult place to work.
“So the buck stops at the table of the President. The confusion in Osun is caused by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and I don’t know why Nigerians are always shy to ask a competent and obviously corrupt President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to resign. Nigerians are always going for the weak targets. The person who should go is Bola Ahmed Tinubu, because the Attorney General is the only political person who has authority to advise or interact with EFCC.
“So for the President to purport to order EFCC is already an impeachable offense, because EFCC is part of the legal process in Nigeria. And as a lawyer, I’ve done cases against EFCC, I’ve defended people before EFCC, and just like the Police.
“The law is clear on how to get it right. If EFCC wrongly froze the account of Osun State Government, there are legal remedies that could be taken to unfreeze, including getting damages against EFCC. You will see that Dr. Olu Agunloye, the National Secretary of the SDP, got a huge judgment against EFCC, and he’s going to get a bigger one very soon, all things being equal. But we in SDP have never insulted EFCC”
According to him, what the presidential directive has shown is the the President can ask the anti graft body to go or not to go after anybody he feels like, a development he described as an impeachable offence.
“So President Tinubu ought to be impeached if there was a National Assembly. But now he should resign because what he’s saying is that he has power to instruct EFCC, go against this person, don’t go against this person. He’s even instructing them to go to court and withdraw.
“No, if Osun state state believes that their account has been wrongly frozen, the Attorney General of Osun state can go to court. Even the Attorney General of Osun state can go straight to Supreme Court to sue the federal government to court. So I don’t want to politicize the issue. All the governments are committing crimes, all of them. And all of them are using public money to do elections”.
The outspoken presidential hopeful further charged the EFCC to rather focus their efforts on those who compromise the electoral process by engaging in vote buying.
“So the only thing I advise EFCC is that when they are doing bribery and buying of votes negatively, even though it’s an APC state, you ought to act. If they are doing it in another state, including Osun, you have the right to act. If you see an SDP person giving money to a voter, he’s liable to be arrested. And we in SDP will not say, oh, EFCC, leave our member alone. We will say, take him to court, go and prove it. So we will not join in any call for EFCC chairman to resign”.
On the controversy surrounding the visit of the Catholic bishops to the President, Adebayo said he had even expected the bishops to have called for an emergency national prayer because of the utterances of the President.
He wondered why the government was angry that the bishops failed to sing the praises of President Tinubu, and that the country does not deserve the present leadership.
“What is surprising to me is how the Catholic bishops could meet with President Tinubu and listen to President Tinubu talk the way he talked, and they left the villa without calling for emergency national prayer. Because I went to Catholic school, and when you see someone behaving like that, they call everybody together. So what I look forward to is the clergy, the Catholic bishops, others to start praying.
“Because that president that they met there cannot be the kind of president God wanted us to have. So it’s either our sins are too many that God gave us that kind of president, or the President’s own personal sin is too much that God is letting him expose himself. Because no local government chairman or counselor can talk as irresponsibly in the front of eminent leaders like President Tinubu himself spoke”.
It could be recalled that the G100 is a group of people who have presented a proposal for the six year single term for the president in Nigeria.
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