By Tony Eluemunor.
To Okey Ndibe, I’ll ask just a question: How long will it take a columnist to accept the truth? Forever? If he couldn’t accept (in his Epistle from St. James to fellow Steakholders in Daily Sun of Tuesday Feb. 7, 2017) what Nasir el-Rufai, Nuhu Ribadu’s friend, close political collaborator in 2007 and puppet-master wrote in a book, what else would he accept as the truth; mere rumours? So, despite the passage of almost a decade, despite the publication of several books, despite the recent developments in the Ibori London case, when the BBC, and leading British newspapers from the Times, Guardian, SUN, Mail, Telegraph, etc, championed Chief James Onanefe Ibori’s interests by showcasing the deliberate injustice done to him through police corruption, misleading of the courts, serious but prosecutorial missteps and outright lies, Okey Ndibe’s university lecturer’s brain, his newspaper reporter’s inquiring mind, mass media columnist’s alertness and a social critic’s public awareness (at least, one presupposes that such attributes should come with such wholesome responsibilities) has refused to learn anything new or even admit that there is any new vista of looking at the trial. Instead, like a tree, he is at the end rooted to exactly where he was at the beginning. This is as terrible as it is unscholarly!
To Ndibe’s insinuation that Ibori helped remove Ribadu from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and sent him to Kuru, my only reply is this relevant passage from El-Rufai’s book; ‘The Accidental Public Servant’, and the section tellingly entitled: “Umaru Asks Nuhu for Support: The Beginning of Our Problems”. There, El-Rufai related that when the then Gov. Umaru Yar’Adua visited Ribadu and told him that Obasanjo had asked him to run for presidency, “Nuhu’s response could hardly have been less gracious: ‘Well, Obasanjo has not told me, and as far as I am concerned, I have my candidate for president and that is Nasir el-Rufai’. Nuhu’s instinctive reaction was that of a typical policeman – dust off EFCC files and comb for petitions against Umaru… He even arrested some local government chairmen from Katsina as part of his investigation of mismanagement LGA funds by (Yar’Adua). He was clearly trying to take Yar’Adua out of the race and narrow all options to zero except for El-Rufai…By the time we realised what was going on…things have gone bad for all of us.” So, the late President Yar’Adua, having tasted how Ribadu would “target people that threaten certain interests” (as El-Rufai wrote on page 360) needed no prompting from anybody to remove Ribadu, as EFCC chairman.
Col. Abubakar Umar (rtd.) once said: “When Obasanjo embarked on total genocidal war against his political and business opponents (including Ibori), the EFCC became the most useful and loyal force that was used”. He forgot to add that Ribadu even fought his own personal wars, misusing EFCC’s powers – as El-Rufai testified. And former President Yar’Adua experienced Ribadu’s such personal wars and flourishing hypocrisy personally.
A few columnists vented their old prejudices against Ibori, using the overwhelming welcome the Niger Delta people accorded Ibori on his return, as a pretext. One attentive and inquiring columnist, Josef Omorotionmwan (Vanguard of Thursday Feb. 16, 2017), differed brilliantly. He wrote: “Delta is one of the most enlightened states throughout the Federation. Yet, (the people) love Ibori most passionately – to the extent that many would be willing to go to prison in his stead; and many would be willing to die so that Ibori could live. When Ibori returned to Nigeria recently … he got the type of reception that no Nigerian Head of State had ever received. And this came in spite of the fact that many had written and spoken of the folly in coming out to welcome him. If some former governors … had to quietly return home in total infamy after service; and you have Ibori’s return being celebrated in grand style, then, Ibori must have something going for him. He, therefore, becomes a special research subject. That’s our major point of interest”.
Josef Omorotionmwan may not be a university Professor but he has gravitas. He has wisdom. He has a brain and he uses it. He is not a part of the decaying debris in a sea of rumours. Please, permit me to repeat myself: He has an inquiring mind.
Non-inquiring minds and slavish columnists failed to recognise the new questions and answers inherent in the people’s spontaneous convergence to give Ibori a fantastic welcome. They had spent years demonising Ibori and then suddenly the man returned … Undiminished (even burnished) in the eyes of the people. Please, note that I used the word slavish with every sense of responsibility – as Jimmy Cliff used it in his “Poor Slave” reggae music track: “A slave remains a slave when he can’t think independently”. The “people” repudiated the authority some newspaper columnists and sundry politicians had wrongly assumed after they had misspent years writing heaps of what the people saw as total rubbish, as they voted with their presence when Ibori returned. Or did their excoriation affect the peoples’ perception of Ibori?
Also, the visitors who came to felicitate with Ibori were not just politicians. Gen. David Ejoor (rtd.) visited him too; the grand old man, who could hardly walk, was Mid-West Region’s Military Governor in 1966 when Ibori was eight years old and was Yakubu Gowon’s Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters when Ibori was a teenager. The remarkable inventor, Brig-Gen. Otu Oviemo Ovadje (rtd.), a highly accredited Nigerian medical doctor, who invented the Emergency Auto Transfusion System (EAT-SET) – an affordable, simpler and effective blood auto-transfusion system, also visited him. They wouldn’t have come for handouts or Okey Ndibe’s “steaks” either!
Now, who would list them among the politicians or among the hoi-polloi? That exemplifies the genuine love Ibori enjoys in Delta State and the South-South and even across the land – an admiration that has refused to fade despite all the slings and arrows Nigerian politicians, British DfID agency and self-serving but ill-informed and outrightly dubious columnists have sent against Ibori – columnists, who have refused to acknowledge that Ibori had other sources of income while he was governor (according to court papers), that he bought the UK properties with money legitimately earned, e.g., through MER Engineering (an oil service outfit), that the first confiscation hearing ended in 2013 and Britain did not find (and so could not seize) the fantastic sums of money being bandied about that Ibori stole, and so, another and new confiscation trial was decreed, that till today, no evidence of money, which Delta State lost was presented against Ibori before any British court and that the Ibori trial in Nigeria is self-evidently different from the London trial; while it was beyond every reasonable doubt in Nigeria, it was just on inference alone in Britain, so nothing was proved at all – in a criminal case – not even the predicate case of establishing a crime before talking of money laundering. And I’ll publicly apologise if any of my claims of fact here is proved to be false!!!
•Eluemunor is Chief James Onanefe Ibori’s Media Assistant.