Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - History of Abacha’s Theft is Being Rewritten Before Our Eyes

What is 'pure Nigerian'??????

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> On May 25, 2020, at 6:28 PM, 'Julius Eto' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
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> Thanks for the clarifications Baba Kadiri sir.
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> On Monday, May 25, 2020, 06:12:54 PM GMT+1, Salimonu Kadiri <ogunlakaiye@hotmail.com> wrote:
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> ​Point of order, Mr. Julius Eto!! Farooq Kperogi is a pure Nigerian of Baruba ethnic group in part of today's Kwara State although he prefers
> to identify his ethnic group as Batonou just as the extended part of the Baruba ethnic group in Benin Republic is called, with French language flavour. However, I dare say that from 27 May 1967, when Yakubu Gowon sliced then existing four regions in Nigeria
> to twelve states, the appellation of one Northern region became, not only obsolete but, constitutionally null and void. Yet Farooq can still be writing of Northerner as an entity in 2020.
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> ​People, mostly young northerners who hadn't come of age when Abacha's evil regime reigned, have sent me private messages that I help
> stop the ''demonization'' of Abacha. For them it's a regional and religious project. But that's misguided. Islam teaches us to be fair, and truthful. It doesn't teach us to lie to salvage the image of a dead thief among us - Farooq Kperogi. I doubt,
> if any northerner(?) whether young or old ever sent a private message to Farooq Kperogi to stop the *demonization* of Abacha. It must be a betrayal of trust on the part of Farooq to refer to private messages sent to him which the senders had not intended to
> share with the public but only Farooq. Why could he not honestly reply, privately, to the senders of private messages to him that Abacha actually looted Nigeria's treasury during his reign? Farooq could have enlightened his imaginary northerners(?) sending
> private messages to him that it was General Abdulsalami Abubakar who set up a Special investigation panel into Abacha's plunder of the Nigerian treasury and not Olusegun Obasanjo. Farooq could honestly have told his supposed northerners(?) that Abacha's National
> Security Adviser (NSA), Ismaila Gwarzo, appeared before the Special Investigation Panel to give detailed accounts, beginning from Friday, 25 March 1994, of how he and his Special Assistant first collected $37.6 million raw cash from Central Bank of Nigeria
> for Abacha up to the last collection on Thursday, 18 December 1997, when only £6 .15 million pounds sterling was collected for him. It was also revealed at the Special Investigation Panel, 1998, that Sani Abacha had 130 different Bank Accounts in Nigeria!!
> Abacha was a Nigerian who stole Nigeria's money in his name, on his own behalf and not on behalf of northerners(?). The repatriated funds were deposited in his name and he did not leave any will in which he stated that he stashed the funds off-shore on behalf
> of Nigeria. There were traces of how he pilfered the funds deposited overseas which were far beyond his legitimate income. What then has his treasury looting got to do with his religion and the part of Nigeria he hailed from?​
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> When it comes to stealing of public funds in Nigeria, religion and ethnicity play no roll. Two cases of former Governors stand to illustrate
> the absence of ethnicity and religion when looting collective patrimony. On July 27, 2007 the former Governor of Abia State (1999-2007), Orji Uzor Kalu was arraigned before an Abuja High Court on a 107-count charge of money laundering, official corruption
> and criminal diversion of public funds in excess of N7 billion. The EFCC accused Kalu of transferring billions of naira belonging to the Abia State government to his Slock Airlines. He was also alleged to have, between 1999 and 2007, moved various sums of
> government money into Slok Investment, Slok Nigeria Limited, Slok Incorporated and other companies owned by him. The presiding Judge, Justice Binta Murtala Nyako granted him bail. On the same day, the former governor of Jigawa State (1999-2007), Saminu Turaki
> was docked on a 32-count charge of stealing N36 billion from the treasury of the state. He was co-charged with three companies he had used to siphon the funds. The three Companies presumably owned by him were : INC Natural Resources Limited, Arkel Construction
> Nigeria Limited, Wildcat Construction Limited and one accomplice by name, Ahmed Mohammed. Just like Orji Uzor Kalu, Taminu Turaki was granted bail by Justice Binta Murtala Nyako. While Kalu was able to fulfil his bail conditions, Turaki was unable. The only
> known common denominator between Kalu and Turaki was that both belonged to the PDP as Governors. Otherwise, Kalu is Igbo while Turaki is Hausa and while the former, presumably, is a Christian, the latter is a Muslim. Jigawa became a Sharia State under Saminu
> Turaki governorship. The online Sun newspaper (owned by Kalu) of 4 August 2007 carried the headline, Igbo Monarch Signs Turaki's Bail. The Sun stated, "Former governor of Jigawa State, Senator Saminu Turaki was offered surety by an Igbo Monarch, His Royal
> Majesty, Eze Onuigbo from Abia State. Turaki's aides and family members surrounded the royal father, who arrived the premises of the federal high court, Abuja, in a metallic blue Peugeot 406 with registration number Abia AB1L01." Although Kalu was jailed 12
> years in December 2019 and the sentence is currently being disputed, the case of Taminu Turaki would appear to have been knocked into coma. My main point here is that Farooq Kperogi's ethnic origin and religious adherence are not requisite for him to discuss
> treasury lootings in Nigeria since the act of looting is general all over the country and cuts across all religious affiliations and ethnic belongings.
