• We won’t join issues with them –Presidency

From Taiwo Amodu, Abuja

Few days after the Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose raised the alarm that he was one of the targets of the purported Federal Government travel ban, a fresh alarm has emerged that a clampdown on Fayose’s aides and lawmakers of the state Assembly is looming.
A  source who spoke with newsmen in Abuja  revealed that Chief of Staff to the governor, Dipo Anisulowo, Deputy Speaker, Segun Adewumi; chairman, House Committee on Information, Gboyega Aribisogan; chairman, House Committee on Health, Dr. Samuel Omotoso; and the Special Assistant to the Governor on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, may be invited to explain their roles in the letter addressed to President Xi Jinping of China, asking him to halt a loan of $2 billion to Nigeria ahead of President Muhammadu Buhari’s visit to China last April.
Anisulowo had led the delegation to Abuja to deliver Fayose’s letter to the Chinese Ambassador to Nigeria, Gu Xiaojie.
When contacted, Senior Special Adviser on Media to the President, Femi Adesina dismissed the allegation as a non issue.
“You know I won’t react to such a thing. I have never reacted to anything by Governor Fayose or Ekiti State,” Adesina told Daily Sun on phone.
Fayose, in the April 12, 2016 letter with reference number EK/GOV/28/10, said Nigerians were “totally opposed to increment of the country’s debt burden, which is already being serviced with 25 per cent of the Federal Government’s annual budget.”
Fayose reportedly stormed China same month while Buhari was still the guest of his Chinese counterpart.
The source argued that the Presidency was embarrassed by the role played by Fayose and his aides:
“Since Fayose can’t be arrested or invited for questioning, the plot is to arrest and detain, indefinitely and without administrative bail, all the officials who conveyed his letter to the Chinese Ambassador to Nigeria, Gu Xiaojie.”
Ekiti State House of Assembly had earlier petitioned the National Human Rights Commission, (NHRC) National Assembly, Amnesty International, embassies of the United States and the United Kingdom over the alleged plot by the Federal Government to prevent Fayose and one other governor from the Niger Delta from travelling outside Nigeria without clearance from the DSS.