By Adamu Muhammad Hamid, PhD
Controversial as he seemed, Hon. Muhammad Gudaji Kazaure garnered tremendous courage to have spilled the beans on shoddy dealings in government, involving the Central Bank governor Mr Godwin Emefiele and the Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami on mainly monies discovered in Investors and Exporters (I & E) Window Account amounting to 171 billion USD as at 2020. Hon. Kazaure claimed that the committee in which he’s secretary was specially assigned by the President to investigate money accruing to CBN on Nigerian Inter-bank Settlement System (NIBSS) from 2013 due to the claim that from 2013 to 2016, Nigeria lost about N20trillion.
He claimed that the AGF was instrumental to initiating the letter from Presidency to stop the investigation. And subsequently, he attempted severally to see the President to brief him personally on what was happening. Hon Kazaure’s argument is that all the monies in the I & E Window Account are public funds accruing from NIBSS transactions. According to him, there is no way any foreign investor could deposit any money N1billion without the full information of DSS. Part of the allegation is that the CBN governor secretly owns two commercial banks in Nigeria and that he’s richer than the country. These are quite huge allegations.
Ordinarily, citizens in Nigeria have fun listening to the submissions of Hon. Gudaji because of his characteristic bluntness and Hausa-accented Nigerian English. Now he has brought an exceptionally serious matter that is rocking the country and dominating public discussion. He wouldn’t dare address a news conference on this subject without his facts handy. In addition, he may have his little errors here and there, but the glaring lesson in his submission to the public this time is what is required to be patriotic is not faultlessness in Queen’s, now King’s English but faultlessness in good conduct.
Now, why was the investigation halted?
Though none of Kazaure’s allegations was against the Presidency, the Presidency saw it as a point of duty to respond. Why wouldn’t the CBN governor be allowed to respond himself?
Speaking to the Nigerian public in response to Kazaure’s allegations, the Senior Special Assistant to the President (Media & Publicity) Garba Shehu recounted the history of the whole story in a statement that when President Buhari assumed office in 2015, the law for the collection of a token on banking transactions was there but ineffectual, and this was as a result of certain characters who apparently formed a cartel with collaborators in the Nigerian Postal Service, NIPOST, and they “were allegedly collecting and pocketing this money,”.
So a non-government organization approached the presidency that it discovered the Nigerian government had lost over N20 trillion that should have accrued from the Nigerian Inter-bank Settlement System ((NIBSS) between 2013 and 2016. The NGO promised that the amount is recoverable for the government upon the payment of a professional charge of 7.5 percent of the money. After long explanations, the Statement said that the contract broke through a letter from the office of a former SGF late Abba Kyari because of “the lack of progress in the promised recovery”
The development caused serious concerns to the consultant who later sued the government, but the government later on won the case. After National Assembly amended the law by removing NIPOST from the duty of collecting the levy, the characters affected, according to Garba Shehe’s Statement, kept tricking the government through subtle approaches to “intimidate the government but the vigilant teams of the administration kept them at bay.”
So that was how laterly Hon. Muhammadu Gudaji Kazaure was drafted into the trick, perhaps unknowingly, with a plan to track the lost stamp duties. The former consultant whose deal with the government was terminated via late Abba Kyari’s letter was now chairman and Hon. Gudaji, secretary. Upon realizing such as a situation, the Statement said, the President rescinded his approval and asked that the committee “be stopped from operating under the seal of his office”.
And, pursuant to the provisions of Section 5(1),(a)&(b) of the 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended), the Chief Justice of the Federation and a serving member of the House of Representatives cannot serve in the committee.
So, in the final analysis, according to Garba Shehu’s statement, they found that there was no evidence for the claims of the consultant of a missing N89 trillion from stamp duty, and therefore it’s false; and funny enough, “The entire banking sector deposit is not even up to half of N89 trillion.”
Though Shehu’s response kept using the personal pronoun “I”, the context of the response does not clearly suggest the pronoun refers to him.
The Senior Special Assistant responded to Kazaure’s queries on the source of I & E Window Account’s 171 billion USD and other queries as contained in the Statement but other questions raised by Kazaure in his press statement are still to be addressed. For example, since the media and publicity special assistant to the president saw it a duty to respond to Kazaure’s allegations against the CBN governor, he should also respond on the issue of the CBN governor’s secret ownership of two banks in Nigeria (remember, the guy (the governor) attempted to contest for Presidency recently.)
Again, it’s also curious in the text of the SSA’s Statement that the president constituted the committee with the membership of the Chief Justice of the Federation, but did not remember that the chairman of the committee happened to be the consultant whose work was discontinued in 2015 over the same issue via a letter from his former Chief of Staff, late Kyari.
Though at the end of his news conference Kazure promised to continue with the conversation and update pressmen, he’s likely to do that because he wouldn’t like to join issues with the President. He’s fond of remarking that he has a lot of respect for his person, aside from his loyalty and respect for party hierarchy.
