Those who know Okoi Obono-Obla very well would testify to the fact that he is very passionate and sober in his crusade against corruption.
Gilbert Okorie
Intrigues, treachery and blackmail are the catchwords with which to paraphrase the Nigerian political landscape. In a national disorder in which corruption is the order of the day, desperate and corrupt politicians would not hesitate to pour red oil on your white brocade if you dare investigate them for corruption. Given our overcharged and convoluted social media space which lacks mature weighing up of issues before taking sides, investigators are blackmailed into submission whereas the corrupt ones walk freely with impunity.
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The above scenario aptly describes the current travail of Okoi Obono-Obla, an appointee of President Muhammadu Buhari. His greatest undoing is accepting to serve as Senior Special Assistant to the President on Prosecution. In the course of his assignment, Obono-Obla tried to investigate some members of the National Assembly who were alleged to have been involved in stupendous sleaze and ownership of multiple property across the world. It would be recalled that the 8th National Assembly and the Executive have locked horns over allegations of mounting corruption since inception in 2015.
Rather than clear their names of alleged graft, the lawmakers went for an overkill. There suddenly emerged from nowhere a petition by Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria to the House of Representatives Ad hoc Panel, investigating the Special Presidential Investigation Panel for the Recovery of Public Property (SPIP) also chaired by Okoi Obono-Obla, claiming that he gained admission to study law in the University of Jos with invalid WAEC result. It is the case of the investigator being investigated through intimidation, falsehood, subterfuge and blackmail.
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The affected members of the National Assembly are determined to evade investigation by hulling mud on their supposed investigator and the social media goons chorused in its acclamation. Those who looted and are still looting the national patrimony into their private pockets are now made to look like saints and the man trying to expose their shady deals is now being hunted with odium. Does Nigeria have any soul?
Those who know Okoi Obono-Obla very well would testify to the fact that he is very passionate and sober in his crusade against corruption. With deft patriotic fervour, he has remained unrelenting in his implacable desire to expose those in high places who have raped mother Nigeria prostrate; who have looted our national patrimony into their private pockets. It is this powerful class of shameless usurpers of our commonwealth that is mobilizing to tarnish his hard earned image and reputation. Even when they know that it is not within their brief to investigate him, they have shamelessly left the substance in pursuit of shadows.
Only in Nigeria that people who are being investigated for corruption would gang up to investigate their investigator. Why did the House of Representatives set up a committee to investigate Obono-Obla after some of its members had been indicted for corruption? Of course, the committee was never interested in justice. It had a clear-cut agenda: to besmirch Okoi’s reputation, assassinate his character and expose him to public scandal and odium. If he did not have O’Level, why was he able to earn a law degree, pass the Law School exam and became a lawyer for almost 30 years?
Okoi challenged the power of the House of Representatives committee instituted to investigate the legality of the Special Presidential Investigation Panel For Recovery Of Public Property, which was just a ploy to witch hunt him, in the Federal High Court. Despite the legal challenge in the FHC, the committee still went ahead to purport to investigate his academic records and issued a disjointed report to tarnish his reputation.
The committee made the allegation against him, sat on judgement against him and purported to indict him much against the tenets of natural justice and the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which both insist that one cannot be the accuser, the prosecutor and the judge at the same time.
The committee which boasted that Okoi would be cut to size because he is too independent-minded, fearless and without a godfather, went ahead to scandalize him in the media without producing the certificate he allegedly used to obtain admission into the university for scientific and forensic proof. Why did the committee hurriedly turn in its report to the media even during the recess of the House when the matter was already before the Federal High Court, if it did not have a premeditated agenda to rubbish the image of the legal and social activist?
People entrusted with the arduous task of investigating powerful but very corrupt officials are usually harassed, victimized, threatened and blackmailed while the media chorus: ‘persecute him; persecute him’, without thinking twice.
This is because bad news sells faster in the media. But the public must note that the case of Okoi Obono-Obla is a clear case of victimization and unjust intimidation by very corrupt politicians whose actions have brought the country to this magnitude of underdevelopment, poverty and hunger. He is being harassed, witch hunted, pilloried, targeted, victimized, antagonized, maligned and blackmailed by powerful individuals who don’t want their secret dirty deals to be exposed.
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The irony is that they are using the media to achieve their nefarious objective of trying to ridicule the true fighter for the public good. Okoi Obono-Obla is also, in a way a victim of the prolonged fight between the Executive and the Legislature in our never-ending political gerrymandering, mendacity, acrimony, rancour and strife. But now that the public is gradually understanding the cynical plot of those whose hands are soiled with the public till thereby rendering the entire country to this state of arrested development, Okoi will come out victorious.
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Okorie writes from Lagos
