The Nigerian Police Force, Zone 16 Command, says it has arrested four Policemen over their involvement in the abduction and extortion of N20 million from two alleged internet fraudsters popularly known as “Yahoo Yahoo Boys” in Bayelsa State.

It was gathered that the arrested Police personnel were said to have confessed to the fact that two civilian accomplices, one Eyi Matthew Excel and Mayor Goodluck Arab gave them the information that some internet fraudsters had successfully scammed a foreigner of the sum of $58,000.

Based on the rip-off, the accused policemen stormed the residence of the alleged fraudsters, who are indigenes of Bayelsa State but relocated to Nigeria from Ghana where they pulled off the scam, got them arrested and blindfolded to an unknown hotel in Azikoro town, Yenagoa City.

They threatened to kill the fraudsters with the claim that someone from Ghana accused them of theft.

According to an impeccable source, “They threatened to kill them if they didn’t part with N50 Million. The boys later succumbed and agreed to part with N20 million. They took them to two separate banks where they transferred N7 million and N13 million to the policemen.”

It was later gathered that a friend of the victims who learnt about their ordeal decided to report to the Nigerian Police headquarters through their mobile number advertised in the media which drew the attention of top police officers to the case.

Preliminary investigations, however, revealed that the AIG of zone 16, Benjamin Okolo was reported to have ordered the arrest of the accused persons because their actions were carried out without the approval of their superior officers.

“They were not members of a team. They work at various units but do shady deals together. In the past, they were nearly killed by some Military officers along Agbura road in Ogbia Local Government Area where they mounted an illegal roadblock to extort money from crude oil bunkers,” a source said.

It is learnt that the accused police personnel have returned the N2.5 million they each made from the said deal, while Eyi Matthew Excel is reported to have returned his share of the deal but is still at large.

When contacted, the Zonal 16 Police Public Relations Officer, SP Ikwo Kelvin, confirmed the incident and said that the said police officers are in police custody and investigation into the matter is ongoing.

STRONG indications yesterday that the candidacy of former Senate Minority Leader, Senator Godswill Akpabio, may have hit brickwall as the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is said to have withdrawn his support for him in the contest for the Senate president in the 10th National Assembly.

Recall that the All Progressives Congress, APC, had announced the endorsement of Senator Godswill Akpabio and three others for the topmost positions in the National Assembly.

Senator Akpabio from South-South was endorsed for Senate president, Senator Jubrin Barau from North-West for Deputy Senate President, Tajudeen Abass, North-West for speaker, House of Representatives and Kanu, South-East, for deputy speaker.

This did not, however, go down well with some members of the party, especially those aspiring for the position of presiding offices in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, following the protests and condemnation that trailed the party’s endorsements.

It was gathered yesterday that senators, mainly from the South West, have called for a meeting for tomorrow, where they would take a decision to work.towards reviewing their position on choice of leadership of the Senate.

According to a senator from one of the states in the South West, the meeting is for senators from the zone to know the outcome of a crucial meeting of the leading tendency among the senators-elect scheduled for Thursday which they have strategically asked some of their members to attend.

President Bola Tinubu is said to have heeded the advice of his trusted political allies by tacitly withdrawing his support for the former governor of Akwa Ibom State, Senator Godswill Akpabio.

The President, sources said, was resolute in running a corruption-free government, with emphasis on strengthening all the existing policies and institutions concerned with anti-corruption towards achieving this goal.

In his inaugural speech, Tinubu declared pointedly that his government would take” proactive steps such as championing a credit culture to discourage corruption, while strengthening the effectiveness and efficiency of the various anti-corruption agencies.”

With this statement, the source said ”most of us have come to the full realization of the fact that President Bola Tinubu would not for anything support any senator with myriads of cases of corruption in the anti-graft agencies after declaring before the world that he would strengthen and make them more effective.”

A senator from one of the state in the S-West confided in Vanguard: “We have seen the follies in remaining in this camp, it will not work. We have fixed a meeting for Thursday where we are going to chart our next line of action.”

However, the Director General for the Akpabio/Barau Stability Group, Senator Ali Ndume, APC, Borno South, said in his reaction to the development yesterday: “It is not surprising that whenever a politically exposed person is contesting elections, some people would be sponsored to raise issues against him or her.

“Don’t forget that President Bola Tinubu was also severally accused when he was campaigning to be president.”

“We are not actually bothered about what the sponsored groups are saying about Akpabio, the anti-graft agencies know what to do. Why are they teaching them what to do?

“They are alleging that some corrupt activities took place under his watch at the NDDC but they did not say he misappropriated funds as governor or as minister.

“Akpabio was not the accounting officer of the NDDC, he only supervised the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs.

“They also accused him of not constituting the board of the NDDC but that also was not his job. The president of the country is saddled with such responsibility.”

