David Alechenu Bonadventure Mark may well be one of the wealthiest Babangida era army generals going by disclosures from his messy divorce in a London family court. He was a core member of the “Babangida Boys” club within the Nigerian military hierarchy under military dictatorship directed by the evil genius, IBB between 1985-1993. Though currently a senator of the Federal republic of Nigeria David Mark had been a military administrator of Niger State, a diplomat to the US and onetime federal minister of communications who made a fortune stealing public funds and currently wants to become the number 3 most powerful Nigerian political office holder as he jostle to become the senate president on Tuesday if plans by former president Obasanjo sails through.
David Mark had a controversial history in Nigeria before he fled into exile in 1994 after he fell out of favor with military dictator, Sani Abacha he first fled to Ghana on exile before moving to the UK, while he was in Ghana, General Abacha contacted Jerry Rawlings of Ghana to help him chase down David Mark because he Abacha found out David Mark had stolen so much money from Nigeria but J.J Rawlings replied that he couldn’t do it because if David Mark was mishandled, the Ghanaian economy will feel the impact. It was true, David Mark was traveling with a huge sum of money in Ghana and for a brief period he was the largest dealer in foreign currency in Ghana according to sources in Ghana who witnessed his brief stay in the West African country.
David Mark was born in 1948 in Benue State and had a flourishing military career ending in the rank of general before he was retired in 1993. David Mark, according to our investigations made a fortune during his military career mostly ferrying cash money on behalf of General Babangida before and during the “Gulf Oil windfall” era. His main duty was to help set up fictitious companies and offshore bank accounts in Cayman Islands and Jersey on behalf of Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida and himself as Babangida and his boys looted the Nigerian national treasury before he was forced out of power in 1993 owing to the mass uprising arising from annulment of the June 12 elections won by businessman Chief M.K.O Abiola.
As news has it, it was David Mark who led some army generals known as “IBB Boys” to scuttle the electoral success of Chief Abiola who later died in detention under controversial circumstances. He was quoted as threatening to kill Chief M.K.O Abiola and IBB if the military handed over power to Abiola after the Chief won the June 12 1993 presidential elections adjudged to be free and fair by local and international observers. IBB did annul the results of the elections and went ahead to set up an interim government headed by Chief Shonekan. The interim government would last only 82 days before General Sanni Abacha took over from Shonekan through a palace coup.
David Marks’ opposition to the June 12 elections and the desire to scuttle the elections tallied with that of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo who was being recruited by IBB with the help of David Mark’s group to lead the interim government, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo became close with David Mark as he worked underground with the military to ensure that Chief M.K.O Abiola did not take over power on the account of the June 12 elections, though IBB didn’t let Obasanjo head the interim government as planned because he –IBB-couldn’t trust Obasanjo, David Mark became close to Obasanjo ever since, their friendship was cemented when Abacha suddenly died and Obasanjo was released from prison to run for office as President, David Mark who had lived in the UK during the time between 1994 to 1998 returned back to Nigeria from exile. He was an arrowhead of the third term project which would have seen President Obasanjo extend his tenure for a third term of four years in office.
It has been rumored that David Mark owned a private jet and a multi-million dollar golf course in Ireland but none of those could be independently confirmed by Saharareporters as the time of filing this report. What gave a major clue into David Mark’s corrupt lifestyle was a bitter divorce filed by his fourth wife, 57 year old Victoria Preye Mark, a Rivers State indigene to whom David Mark was married in 1979. The couple had four kids all of whom were British citizens. The four kids attended schools in Switzerland and the UK before their parents’ divorce which commenced on July 17 2000.
Victoria’s divorce claims provided the best yet exposé on David Marks corrupt past, in 2000 Victoria successfully got a Family Division court in London to freeze an account owned by David Mark to the tune of 6 million pounds. Obviously the monies in the account were proceeds of corruption from his days as currency courier for the Babangida’s family.
The monies which were set up in four accounts namely three accounts at the Northern Bank, Isle of Man, and one account at the Allied Irish Bank, Jersey were frozen in October 2000 as a result of the ancillary relief sought by Victoria Mark in their divorce case.
The full text of the Appeal is included in the E-Library
By Sylvester Asoya
Senator David Mark’s recent assertion that only ex-military officers should aspire to become president incurs the wrath of the civilian arm of the political class.
Controversy and Brigadier-General David Bonaventure Mark (retd), now Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, are companions. In different political epochs, Mark, Chairman, Senate Police Committee, has made waves and enmeshed himself in controversies, slipped into oblivion and, again, re-emerged in controversial circumstances.
Largely seen as an opportunist in military circles, Mark’s recent interview with The Punch has added another spat to his pool of controversy. He told the daily that only ex-military men have the requisite training to be president of Nigeria. “Do you know the history of America, the mother of all democracies? Who among the presidents did not wear uniform? Go and look at the percentage. Do you know one of the things that could have worked against Clinton was that he did not wear uniform? If I have my way, I will say whoever does not have military background should not be made president. You civilians don’t have the requisite training,” Mark argued.