> S. Kadiri
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> Från: 'Julius Eto' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
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> Skickat: den 24 maj 2020 20:08
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> Till: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
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> Ämne: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - History of Abacha's Theft is Being Rewritten Before Our Eyes
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> Thanks for your honesty and patriotism on this issue Farooq although you are Muslim from the north.
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> On Saturday, May 23, 2020, 09:05:22 AM GMT+1, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:
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> Saturday, May 23, 2020History of Abacha's Theft is Being Rewritten Before Our Eyes
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> By Farooq A. Kperogi
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> Twitter: @farooqkperogi
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> In her historical fictional narrative titled "The Lost Sisterhood," Danish-Canadian writer Anne Fortier quotes one of her characters as saying that "those who control the present can rewrite the past." This is playing out right before us in what I called the curious
> posthumous deodorization of Abacha's grand larceny in a May 7, 2020 social media update.
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> Loyalists and beneficiaries of Sani Abacha's dictatorship control Nigeria's present, and they are trying to exploit this privilege to rewrite the sordid past of their benefactor while the rest of the country is fixated on other issues.
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> Muhammadu Buhari has always been invested in cleansing Abacha's appallingly grubby reputation as a murderous larcener. During the 10th-year-rememberance anniversary of Abacha in Kano in June 2008, for instance, Muhammadu Buhari remarked that, contrary to settled
> narratives in the Nigerian public sphere, Abacha never stole from Nigeria.
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> This 2008 Buhari declaration birthed a fringe, outlandish but nonetheless popular narrative in northern Nigeria that Abacha's reputation as a ruthless crook who stole billions of Nigeria's patrimony and salted it away in Euro-American financial institutions
> was the handiwork of Olusegun Obasanjo who was taking a posthumous pound of flesh from Abacha for imprisoning him.
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> In the aftermath of the unrelenting repatriation of what has now been called the "Abacha loot" from Western banks, a new farcical story line was fabricated, which is that Abacha actually "saved" the money for Nigeria for a rainy day!
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> Apart from Buhari's public defense of Abacha's larceny in 2008, the posthumous discursive purification of Abacha's image as a greedy, conscienceless thief was largely informal and took place on the margins of polite society.
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> Abubakar Malami, Buhari's Attorney General and Minister of Justice, officialized the revisionism of Abacha's thievery. In a May 4, 2020 tweet, Malami described repatriated Abacha loot as "Abacha assets." "I am happy to confirm that the Federal Republic of
> Nigeria on Monday 4th May, 2020 received $311,797,866.11 of the Abacha assets repatriated from the United States and the Bailiwick of Jersey," he wrote.
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> The change from "Abacha loot" to "Abacha assets" was a willful rhetorical move designed to lend official credence to the hitherto fringy, informal but nevertheless robust narrative that Abacha didn't steal Nigeria's money.
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> Led by Sahara Reporter's Omoyele Sowore, Nigerians on social media pounced on Malami's tweet and compelled him to retract his incompetent attempt at revisionism. In a woolly, shamefaced, error-ridden retraction, Malami said, "It is to be noted that by way of
> antecedence [sic] that Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, SAN has been consistently describing the recovered funds as 'Abacha loot' at several fora during the process of recovery of the looted funds, particularly before
> the eventual repatriation of the funds."
