Our ‘Governor of the year’, Governor Peter Ayodele Fayose is in the news again. This time he’s got an axe to grind against the EFCC, Mr. Femi Falana, Zenith Bank, Mrs. Aisha Buhari, his usual target, President Buhari and any other person or institution he suspects of wanting to get him indicted for his indiscretions. And he won’t spare any weapon at his disposal, including those of ‘mass destruction’, at demobilising these perceived foes of his.
The EFCC’s ‘unpardonable sin’ was that it froze Mr. Fayose’s Zenith Bank accounts as part of its investigation into the sum of N4.7 billion he allegedly received from the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) during his election campaign in 2014. Mr. Fayose denies receiving any money from the ONSA. He also says that the EFCC has no right to investigate him as he is a serving governor, covered by immunity.
Meanwhile, Mr. Fayose’s campaign manager during the 2014 Ekiti governorship election, Dr. Tope Aluko, has come out to say that the election was rigged with the help of the security apparatus and that the said N4.7billion was flown in cash from Abuja to Ekiti through Akure. We also have the Ekitigate audio secretly recorded by Captain Koli in the public space to corroborate Dr. Aluko’s assertion. The Nigeria Army has since conducted a court martial which indicted all the soldiers involved in the same election scandal. Most of them have been summarily dismissed from service.
Characteristically, the Governor has responded not with the decorum expected of a public official but with a lousy defilement of the public space with his gangster behaviour and uncouth utterances rather than submit himself to the law and clear his name through the courts if he indeed believes that he has a case. Instead, he has attempted to throw mud at anyone or institution that could indict him. He accuses Zenith Bank of lying about the source of the money that was traced to his account but the bank has since denied that it contributed more than N50m to the campaign.
Fayose accuses Zenith Bank of sponsoring his campaign. Zenith bank denies it fully. Then a picture emerges of an alleged Zenith bank staff member kneeling down to beg the governor. Only in Nigeria!k
Mr. Fayose accuses the President of owning an estate in Abuja which he did not declare in his asset declaration form with the Code of Conduct Bureau, without any proof. This he says makes it untenable for the presidency or any of its agencies to investigate him since, according to him, the President is also corrupt.
The President’s wife is also not left out. He alleges that she was indicted in a bribe scandal that saw a former US congressman, William Jefferson, jailed. It has since emerged that she is not the same Aisha Buhari that was indicted. In anger, the president’s wife published a tweet in which she called Mr. Fayose a ‘mad dog’. She later deleted the tweet and had her lawyers write him a letter demanding a withdrawal of the accusation within 5 days or she seeks redress in court.
Mr Fayose says that Mr. Femi Falana who was involved in the Army’s court martial had a sinister motive for getting involved. You wonder how doing his job as a lawyer constitutes a plot to have the governor removed. Except of course the governor is culpable, which he could be, judging by the facts in the public domain, hence his wild attempts at deflecting them away.
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