• Details of meetings of the coordinating team
• CJN and AGF connection
• Details of meetings of the coordinating team
• CJN and AGF connection
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As Nigeria’s two most powerful zones in the country - the North-West and the South-West where President Goodluck Jonathan is least popular – emerge at the highest potential voting blocs, Saharareporters can report authoritatively that the President and his handlers have become very desperate.
President Jonathan’s fear of losing the April 2011 presidential election, a source at the Presidential Villa in Abuja told Saharareporters, should now be the beginning of wisdom for all opposition forces as he moves against them. Even though he is playing the ostrich and using “reconciliatory” tones in his recent public statements, our sources revealed that the president has ordered the release of N2.9 billion to destabilize the “opposition zone” of Southwestern Nigeria. The deal to destabilize the southwest and destroy the opposition Action Congress of Nigeria which has been gaining a lot of support in the Northwest due to the embrace of its presidential candidate, Mr. Nuhu Ribadu, by the conservative leaders, is code-named “Southwest Project.” The first tranche of N500 million is said to have been released to the coordinating team which includes Ogun State Governor, Mr. Gbenga Daniel.
Apart from destabilizing the opposition party in the southwest, the “Southwest Project” is also charged with ensuring that Justice Ayo Isa Salami, the President of the Federal Court of Appeal, is removed from office before April, so as to ensure that he does not preside over the constitution of the election tribunals. As a major plank of Jonathan’s and the ruling People’s Democratic Party’s plan to ensure victory by all means- fair and foul -in the April general elections, the Attorney General of the Federation, Bello Adokie, has been appointed at the head of a sub-committee to “get rid of Justice Salami” as soon as possible. Adokie is said to be working with the Chief Justice of the Federation, Aloysius Katsina-Alu, to ensure the removal of the President of the Appeal Court before the April elections. As earlier reported, AGF Adokie, was nominated for his position by the CJN Katsina-Alu, when Jonathan decided to remove the CJN’s kinsman and President Yar’Adua’s AGF, the controversial and discredited Michael Aondoakaa. It will be recalled that Justice Salami recently accused the CJN of attempting persuade him to pervert the course of justice in the Sokoto State gubernatorial case.
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The committee in charge of the “Southwest Project,” Saharareporters gathered, include embattled Ogun State Governor, Gbenga Daniel, former president Olusegun Obasanjo brother-in-law Chief Kenny Martins, who was coordinator of the badly corrupted Police Equipment Foundation. Mr. Martins was until recently under trial for criminal breach of trust, conversion, and misuse of public funds totaling more than N800million by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). Others in the group are former Lagos State Deputy Governor, Femi Pedro, one Dr. Kalejaiye, Senator Iyiola Omisore , former Ekiti state governor, Segun Oni and a few of Jonathan’s Senior Special Assistants.
Sources in, Abuja, told Sahareporters that, at a meeting last week Friday at the Villa, it was decided that Osun and Ekiti State PDP leaders should petition the National Judicial Council (NJC) and the President on the appeal cases which were resolved by the Appeal Court in favour of the ACN candidates, Dr. Kayode Fayemi and Mr. Rauf Aregbesola respectively last October and December. Before the petition was written, Jonathan had mandated the State Security Service (SSS) to compulsorily obtain phone records of Justice Salami and the lawyers involved in the cases without any court warrant, so as to use these as “evidence” in blackmailing Justice Salami and “discrediting” the ACN. The phone numbers were included in the petitions submitted by the Osun and Ekiti States’ PDP leaders. As soon as the petition written by Onni backfired, the SSS then wrote an official letter to MTN to demand the phone records of Justice Salami. The later was dated February 23 2011 addressed to MTN’s Akin Goodluck from the SSS.
The bigger plan, according to our source, was not so much to revisit the appeal cases in Osun and Ekiti States, but to engineer a crisis that will lead to the exit of Justice Salami before the April elections. Justice Salami is regarded as “a threat to PDP’s victory” in the likely election petition cases that might result from the April polls.
Our sources disclosed that Mr. Segun Oni who was removed as the governor of Ekiti State readily embraced the plan, because he was hopeful that it might lead to his return to office – since he can still run for another term. However, former Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola, whose term would have ended about five months away from the time he was removed from office, was not very enthusiastic about the plan. Regardless, Senator Iyiola Omisore, who is desperate to become the PDP candidate for the Osun State governorship race, was very supportive of the plan. Omisore therefore got the acting chairman of the Osun State PDP, Sunday Ojo-Williams, to send a petition to the NJC. While Ojo-Williams sent his own petition to the NJC, Oni , curiously sent his to Jonathan.
