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By Henry Umahi
The Agbor Stakeholders Forum (ASF) has raised the alarm to what it referred to as “the relentless persecution and witch-hunt of our kin, Mr Godwin Emefiele.” The group described the ordeal of the former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) as the “greatest political witch-hunt in Nigeria’s history.”
According to the group, Emefiele has suffered humiliation and incarceration for months and should be allowed to go home.
In a statement signed by Kanene Kachikwu, the group said: “The latest scheme by the Bola Tinubu administration to break our brother and probably jail him for purely political reason, is the surreptitious contracting of the world’s number one accounting firm to audit the forex transactions of the CBN during Emefiele’s time.
We assert that no other CBN governor has been so probed in the history of Nigeria.”
The group said the biggest accounting firm in the world today, which is priced in tens of million of dollars, was secretly recruited by the Tinubu administration recently to do a yeoman’s job of auditing Emefiele’s CBN.
The group alleged that the accounting firm has come up with yet another binge of allegations, stressing that all previous charges have been dropped and Emefiele is being dragged to court on fresh charges after several other investigations to nail him failed.
The group said: “Recall that since June 2023, immediately after the inauguration of President Tinubu, Emefiele has been subjected to intense probes and scrutinies without let, till date. The first grilling of Emefiele was by the Department of State Service (DSS). The DSS had plucked our brother from his Lagos home on June 10, 2023. “They had detained him in Abuja and literally turned him upside-down. The DSS had initially accused him of financing terror. They kept him in their custody for about four months. They visited all his property everywhere in Nigeria and ransacked them all.
“At the end of the day, they found only a little ‘toy’ gun. They didn’t get an iota of evidence to prosecute him on the accusation of funding terror or gun-running. The DSS dragged Emefiele to court several times on some trumped up charges but not one charge could stand up before the court.
“The DSS shamefacedly handed Emefiele to brother agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). The EFCC that was supposed to investigate Emefiele in the first place also dredged up all sorts of unfounded allegations of financial malfeasance, including procurement offences. But none could stand the test of basic legality. The EFCC failed.”
The group said that a so-called special investigator was engaged and he “rushed to pronounce that CBN under Emefiele opened about one thousand bank accounts across the globe; that he had interests in some new banks, that some N7.3 billion were traceable to Emefiele, and that he forged Buhari’s signature to draw $6.2m, among other spurious allegations. Not one allegation has been proved.”
The ASF further said: “As we have noted several times before in the last one year, our brother was headhunted for the job of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor in 2014. He was plucked from the pinnacle of one of the biggest and best banks in Africa.
“Emefiele rose through the ranks to become the MD/CEO of that bank. He remains a major shareholder in the bank and therefore, was probably the richest CBN governor ever to be appointed. We therefore state categorically that Mr Emefiele was not in the CBN to look for money or to make money.
“On the contrary, his driving force was and remains the need to mobilize idle long-term funds for the rapid development of Nigeria.
And shorn of the ongoing vicious vendetta, Nigeria’s landscape today is full of glowing outcomes of Emefiele’s infrastructure footprints.
Just one example will suffice here. “The recently launched urban rail system of Lagos State (the Red and Blue lines) Metro railway system. Emefiele’s CBN injected billions of naira in loans to ensure their eventual completion and commissioning recently. It can be asserted that the Lagos Metro lines may not be in use today if not for “Emefiele’s vision for deploying development finance in an emerging economy. Examples of such huge infrastructure boost abound at both state and private sector levels. It is on record that Emefiele’s CBN was the backbone of the Buhari administration. He galvanised massive productivity in all sectors of the economy, including farming, manufacturing and MSMEs. He controlled frivolous importation of products Nigeria can produce. He managed foreign exchange and made it predictable most of thr period.
This is unlike what Nigeria suffer today.
“Nigerians know that the only reason Emefiele has been singled out for persecution is that he implemented President Muhammadu Buhari’s naira redesign policy. At the nick of the last ,presidential election, President Buhari had sought to curb rigging through vote buying. Buhari wanted to checkmate candidates who had stacked warehouses full of cash for the sole purpose of buying votes.
Today, our brother Emefiele is being hounded for carrying out a Presidential directive.
“Finally, as we have done in the past, we beseech President Bola Tinubu to have a change of heart and let our brother go. He has gone through a lot already having lost his tenured job and having suffered humiliation and incarceration for months. We urge Mr President to apply the graces of his good offices and free our brother.
“Having won the crown, we appeal to him to grant our brother reprieve in the spirit of reconciliation and national healing. We trust that Emefiele will be an asset to this administration knowing that he’s a true patriot.”