The National Assembly management has commenced clearance of members of the Senate and the House of Representatives for payment and collection of severance packages, as the 9th Assembly winds down.

The Clerk of the House, Yahaya Danzaria, made this known in a notice to members at the plenary on Wednesday. 

The 9th Assembly, which was inaugurated on June 11, 2019, is expected to wind down by the first week of June, while the 10th Assembly is billed for inauguration on June 13, 2023.

The Speaker of the House, Femi Gbajabiamila, read out the Clerk’s notice to members on the floor.

Danzaria informed “all honourable members to collect their clearance forms for the payment of severance gratuity from the Office of the Clerk to the House and submit same after completion in Annex Room 2.154 or 2.031, Finance and Accounts Directorate on or before Friday, June 9, 2023.”

For the outgoing 9th Assembly, over N30bn has been budgeted for severance and welcome package for outgoing and incoming members and aides in the 2023 Appropriation Act.

Under statutory transfers, the National Assembly and its affiliate bodies will spend a total of N194,839,144,401 this financial year. The sum of N169bn was proposed for the federal bi-cameral legislature in the original bill.

Details of the National Assembly budget are as follows: Severance/inauguration of outgoing and incoming 9th and 10th Assembly (legislators and legislative aides) – N30,173,520,592; National Assembly Office, N30,492,518,529; Senate, N33,267,001,807; House of Representatives, N51,994,511,954; National Assembly Service Commission, N10,555,809,322; Legislatives Aides, N16,520,653,763; PAC – Senate, N118,970,215; and PAC – House of Representatives, N142,764,258.

Others are National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies, N7,411,813,596; Service Wide Vote, N671,335,001; Office of Retired Clerks and Permanent Secretaries, N1,059,121,701; Appropriation Committee Department – Senate, N125,000,000; Appropriation Committee Department – House, N165,000,000; National Assembly Library building (ongoing), N4,250,000,000.

Also in the National Assembly budget is N11,307,475,470 allocated to General Services; hosting of Conference of Speakers of African Parliament, N127,500,000; NASS Liabilities, N8,500,000,000; NASS e-Library, N255,000,000; NASS Dashboard, N118,150,000; Constitution Review, N850,000,000; completion of NASS Library Complex (repeated), 7,500,000,000; completion of NILDS HQ, N2,500,000,000; and construction of NASC building, N10,000,000,000.

Meanwhile, severance benefits to retired heads of government agencies and parastatals will cost the country N1bn, while the entitlements of former presidents/heads of state and vice-presidents/Chief of General Staff was allocated N2.3bn.

The beneficiaries will include former Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari; ex-military Heads of State, Ibrahim Babangida, Abdulsalami Abubakar and Yakubu Gowon; and former Vice-Presidents Atiku Abubakar and Namadi Sambo, among others.

The PUNCH had reported on Sunday that the final pay in office for Buhari and ex-Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, state governors and other political appointees might cost the country about N64.72bn.

The figure also covered the pay for ministers, commissioners, National Assembly members, and special advisers.

It, however, did not include special assistants and state Assembly members.

The allocations by the Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Allocation Commission for salaries and allowances for one month, as well as severance gratuity (300 per cent of basic salary), were analysed to arrive at the figures.

Every government transition begins with a week of gràgrà where the new helmsman tries to assert their power by making definitive executive decisions. The week of gràgrà is when new leaders dis-anchor from the old. This phase, where the cliches of a “new beginning” are still being belted out, is where the newly enthroned must make a show of breaking with the past. That move is necessary because power transitions are not only political-legal affairs but also ethical.

Nigeria’s brand of politics demands that such demonstration of autonomy be ostentatious. Our zero-sum politics does not afford generosity in victory; one must also obliterate the defeated. To carry over from an outgoing leader is to inherit the ghosts of their rulership. In bygone empires, such housecleaning consists of dispatching with the abobakú, the king’s surrogate, whose death eliminates as many of the vestiges of the old rule as possible.

Our modern empires run by supposedly democrats are not essentially different. People get into power not merely through a competitive election but through shadow warfare too. Because elections are the means of calibrating the worth of political actors, they cannot but be a war. Even victory itself is the beginning of another war. The defeated must not be allowed to survive; they must be destroyed politically and morally. Otherwise, one would labour under the weight of their achievements. In our clime, to complete a project your predecessor started is to risk sneers that you are incapable of generating original ideas. To abandon such projects is to be criticised for wasting the resources already invested. One way to override the conundrum of taking on usually white elephant projects started by your predecessor (and burdened by bloated receipts) is to destroy the initiator itself.