Sources said that Gbenga Daniels, Segun Oni and Iyiola Omisore are the ring leaders of the team that convinced President Jonathan that he would need the votes from the southwest to “counterbalance” the bloc votes that either the Congress of Progressive Change (CPC) candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari or the ACN candidate, Mr. Nuhu Ribadu, might get from the northwest – the zone which tops the voters list with 6.2 million registered voters. Convinced that this move is important given the cold shoulders he has been getting from the core conservative northern leaders, Jonathan ordered a massive influx of money, men and materials into the ‘Southwest Project.” He also ordered the AGF to work with all the security agencies and the anti-corruption agencies to ensure that former Governor of Lagos State, Senator Bola Tinubu, is “put in the cooler” before the April elections. The Code of Conduct Bureau has already began the looking into Bloa Tinubu’s assets declaration forms and said it would subject the former governor to trial for failure to disclose 8 foreign accounts he ran while he was governor.
Part of what heightened the felt-need to “cage” Tinubu before the April elections is the renewed attention that conservative Islamic leaders of the north are giving to the Ribadu ticket, Jonathan’s aides in the north have targeted Buhari’s running mate, Pastor Tunde Bakare for “elimination” , they accuse Buhari of choosing as his running mate, an infidel inPastor Bakare, because he converted from Islam to Christianity.
In line with the task to ensure that Justice Salami leaves the Appeal Court before April, members of the “Southwest Project” Team in Lagos have recruited a man who is popularly called “Bishop” to quickly set-up a non-governmental organization, NGO, which will begin a “civil society-driven campaign” to force Justice Salami to resign his job based on the “allegations levelled against him by Osun and Ekiti States PDP.” Bishop, Saharareporters learnt, is to be paid N25 million, as first instalment, to set-up the NGO in Lagos – a city which is described as the “home of civil society” in Nigeria.
Another source in Jonathan’s camp told Saharareporters that one of the consultants to the team raised the question of what should be the appropriate response to some of the issues that will be raised by the “politically-savvy people of the southwest” over the allegations of “compromise” against Justice Salami when it is compared with the “buried case” of Justice Thomas Naron, the Chairman of the first Osun State Elections Petitions Tribunal. TheNEWS magazine had accused of exchanging text messages with one of lawyers, Mr. Kunle Kalajaiye, and thus compromising himself in the process. Kalejaiye was a counsel to the then Governor Oyinlola in the case which was eventually decided by Justice Naron and co. in favour of Oyinlola. It was consequently decided that “friendly newspapers” will be paid to ensure that this “comparison” is not given prominence in the press, if at all it is raised by the opposition. Governor Gbenga Daniel was given the task of ensuring that the “friendly newspapers” in the southwest are bought over for this project.
Another meeting of the team was held on Sunday, February 20, at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers, Abuja, where it was decided that the Attorney-General, Adokie, and the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Katsina-Alu, should convince the President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), J. B. Daudu, to speak out in defence of Katsina-Alu, so as to “protect the office of the CJN”, while denouncing the action of Justice Salami. Part of the plan is to ensure that while Salami is “kicked out of office,” Justice Katsina-Alu, who is “trusted,” should be made to stay in office beyond his date of retirement. This is to ensure that he “supervises” the process of “consolidating PDP’s victory at the polls” between now and the few months after the April elections. In line with this, even though Justice Katsina-Alu’s will clock 70 on 28 March, 2011 going by his date of birth on the payroll record, his spokesperson has now told the press that the man is due for retirement on 28 August – while putting his date of birth at 28 August, 1941.
The NBA has already set up a committee to resolve the crisis within the judiciary but knowledgeable sources told SaharaReporters that most of the old hags included in the NBA committee except for two person are PDP lawyers or those actively seeking lucrative legal briefs from the federal government of Nigeria.
Saharareporters leant that as the battle for April elections rages, Jonathan has been convinced by members of the team and his other handlers that he has to “adopt the Obasanjo method of do or die,” given the formidable opposition he faces all over the country, particularly in the north and the south-west, the two most populous and most politically-powerful regions of the country.
However, a source close to the opposition parties, ACN and CPC told Saharareporters that “What all these show is that the PDP and President Jonathan realize that they will lose the April polls and want to do everything to subvert the legitimate voices and votes of the people of Nigeria. But they will fail; otherwise, Nigeria will be engulfed in a crisis that may lead to the collapse of democracy if they go on with their desperate plans.”
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