The Interview Editors
By design or default, the still unfolding $2.1bn arms scandal involving former National Security Adviser SamboDasuki has exposed the bizarre side of our elite and their collaborators. Faced with possible trial over alleged stealing, it is amazing how suddenly yesterday’s strongmen and strong-women of power and influence have become afflicted by all manners of illnesses. It is as if the nation is now under a contagion of plagues.
Even more astonishing is the extent the sufferers hurriedly go to publicise their ailments, obviously to generate sympathy. When the acting chair of PDP’s BOT finally turned up to answer charges of receiving N300m alongside his son, for instance, he did so in wheel-chair. Before the court rose that day, his son on the other hand fought tooth and nail to avoid being kept at Kuje Prisons claiming he suffers arthritis.
The case of former PDP BOT chair and expired strongman of Edo politics, Tony Anenih, was no less dramatic. He is accused off pocketing N260m of the loot. The next thing we heard was that the old man just had a serious heart operation and still recuperating. Abroad, of course. This long-running melodrama started with the embattled NSA, Sambo Dasuki, himself. Long before the sordid details of the monumental $2.1bn scam began to seep out like pus, Dasuki had bluntly refused to cooperate with security agents and simply insisted he be allowed to travel abroad to treat “cancer”. Since he was silent on the nature, mischief-makers were left wondering if it had to do with constipation or gluttony. In his own last-ditch attempt to evade being arraigned for allegedly partaking of the $2.1bn loot, media mogul and AIT’s owner, Raymond Dokpesi, also begged he be allowed to travel abroad to keep a “pre-scheduled medical appointment”. He did not disclose whether flu or toothache.
Already, Mrs.Deziani Alison-Madueke, yesterday’s all-powerful oil minister, has virtually stripped her head for all to see how much an unspecified cancer has ravaged her hair. So, she would rather we all pray for her now, instead of asking where trillions of Naira of the oil money disappeared to under her watch. Deziani’s photo tactic would seem to have been inspired by Kingsley Kuku. Hours before EFCC formally declared him wanted over alleged diversion of tens of billions of naira of the Amnesty money, pictures of Kuku’s lying on a stretcher at a location described as an American Hospital surfaced in the media. He claimed to be recovering from a knee surgery. Curiously, his campaigns posters for the Ondo governorship polls in 2016 are already in circulation.
