EFCC May Cripple Multiparty Democracy in Nigeria If…, Says HURIWA
By Sunday Okobi
Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria
(HURIWA) on Wednesday alleged that throughout 2015 and until the last week of December
2017, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has carried out
daredevil partisan attacks on top officials of the presidential campaign team
of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) while “overlooking
the need to be balanced, objective and
patriotic by failing to take a forensic investigation of the campaign finances
of the now ruling party- the All Progressives Congress(APC) which sponsored President
Muhammadu Buhari in 2015.”
HURIWA in a statement
jointly issued by its National Coordinator, Emmanuel Onwubiko, and the National
Media Affairs Director, Miss Zainab Yusuf, said: “This open and brazen act of
perfidy and biasness is even against the backdrop of the fact that over five
governors under the platform of the then ruling party left to join APC and were
known to have heavily bankrolled the campaign of the then leading opposition
leader, Buhari."
The group charged Nigerians to be vigilant and work
for the sustenance of multiparty democracy in Nigeria in 2018 which is a
crucial campaign year is heralding the 2019 general election “in which the
incumbent is being railroaded to contest by some of the governors elected on
the platform of APC.
The rights group alleged that the historical
trajectories of EFCC boss, Ibrahim Magu,
portrays him to be slavishly loyal to his appointing authority-President
Buhari-who has against all calculations and lawful recommendation of the
National Assembly that he be dropped as acting chairman has stock to his gun in
the insistence that Magu whose attempted confirmation was truncated at the
Senate.
HURIWA cautioned that if the National Assembly does
not rise to the occasion and exercise its lawful legislative powers by totally insisting
on its original recommendations rejecting the confirmation of Magu as chairman
of EFCC, “Nigeria could see a sudden spike in coordinated raids of homes and
offices of opposition political figures especially those who are perceived to
have the formidable wherewithal and necessary competences, networks and
financial muscles to wrest political power from the current administration
which is seen as poorly performing and has endangered the national economy of
Nigeria.”
HURIWA which also completely condemned the EFCC for
dabbling into the trade disputes as if it has become a debt collector or attack
dog in the longstanding litigation between the Guarantee Trust Bank plc and one
of its respected clients and a reputable industrialist, Mr. Innocent Chukwuma, also
lamented that undue attention EFCC has paid towards unraveling the sources of
campaign funding of the immediate past PDP administration portrays it as being unrepentantly
partisan.
It described EFCC as “politically biased and is now
an institution whose reputation has been sullied and its integrity rubbished in
the cesspool of politically corrupt anti-graft war which is just a smokescreen
for waging a crusade against multiparty democracy.
"We must safeguard our multiparty system and
not allow EFCC and forces of darkness to instigate the enthronement of a one
party state in 2019."
HURIWA has therefore called on the judiciary and
courts to maintain their constitutional independence as enshrined in section 6
by “adjudicating on all the matters filed before it by the EFCC/ICPC/POLICE/DSS
without fear or favour and without pandering to the whims and caprices of
anti-democratic forces masquerading about as officials of anti-graft bodies but
whose only brief is to decimate, degrade,
intimidate, harass, incarcerate extra legally, naming and shaming and
conducting serial media trials of opposition political figures especially those
of the only remaining mainstream opposition, PDP.”
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