The main pillars on which Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi laid the foundation of their castle of myth in challenging the declaration of Ahmed Bola Tinubu as the winner
of February 25, 2023, Presidential election in Nigeria by the INEC were as follows : Tinubu was not qualified to vie for the position of president of Nigeria in the election because, according to the petitioners, Tinubu was convicted in the USA for narcotic
related crime; INEC violated the Electoral Act, 2022, by not posting results in real time from the polling units into its Results Viewing portal (IReV); non-uploading of results from Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) into IReV) enabled INEC to rig
election results in favour of Bola Ahmed Tinubu; and Tinubu should not have been declared the winner of the Presidential election since he failed to obtain 25% of the votes cast in the Federal Capital territory, Abuja.
On Tuesday, May 30, 2023, the witness of Peter Obi and his Labour Party, a legal practitioner named Lawrence Nwakaeti, tendered a US verdict showing how Tinubu
in 1993 forfeited $460,000 to the US government. Before going through what Barrister Lawrence Nwakaeti said under interrogations in the Court on that day, let me recall that this issue of probable Tinubu’s crime in respect of a forfeiture in the USA, in 1993,
had exhaustively been discussed when Bola Ahmed Tinubu was seeking second term tenure as Governor of Lagos State in 2003. Among the incontrovertible evidence produced in 2003 was that Tinubu graduated on June 22, 1979, majoring in Accounting and Business Administration.
He stayed thereafter in the US working in Mobil Oil as a Treasurer while, privately, he engaged in buying and selling of stocks in line with his profession. In 1983, he decided to be a brain-gain to Nigeria by returning to Nigeria. Behind in the US, Tinubu
had various bank accounts, especially in First Heritage Bank and City Bank NA. At the hight of the debate whether Bola Ahmed Tinubu was convicted of drug offence in the US, followed by forfeiture of $460,000 in 1993, the then Inspector General of Police, Tafa
Balogun, in a letter dated February 3, 2003, to the US Embassy in Nigeria asked the Embassy for confirmation of Tinubu’s past criminal records and convictions in the US. In a letter dated February 4, 2003, with reference number 011-234-1-261-0097-ext 244,
the Legal Attaché to the US Consulate, Michael Bonner, replied the then Inspector General of Police, Tafa Balogun thus, “The FBI never charged Tinubu with any drug offence; the case did not go on trial. Tinubu was never convicted. And he was never barred
from entering the US.” In relation to your letter dated February 3, 2003, reference number SR 3000/IGPSEC/ABJ/VOL. 24/287, regarding Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a record check of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) National Crime Information Center (NCIC)
was conducted. “The results of the checks were negative for any criminal arrest records, wants, or warrants for Bola Ahmed Tinubu (DOB 29 March, 1952). For information of your department, NCIC is a centralized information centre that maintains the records
of every criminal arrest and conviction within the United States and its territories.”
When a special Agent with the United States Internal Revenue Service, Kevin Moss, discovered the bank accounts of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in 1992, he assumed that a
Blackman having that amount in his bank account must be a drug dealer. On January 10, 1992, the federal agent approached a Court to obtain an order to freeze the accounts of Tinubu at First Heritage Bank and City Bank respectively. On January 13, 1992, Mr
Kevin Moss, the Special Agent with the US Internal Revenue Service telephoned Tinubu in Nigeria from the US, informing him that he had obtained Court order to freeze his accounts at First Heritage and City Banks with further aim to ask for the forfeiture of
the money therein to the US treasury. Tinubu contacted his lawyer in the US to challenge Kevin Moss’s attempt to confiscate his hard-earned dollars. A rapprochement was reached with the US government in a settlement order of September 15, 1993, whereby Hon
Judge John A. Nordberg ordered that the sum of $460,000 held by Bola Tinubu in the First Heritage Bank account be forfeited to the United States Government. Anything in excess of $460,000 at the First Heritage Bank, the Judge ordered, should be handed over
to Tinubu and the entire funds at City Bank should be released to him. If the funds in Tinubu’s account had been traced to proceeds of narcotics, the case would have been handled by FBI and not by a tax collector, Kevin Moss.
Despite the fact that the Legal Attaché to the US Consulate in Nigeria, Michael Bonner, had in his response to the then Nigeria’s Inspector General of Police, Tafa
Balogun’s, enquiry in 2003 stated emphatically that the FBI had never charged Tinubu for drug offence and had never been convicted for any offence in the USA, Peter Obi and his Labour Party still believe, adamantly, in 2023, that the racist based accusation,
without evidence, expressed in 1992 by the Special Agent with the US Internal Revenue Service, Kevin Moss, that the money found in Tinubu’s USA bank accounts were proceeds of drug crimes. Therefore, on May 30, 2023, Peter Obi and his Labour Party called Lawrence
Nwakaeti, a legal practitioner, to tender a copy of the judgment and to witness about the conviction of Bola Ahmed Tinubu in 1993 in the US in a narcotic-related crime. Under cross examination by the APC Counsel, Lateef Fagbemi, Barrister Lawrence Nwakaeti
admitted that the purported judgment against Tinubu that he tendered was not registered in Nigeria and there was no certificate from any consular in Nigeria or America in support of the judgment. When Lateef Fagbemi asked Barrister Nwakaeti to produce a copy
of the charges against Tinubu in his acclaimed US trial for drug trafficking, he said he had none but quickly added that the forfeiture was civil proceedings.
