The co-Founder of BudgIT, Seun Onigbinde, has on Thursday, said that former President, Goodluck Jonathan, should be arrested and prosecuted along with his National Security Adviser, NSA, Sambo Dasuki. Dasuki is being tried for alleged misappropriation of funds meant for the purchase of weapons for the Military to fight the armed group, boko haram. He was recently released from the Department of State Security Services, DSS, custody, after more than four years, on Tuesday.
Onigbinde reacting, stated that Jonathan should be docked too for the alleged fraud, since it happened under him. “GEJ is the one to sit in the dock with Dasuki firmly beside him and the entire downline”, Onigbinde said on Twitter. Onigbinde resigned his appointment as the Technical Adviser to the Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, after he faced an intense social media backlash over the appointment, mostly because of his past caustic criticism of President Muhammadu Buhari and his government.
He said that the Nigerian government has “lost the case”, because it has failed to charge the former President with Dasuki. “If you have any respect for the sacred nature of public funds, there is no single justification for using arms fund or security votes for political opportunism”, Onigbinde said. Dasuki was accused of awarding “phantom contracts” to buy 12 helicopters, 4 fighter jets, and bombs and ammunition worth $2 billion, that never were supplied.
“Thousands of needless Nigerian deaths would have been avoided”, if the money had been properly spent, Femi Adesina, an Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari, said in a statement in 2015. Adesina also alleged that Dasuki got the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, to transfer $142.6 million to a company with accounts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in West Africa, for unknown purposes, and without contracts. Dasuki has since denied any wrongdoing. He said that he was proud that in the final months under his watch, Nigeria’s Military ousted boko haram from a large swath of territory it had seized in North-East Nigeria.