In what observers described as irritating arrogance, the senator said a sergeant in the Army is better than a university graduate, stressing that the polity would be more robust only if retired military men played prominent roles at all levels of governance. He added: “Military training is the best. That training gives you boldness. You people think we are just zombies.”
Famous Lagos lawyer and human rights activist, Gani Fawehinmi, however, believes Mark cannot be anything other than a zombie. He said the Senator’s outbursts reflected his mediocrity and inferiority complex. “Mark has always suffered from inferiority complex. He is intimidated by the sophisticated intelligentsia that the universities have produced before the military junta, which Mark had always been part of, [and which has] reduced the universities to glorified nursery schools. Though Mark and his gang have bastardised the university system, Mark remains an intellectual dwarf to our teeming graduates,” Fawehinmi said.
While heaping blame for the under-development of the country on long years of military dictatorship, Fawehinmi called on Nigerians to revolt against ex-military generals in politics. But Alex Akinyele, Minister of Information in the General Babangida regime, backed Mark. He believes that ex-military personnel will rule Nigeria for 25 years because, according to him, only they have the material resources to run aggressive presidential campaigns in Nigeria. He, therefore, advised Nigerians not to crucify Mark for expressing a ‘‘popular’’ view, adding that the Senator is famous for ventilating his opinion on any national issue, whether or not it is popular. Akinyele’s view is not too surprising as both men had served as ministers in the Babangida administration and remain friends.
As Minister of Communications, Mark once said telephony was not for the poor. That reckless declaration pitted the signals officer against many Nigerians on many grounds: One, the public believed that having come from an indigent home in the rustic town of Oturkpo where social amenities have, up till date, remained a luxury, Mark should have identified with the downtrodden by using his office to make telephony available to the people. Besides, most people contended that access to telecommunication by the poor was a right and should not have been the exclusive preserve of the rich as the then minister made it look like. “Mark’s outburst was an insult on the collective sensibility of our people. It, more than anything else, shows that Mark has no vision. For if he had, he would have known the GSM revolution we are enjoying today would come to pass,” reasoned a socio-political commentator.
Secondly, neighbouring countries like Ghana and Mali at the time had begun providing telecommunication for the less privileged. So his critics found it unacceptable for a Minister of the most populous country and a viable economy like Nigeria’s to deny the poor telephony.
Before his inglorious removal as minister, his stints as Chairman, Abandoned Properties Implementation Committee and state governor had been characterised by scandals. It would be recalled that shortly after the end of the civil war, the Gen. Yakubu Gowon junta constituted a panel to, among other things, help recover the abandoned property of Ndigbo scattered all over the country. Mark, then a major, was head of the task force. He allegedly handled the job in a manner that left a sour taste in the mouth of some Igbo land owners, who petitioned the federal government. Typical of most petitions in Nigeria, the land owners’ cry was thrown into the trash can. That assignment launched him into the millionaires’ club.
As Military Governor of Niger State, Mark’s rural development programmes culminated in the worst controversy in the history of that state, with an undisclosed sum of money earmarked for the programmes reportedly disappearing into thin air. An embarrassed Gen. Babangida, who was then the military president, had to relieve Mark of his appointment. And at the dawn of the botched Third Republic, Mark stood tall as one of the anti-democratic elements that scuttled the June 12 presidential election, adjudged to be the freest and fairest in the history of the country. He was reported to have insisted that the acclaimed winner of that election, Bashorun Moshood Abiola, was not born to rule. As the storm that followed his assertion was about settling down, Mark released another bombshell when he described his Yoruba compatriots as cowards.
Mark allegedly supported the sack of Chief Ernest Shonekan, who headed the lame-duck Interim National Government in 2003. However, if the dark-skinned officer thought the ouster of Shonekan would bounce him back into reckoning, he was wrong. The late General Sani Abacha, who became head of state retired Mark and forced him into exile. Though no reason was given for Mark’s untimely retirement, close watchers of the Abacha dark days believe that his (Abacha’s) government could not retain Mark because he was regarded in military circles as a loose canon. Mark remained in the cooler until Abacha expired in June 1998. In 1998 when some Idoma elites rolled out the drums to welcome the soldier from exile, the masses and the progressive wing of the political elite refused to participate in the frenzied reception that attended his home-coming. They perhaps dissociated themselves because they knew that being in exile for five years couldn’t have erased the zombie mentality in Mark’s bloodstream. Besides.
