A former national secretary of the Action Congress of Nigeria, Dr Usman Bugaje, has said that the trial of the former Lagos State governor, Bola Tinubu, is a political witch-hunt by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which has a number of its own members with pending criminal cases that have been stalled.
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Dr Bugaje who was a member of the House of Representatives between 2003 and 2007 in an exclusive interview with LEADERSHIP, wondered why former PDP governors who? committed the same crime for which Tinubu is being charged and former president Olusegun Obasanjo who has questions to answer in respect of the power projects have not been charged to court.
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He said the House had established that $16 billion had been spent on the power sector with nothing to show for it and those responsible are well known. “A lot of them are PDP people and the head of them is Obasanjo who has not been brought to book,” he said.
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“So, how can you convince anybody that the PDP government is really out to fight corruption. The PDP government is using this opportunity selectively to fight who they perceive as its enemies,” he added.?? Bugaje further said, “ If you look at the PDP chairman, from the last acting chairman, the chairman before him, and the one before that one, three successive chairmen if you like, all of them have one case or another in one of the anti-corruption agencies.”
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He said, “It is either Siemens or the national ID card fraud, or it is something else. These people have been taken to court or at least the issue has been raised in one of these anti-corruption agencies. But what have you heard about the matter?”
“You can clearly see that here are people who ought to be prosecuted and taken to jail. These cases have been going on for nearly five years, nobody has done anything and then suddenly, you are pursuing other people.
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And this particular case, if indeed it was true, look at the number of years he has spent since he left office, it has been four years. Nobody ever thought about bringing him to book. Could it be that he is the only officer at his own level that really committed this so-called crime? What about the PDP governors? Were they complying with this particular law or not?”
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Bugaje who was the ACN governorship candidate in Katsina State for the 2011 election also said that it was clear that the judiciary was being manipulated by the PDP as tribunal judges no longer hear cases on their merits but dismiss them on grounds of technicalities.
He said, “In this country, whether you provide hard evidence to the court or you do not, everybody who lives in this country knows that the judges, the police and the other security agencies are in an unholy alliance with the PDP government.”
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