“You are aware that all the proceedings were civil proceedings,” the Counsel asked Barrister Nwakaeti? “Civil forfeiture proceedings,” Barrister Nwakaeti replied.
Counsel representing Bola Tinubu, Chief Wole Olanipekun asked Barrister Nwakaeti, “My learned friend, you stated that Tinubu was fined the sum of $460,000. Do
you still stand by that disposition?” Barrister Nwakaeti replied, “Yes my Lord, I stand by it.” Chief Olanipekun then asked Barrister Nwakaeti, “Will you be surprised that from the document which you tendered, there is no single line or even a word relating
to the issue of fine?” Barrister Nwakaeti replied, “My Lords, I will be surprised because he was fined and the document speaks for itself.” Asked, if there was a certificate from any police officer in the USA where the offence (by Tinubu) was allegedly committed,
Barrister Nwakaeti replied, “My Lords, there is no certificate as the police played no role in the indictment.” Those were the words of Barrister Lawrence Nwakaeti from Ihiala in Anambra State, Nigeria, to the Presidential Election Tribunal regarding the alleged
conviction of Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the US in 1993. In view of the aforementioned narratives in the court, the five-man Presidential Election Petition Tribunal led by Justice Haruna Simon Tsammani unanimously decided on Wednesday, 6 September 2023 that
the $460,000 forfeiture judgment against Tinubu in 1993, in the USA, was not given in a criminal case and the decision does not amount to sentence or conviction as envisaged under the Nigerian Constitution. It was a civil proceeding in which Mr. Tinubu was
not a party. The Chairman of the PEPT, Justice Haruna Simon Tsammani, ruled that even if the US Judgment amounted to a criminal conviction, the Nigerian Constitution, in Section 137 (1) (e), provides that it could only be a basis to disqualify Mr. Tinubu from
running for the presidency only if it was given within ten years before the election in question. The effect of the sentence is Statute-barred after ten years, which means the sentence will no longer have any adverse effect on the convicted after ten years.
Surprisingly, quasi liberal Nigerian professors are still wailing publicly that the Presidential Election Petition Court allowed a convicted US drug baron to be President of Nigeria. The proud children of Joseph Goebbel do not know that a fine connotes that
a person has been charged for an offence, convicted and punished which is not the same as forfeiture. Now that Obi and Atiku have appealed to the Supreme Court, I hope that Tinubu’s lawyers would press for a heavy fine for defamation of character by those
lying in a court of law that he was convicted for drug trafficking in the US in 1993 when nothing of such happened.
Truly, INEC promised to transmit the results of 2023 election in Nigeria electronically. However, the promise did not take into consideration the level of technical
developments in Nigeria where one day electric light is equal to three months darkness, even when citizens are billed to pay for anticipatory consumption of electricity. Therefore, it shouldn’t have been a surprise for anyone to hear INEC announce that technical
glitches prevented it from fulfilling its promise to upload the Presidential election results from Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) into its Results Viewing portal, direct from the polling units on February 25, 2023. The least expected that INEC could
have done was to apologise to Nigeria for not being able to fulfil its promise to electronically transmit the presidential election results from the polling units. INEC, having failed to apologise to the nation for its failure to upload presidential results
in real time, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi insinuated that INEC did not experience any technical glitch but rather, they claimed, INEC deliberately refused to transmit the presidential election results in real time for the purpose of rigging the presidential
election in favour of Bola Ahmed Tinubu. In practice, BVAS is a technical device that allows for identification and accreditation of voters through finger prints and facial recognition. The results of the election are stored in the BVAS machines and are also
recorded in Forms EC8A duly signed by the polling agents of political parties at each polling unit. Every political party polling agent at polling unit signed and received copies of result sheets on Forms EC8A. With that procedure, if INEC should tamper with
the contents inside the BVAS, it will be exposed by the result sheets on Forms EC8A of which each political party’s polling agent has received at their respective polling unit. However, on Monday, June 19, 2023, Peter Gregory Obi and his Labour Party presented
a witness at PEPT who asserted that there were no glitches in INEC IReV portal on February 25, 2023, implying that non-transmission of presidential election electronically was intentional and with purpose of rigging. (To be continued)
S. Kadiri