In anticipation of this bile, some outgoing politicians sow disaffection for their successors by making a trailer load of appointments right before their exit. If the successor goes forward with the stuffed payroll, they could end up accommodating their predecessor’s loyalists along with any potential for mischief. If they reverse such appointments, they would be labelled as the evil person who took food away from people’s mouths.

In 2015 when former President Muhammadu Buhari got into office, his week of gràgrà comprised of sniffing into the sewers of comatose bureaucracies to dig out cases of corruption spectacular enough to make sensational headlines but which, when stripped to details, would not implicate those whose dirty money sponsored his ride to Aso Rock. Remember, that was the season the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission turned itself into a street dancer, entertaining us with astounding discoveries of money in unusual places. For all that gràgrà, what is the anti-corruption scorecard under Buhari?

I still clearly remember where I was in July 2015 when former-labour-activist-former-governor-turned-dissembler Adams Oshiomole claimed that on a trip to the USA, some officials informed them that a single minister stole $6bn under President Goodluck Jonathan’s watch. Even for a country where people routinely pull figures out of their derriere, that amount sounded improbable and outright nonsensical. But then, those kinds of stories do not need to be factual. They only need to be believed.

For the newly inaugurated government, the week of gràgrà started with the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the uncertainty of what will become of the much-disputed subsidy. Buhari, ever an artful dodger of responsibility, left the problem for his successor to resolve (or not). Managing it will be difficult because it would also entail the question of how to properly narrate the failures of their predecessor in that regard. They will need to extricate themselves from Buhari’s baggage so they can start on a new note, and at the same time, the APC-APC transition must be seen as truly continuous.

They struggled with a similar conundrum during their electioneering. To carve themselves in the electoral campaigns as different from the All Progressives Congress government was to be disingenuous, risk the ire of Buhari and his loyalists, and damage themselves from the outset. To present themselves as continuous with Buhari was to own his failures. It was—and still is—a tenuous balance for Tinubu. Given the support that Buhari offered him, how does his administration move on from Buhari and his unwise decisions without starting itself on a sour note? I will not be surprised if Tinubu absorbs the failures of his predecessor on the fuel subsidy issue and suspends the implementation indefinitely.

Purging Buhari’s ghosts from a Tinubu’s Aso Rock will be hard. Unlike 2015 when there was an “enemy” against whom Buhari could establish its anti-corruption bona fides, the 2023 transition was between old friends. After eight years of Buhari, I am not sure even their own party loyalists want to ever hear them moaning about “16 years of the PDP!” again forever. They must find another excuse that will resonate. Unfortunately, Buhari is already ahead of them on that. When Tinubu went to present his Certificate of Return to Buhari in Daura in March, one of the things that man said was that his achievements in office galvanised Tinubu’s victory (a claim also repeated by Buhari’s minister, Tunde Fashola). Buhari was not delusional; he put his successor in a moral bind.

Mind you, Nigerians are not unaware of the degree of the damages done to the polity—they bear the worst part of it, after all—but the Tinubu administration will never be able to speak fully of the degree to which Nigeria was denuded in the last eight years. If they find outrageous instances of misappropriated public funds, they cannot rush to the press. They can hardly afford to shatter whatever is left of the man’s myth, especially since they spent the past few weeks singing his praises. The week of gràgrà, where a new leader gets to reel out a list of their predecessor’s sins, is where Tinubu refurbishes Buhari’s worthless legacy.

Unlike 2015, it will be too imprudent of them to regale us with stories of finding secret stashes of money in graveyards or water tanks. Such strategies will fail because Buhari not only used those tricks until they became trite, but it would be outrightly laughable for an administration headed by a Tinubu to pretend it has any moral ground to stand on to challenge corruption. From the look of things, we might even be spared the tiring vulgarity of the EFCC crashing into homes at midnight to arrest people. Anything that goes wrong with the economy or security cannot be glibly blamed on the past leadership. Buhari has managed to seize the narrative by reporting his failures as successes, getting his successor to assent, and linking the life of his administration to theirs. They accepted the “past perfect” he chronicled for them; when the present tenses, it could only be because of their (un)doing.

One day, Buhari’s biographers will claim that he bequeathed the country with a parting gift of Nigeria Air. And if by this time next year, that single plane they launched last week is not yet crisscrossing the skies, those who let him get away with the farce will own the failure.

If the transition had happened between two different parties, Tinubu’s camp would have had a jolly good time refuting Buhari’s legacy. Now they are stuck with promoting Buhari’s phony achievements, mopping up his messes, and propping up his empty achievements. Looking at it now, you realise that Buhari might have been a clueless buffoon for eight years, but he knew what he was doing when he supported Tinubu. The Tinubu team of propagandists who used the tools of their trade to finish off Jonathan in 2015 presently stands down on Buhari’s matter. The best the boldest among them can do with their fanged tongues is to speak here and there.