As the running scandal that is now sure to go down in the annals of sleaze as asuikigate seeps drip by tawdry drip into the fount of public discourse, one cannot but marvel at the casualness, the utter disregard for consequences with which vast sums of money earmarked for national security were handed out even to persons who had not set out to obtain.
One veteran says he has never met Dasuki and never obtained from him. He was minding his own business when they brought him $230,000, a far cry from the N100 million they claim to have given him.
They didn’t tell him the source. They didn’t tell him what it was for. He apparently assumed that it was for old times’ sake, or for business as usual, not knowing that it was stolen money.
Pardon the digression, but it brings to mind Dominique Strauss-Kahn , the randy billionaire former president of the IMF who would have been elected president of France in 2012 if he had not sexually assaulted a maid in a swanky New York hotel the previous year. On trial for participating in prostitution ring in France, he pleaded that since the women were naked, he had no way of knowing that they were prostitutes.
Maybe the women should have put on identifying apparel, just as the package delivered to the veteran, aforementioned, should have been stamped “Stolen Money.”
As if partial recompense for the Nobel Prize they thought he should have been awarded long ago if those doddering old men in Oslo had not been intellectually fossilised, National Security handed him N450 million for his labours.
One expired political godfather to whom they said they handed N100 million says it was actually N500 million and that he simply passed it on, N100 million apiece, to the lesser godfathers in the zone, taking nothing for himself.
Those who claim to know him well say they believe him. They say he would rather donate than obtain, and that it is not for nothing that he is called “Donatus” — behind his back.
Amidst the back and forth, one strand of Dasukigate risks getting lost. As the story goes, on hearing that huge sums of money were being handed out without appropriation, one influential lawmaker went to the main depository and threatened to bring the matter before the appropriate oversight body of one of the legislative houses unless he was, shall we say, accommodated.
Knowing that this was no idle threat and that the fellow was firmly resolved to obtain from the colossal slush fund they were dispensing, they quickly handed him N250 million in hush money. So the story goes, at any rate.
Are the authorities investigating it?
Then there is the story set in Akwa Ibom that may or may not be related to Dasukigate. In a controversial raid on a wing of Government House Complex in the state capital, Uyo, security operatives searching for illegal arms reported stumbling upon “a stockpile of dollars, “not the stockpile of illegal arms they expected to find.
What became of the stockpile? Has its owner –or custodian – been identified? Where did it come from, and what purpose or purposes was it meant to serve?
Jankara journalism
After Bode George conned him into doing a stultifying white-wash job on the contract-splitting scam at the Nigerian Ports Authority, you would think that the self-certified chief of Area Boys and leading practitioner of Jankara journalism has learned some lessons in real journalism and humility.
Fat chance.
There he was again the other day, this media wayfarer, pontificating that the Nigerian print media establishment is made up of “the Zombie Press” and others, with apparently nothing in between.
Irrespective of the issue at hand,” he has written (Vanguard, October 11, 2015), “all the reader needs to know is where the interest of the owner lies and he can virtually write all the columns, editorials, comments, letters to the editor that would appear,” pro and contra, in the “Zombie Press, “ of which he names this newspaper as an exemplar.
He cites as one of his two test cases Saraki’s “emergence” as Senate president. All the “journalists” (inverted commas in the original) writing for the Zombie Press, he found as he had confidently expected, took the same position, despite the fact that “some of these writers are Professors (including Emeritus Professors), and holders of advanced degrees.”
This Emeritus Professor of Journalism holds and has stated at every opportunity that Saraki’s path to the presidency of the Senate was base and ignoble. That view is shared by tens of thousands, perhaps millions of Nigerians who are not in any way connected with this newspaper.
Anyone who sincerely believes that Saraki’s conduct in the matter is the quintessence of propriety and nobility should come out forthrightly and say so, instead of sniping at those who hold a contrary view or ascribing improper motives to them.
The second test case in the Jankara study – such as it was — centres on perceptions of President Muhammadu Buhari’s performance in office.
Those “Zombies” who called Yar’Adua “Baba Go Slow” in 2007 are now unanimous in asking Nigerians to allow Buhari to operate at his own pace, whereas the other Zombies who had supported Yar’Adua back in 2007 have been carpeting Buhari for being too slow. In each case, the editors operate as if the only view that counts is that of those who agree with their publisher, the study asserts.
I don’t know what happens at the paper where the researcher moonlights, but that is not how The Nation is run. You have to wonder whether he really reads the newspaper. The views expressed on its pages are far more nuanced than a casual researcher can fathom.
Plus, they don’t do nuance at Jankara, I gather.
Then, this : Those ‘Zombie” newspapers “are so predictable that one must ask: whatever happened to self-respect? Is it possible that 20 educated and intelligent adults could agree on every important issue – unless “none thinks very much”?
Do the columnists and editorial writers and editors he is excoriating in fact agree on every important issue? What is the evidence for this sweeping assertion on the basis of which the author gratuitously questions the education, intelligence and self-respect or persons, many of whom are not one whit less educated, less intelligent and less self-respecting than he is?
Pity they also don’t do civility at Jankara.
Worse than Jankara journalism
Late this past Sunday, a friend called my attention to a longish piece in Nigerian Tribune purporting to be an interview with the eminent legal scholar and Senior Advocate, Professor Itse Sagay.
Three or four paragraphs into it, I was already doubting its authenticity. By the time I was done, my doubts were confirmed. The statements credited to Professor Sagay lacked the clarity of thought and the elegance of exposition that are his hallmark. In part fact-free and in part driven by bilious rage, the piece seemed to have been put together by an Olisa Metuh clone.
It has since been confirmed that the “interview” was a forgery through and through.
NATION
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