As military governor of Niger State, minister of communications and member of the Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC), Mark had the opportunity of attracting development to the Idoma-speaking area in particular and Benue State as a whole. In fact, the Idoma elites had thought he would explore his closeness to IBB to create Apa State out of the old Benue State but he had frittered away that golden opportunity. Today, his people, the Idoma – a minority ethnic group in the state – are still groaning under the brunt of Tiv marginalisation. An analyst once captured the monumental failure of Mark thus: “David Mark was the closest military officer from the old Benue to General Babangida. At a time when state creation was as easy as buying sachet water on the street, Mark preferred to sell the proposed Apa State for a pot of porridge. I can’t understand why Mark would be clamouring for state creation now when it’s constitutionally difficult to do so.”
Even outside the confines of his senatorial district, the Tivs that constitute the majority tribe in the state avoid Mark like the plague because of his arrogance and “know it all” posture. It was, therefore, not surprising that the old breed Idoma political elite, led by former Senate President, Ameh Ebute, opposed Mark’s Benue South senatorial bid in 1999. But with the intervention of General Ibrahim Babangida, Chief Barnabas Gemade, former PDP National Chairman, and the paramount ruler of Idoma kingdom, HRH Elias Ikoyi Obekpa, Mark was elected senator on the platform of PDP.
The soldier-turned-politician spent the better part of his first term in office doing nothing in the hallowed chambers of the National Assembly. He neither sponsored a bill nor articulated the Idoma cause which includes giving the Idoma people a befitting identity through the creation of Apa State. It was also on record that Mark did not consult with his constituents on any matter. Even when the Federal Government released funds for constituency projects running into millions of Naira for each Senator of the Federal Republic, the people of his senatorial district were not briefed. Most of them only read about it on the pages of newspapers. In 2002 when Mark announced a scholarship scheme for gifted indigent students of Idoma extraction, it turned out to be a ruse. Some of the students who had thronged Mark’s constituency office in Oturkpo, the ancestral capital of Idomaland, were to later discover that the ex-minister was only deceiving the people so as to endear himself to them ahead of the 2003 elections. The students were shocked that a distinguished senator could be so dishonourable to the extent of playing politics with the future of the youth.
Since then, the die seems to have been cast and there has been no love lost between the Senator and the National Association of Idoma Students, NAIS, the umbrella association of Idoma students. It was, therefore, not a surprise to observers of Benue politics that the youths constituted themselves into a thorn in the flesh of Mark in his re-election bid in 2003. Indeed, the students had favoured Alhaji Usman Abubakar of UNPP, Mark’s main challenger in that year’s senatorial election. Were it not for the monumental war chest of the PDP and INEC’s complicity, analysts believe Mark would have been defeated.
Since that election, the centre no longer holds for Mark. To worsen his plight, Governor George Akume of Benue State, Dr. Iyorchia Ayu, former Minister of Environment and Chief Audu Ogbeh, former PDP Chairman, who had hitherto given him cover, now avoid him. Even his nominees in Akume’s government have distanced themselves from him. However, Mark is said to be capable of doing anything to remain in the corridors of power even if it is incongruous with the wishes and aspirations of the electorate on whose votes he purportedly won election. That opportunity came with the tenure elongation bid of the President. Though the third term infamy died in the hallowed chambers of the Senate, Mark, against the wish of his constituents, had supported it, allegedly to induce the presidency into awarding him the contract for the supply of motorcycles to the Nigeria Police, which the President reportedly obliged him.
Other conditions Mark allegedly handed to Obasanjo included the President appointing a lackey of his as minister and guaranteeing his re-election to the Senate in 2007. Following the sack of Dr. Iyorchia Ayu from the Ministry of Environment in 2005, the lot fell on Mark to nominate Grace Ogbueche as Minister of State for Education, to fill the vacant Benue State ministerial slot. But with the collapse of Obasanjo’s sit-tight plot, the chickens are coming home to roost ahead of 2007.
Already, Benue South Senatorial district, comprising the Idoma people where Mark and Ogbueche are from, has disowned them. The Opiatoha k Idoma, the mainstream socio-cultural umbrella of the Idoma, has said Mark neither consulted it nor the Benue State government before nominating the Minister. It also issued a statement alleging that the woman is only representing the interest of Mark and not the state. Besides, the group and Idoma students, under the umbrella of NAIS, staged a peaceful rally in Makurdi calling for the recall of the Senator. Already, the political elites are collecting signatures to commence the senator’s recall. “Senator Mark is a chop chop politician. His years as military governor and Minister of Communication were disasters to the Idoma people. Out of sympathy, we made him Senator in 1999 to attract development to us but he went to lobby for contracts for himself, and supported third term for selfish aims. That is why we want to recall Mark,” Enalegwu Oche, President, Idoma National Forum, said in Makurdi.
But some observers believe that no amount of signatures can recall Mark because the President will stop at nothing to give protection to the controversial Senator. This is against the background that none of the Senators whose constituents had fulfilled the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) conditions for recall had been sacked by INEC, on grounds that they were “persecuted” for supporting the President. The case of Mark may not be different from others. One thing is however, certain, Mark is in the summer of his political career.
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