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> But it didn't stop there. Buba Galadima, a former Buhari protégé who is now at loggerheads with him because he has been shut out of the orbit of governance, has taken off from where Malami backed off. In a May 17, 2020 interview with The Nation, he said the
> estimated $5 billion Sani Abacha stole from Nigeria's trough was actually "saved" for Nigeria—on the advice of Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein—in anticipation of US sanction against Nigeria so that "even if Nigeria's account was blocked by the US, there won't be
> panic."
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> Galadima, who was Director General of the National Maritime Authority during the Abacha junta, said the notion that Abacha stole from Nigeria's till is "based on ignorance." When an editor forwarded excerpts of the interview to me on WhatsApp, I'd dismissed
> it as fabricated. I was wrong.
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> As I pointed out on social media on May 17, the idea that the Abacha loot was "saved" for Nigeria stands logic on its head, considering that Abacha "saved" some of that money in the US whose impending blockage he was allegedly plotting against. How do you "hide"
> something from someone by "saving" it in his house?
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> Plus, even Buhari, the choirmaster of the Abacha sanitization chorus, has grudgingly conceded that his former boss stole from Nigeria's public treasury. For example, in an April 27, 2016 tweet, Buhari said, "Nigeria is awaiting receipt from Swiss Govt. of $320
> million, identified as illegally taken from Nigeria under Abacha."
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> "Illegally taken" is merely a synonym for stealing. In a February 4, 2020 statement from the US Embassy in Nigeria about the repatriation of the "Abacha loot" from US banks, the US government was unambiguous in stating how the money got to its banks.
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> "The monies were laundered by [Abacha's] family, including his sons Ibrahim and Mohammed, and a number of close associates," the statement from the US reads. "The laundering operation extended to the United States and European jurisdictions such as the UK,
> France, Germany, Switzerland, Lichtenstein and Luxembourg."
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> One of those associates who helped Abacha launder huge sums of money is Kebbi State Governor Atiku Bagudu to whom the Buhari regime wanted to hand over $100 million of the recovered money, according to Bloomberg, but for the resistance of the US government.
> If the money was "saved" for Nigeria, why did Buhari want to hand over some it to a person who has been identified as an accomplice in its theft?
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> The US Department of Justice identified Bagudu as one of Abacha's network of proteges that, "embezzled, misappropriated and extorted billions from the government of Nigeria."
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> It isn't only the US that unequivocally describes the repatriated funds as the product of Abacha's criminal despoliation of Nigeria's resources. In a June 12, 2017 Radio France International report titled "Swiss make deal with Nigeria on final payout for Abacha
> loot," we learn that "The cash was originally frozen in Luxembourg and confiscated by the Swiss as part of a criminal investigation into Abba Abacha, Sani Abacha's son. Switzerland had already returned some 700 million dollars following appeals by Nigeria."
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> In a "Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative - Asset Recovery Watch" bulletin, there's also a case against "Family of former President Sani Abacha," where we read that, "In 2006, the World Bank was involved in a similar framework, providing institutional support
> for the return and use of approx. $723 million in public funds that had been corruptly diverted by General Abacha."
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> Not all the money Abacha stole has been recovered. Of the $5 billion that Abacha looted and squirreled away—or "saved" for Nigeria, to use Galadimian logic—in the banks of countries that wanted to "block" Nigeria's money, $3.624 billion has been recovered so
> far. Can Galadima help Nigeria recover the rest of the money since he appears to know where the money has been "saved"?
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> The purveyors of the transparently fraudulent narrative that Abacha "saved" money for Nigeria in foreign banks which his detractors have decided to call "loot" should be told that they can't rewrite history.
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> People, mostly young northerners who hadn't come of age when Abacha's evil regime reigned, have sent me private messages asking that I help stop the "demonization" of Abacha. For them, it's a regional and religious project. But that's misguided. Islam teaches
> us to be fair, just, and truthful. It doesn't teach us to lie to salvage the image of a dead thief among us.
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> The unvarnished truth is that Abacha did NOT save money for Nigeria; he STOLE from it with conscienceless glee. It's distressing that one has to even say this in spite of the clear evidence that stares us in the face.Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.School of Communication
> & MediaSocial Science Building Room 5092 MD 2207402 Bartow Avenue
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> Kennesaw State University
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> Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
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> Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
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> Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogiAuthor of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global WorldNigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy,
> and Participation
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> "The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
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