Modu-Sheriff: The spirit of law By Louis Odion, FNGE

Nyesom, Sheriff and Fayose when the good was going….

It is quite human for Ahmed Markafi and co to quickly imagine
the worst storm is over following the legal life-line from the Supreme Court
last week and therefore relapse to the iniquities and debauchery of the past.
But unless the dominant faction of the beleaguered Peoples Democratic Party now has the
sobriety to decode the hidden lessons in the adversity suffered in the past
fifteen months, they may realize sooner than later their ululation was
premature.

The first step to self-redemption
will of course be an admission that its downfall in 2015 was
brought on by years of sins, followed by a show of humility
to serve a penance. Nothing emblematizes this legacy of shame more than the
latest revelations from American courtroom of how PDP’s erstwhile princess of oil, Diezani Alison-Madueke, and her male collaborators consistently
bled the nation’s exchequer between 2010 and 2015 and splurged their loot on
vanity. Part of it went into bribing INEC
officials to help fix results in favour of her party.

Ex- PDP oil minister Dieziani Alison Madueke….She stole & stole & stole until she exceeded billions in Naira through Dollars…

By conservative estimate so far, PDP’s Diezani bled Nigeria to the tune
of $6b through sweetheart concessions
to her cronies or outright pocketing of oil receipt for the five years she
presided over the nation’s oil and gas industry. 

The Queen of Mega Fraud in Nigeria, ‘Rt. Hon. Dieziani Alison Madueke’

In one telling
instance, the psychedelic Jezebel
was even quoted in an intercepted phone conversation as tutoring her fellow
accomplices to be careful the way they went about flaunting their sudden wealth
lest the people they were stealthily robbing became suspicious. 
A reminder of what another
kleptocrat in history, Mobutu of Zaire,
once famously told those aspiring to follow in his footsteps at home:

Late Mobutu Seseko…..’Believes in little stealing of Government’s funds but went ahead to bled his country, Zaire to death’

“If
you want to steal, steal a little. If you steal too much, the whole town will
know and will soon come after you”

Late Mobutu Seseko….An Encyclopaedia of Fraudulent Governance?

To famished soldiers murmuring at
the presidential gate over unpaid wages, the great capone brusquely
asked, “Were you not issued uniform
and guns?”
What Diezani and co purloined is different from the hefty $15b bazaar Sambo Dasuki presided
over in the diversion of cumulative defence votes. 
Much as PDP would wish the
congenitally forgetful nation quickly loses these memories, it is doubtful if
the ghosts will readily vanish. A vast number of its leaders are known to have
refunded their own share of “Dasukigate”.

Sambo Dasuki….The Last Father Xmas of PDP government

So, by now, the inheritors of what remains of the the once “biggest party on African continent” should know that
nothing could be more offensive to public sensibilities, indeed suggestive of
utter lack of contrition, than continuing to reserve their front-row seats for
faces already implicated or tainted in that infamy. 

Next in the rehab blueprint should
be a resolve to purge itself of the virus of greed. It manifests in the cabal
culture that upends internal democracy, a pathology that has haunted it right
from Obasanjo days.

Ali Modu Sheriff wept?

It accounts for
the emergence of Ali Modu-Sheriff in the first instance.

With the fall of Goodluck Jonathan in 2015 and the
inevitable forfeiture of moral authority, a clique scrambled in to fill the
vacuum by foisting on the party the most unlikely character who, over the
years, had only proved to be an itinerant undertaker, cold-blooded mercenary,
fresh from the sewer. 
The cartel’s calculation was simple:
they wanted Modu-Sheriff to hold the
horns as interim national chairman from February 2016 while they milked the cow
ahead of the 2019 presidential elections.

Ex-President Goodluck Jonathan with his De-facto ‘Minister of Finance’ Colonel Sambo Dasuki

But a ruthless schemer himself, the
hireling from Borno had his eyes on PDP’s presidential ticket as well. In
fact, he was said to have separately wooed two of the PDP governors to be his
presidential running-mate. The duo, who were quite instrumental to his being
crowned the party head, only got to know this while comparing notes and soon
rallied others to pull the rug from under Modu-Sheriff’s
feet at the now historic Port Harcourt
Convention of May 2016.

If not for greed, the cabal should
have known from Sheriff’s antecedents
that he is incapable of any commitment without a guarantee of
self-aggrandizement.

Chief Olusegun Obasanjo….Used ‘old tricky Sherrif’ as a secret agent in ANPP

Even as ANPP governor between 1999 and 2007, Modu-Sheriff was known to be Obasanjo secret agent who helped suborn
the then opposition party to the wiles of the ruling party. 

As governor, he is reputed to have
provided the feeding trough for the first generation of Boko Haram at the beginning of this Republic. They provided him
muscles to chase his political rivals out of town. As part of their own share
of the election spoils of 2003, the office of Finance Commissioner was
allegedly ceded to the future terror organization.

Author, Louis Odion FNGE….Captures the history of PDP’s political achievements from the Dieziani perspective

 

But as with any partnership founded
on an ideal less than noble, that political romance soon collapsed following
the gruesome murder of the Finance Commissioner nominated by Boko Haram.
Again, it is a measure of the
naivety of the cabal to have recruited a man said to be related to President Buhari of APC by marriage and expected him to act differently. As a top APC player once put it half in jest,
half in earnest to this writer, “Well,
Sheriff just has to do the work of a Sheriff in the PDP”.
That is, the
sort of dirty job the British
colonialists would euphemistically call “pacification”
in the heady days of independence struggle by native agitators.

Gov. Nyesom Nwike of Rivers State & Ayo Fayose….Optimists of the  Sheriff band  turned pessimists

Overall, by the judgement of last
week, Supreme Court clearly acted on the side of the spirit of the law which is
more morally compelling than obsession with the fine letters of the law. The
lower courts that indulged and provided Sheriff
shelter had undoubtedly conveniently chosen to hide behind the
technicality of law.

Moments after the door was shut
firmly against him in Port Harcourt,
wily Modu-Sheriff quickly addressed a
press conference and unilaterally declared the party was now ready to
“obey” a subsisting injunction forbidding the scheduled
convention. 
That was a smart maneuver by a
political buccaneer. He seemed right by the letter of law. Though Sheriff then continued to flaunt
the party’s staff of office, everyone knew it was ill-gotten.

Makarfi (R) shoved Sherrif at the Supreme Court

Everyone knew the Markafi group had
more clout and the crowd. It soon became clear that the only one actually
profiting from the hemorrhaging PDP
was the ruling APC left to frolic
with reckless abandon in the absence of a virile opposition.  

But with the Supreme Court
judgement, a flicker of hope has undoubtedly been raised for the deepening of
democracy in Nigeria, without which
the national space risks becoming an exclusive arena for the hallelujah choir.
A republic is doomed and the polity in great peril without a
check-and-balance valve. It however remains to be seen if PDP can seize this historic moment. 

President Muhammadu Buhari…Watches from the sidelines the catastrophic rise & fall & rise of PDP

Some have proposed reconciliation.
But it will be futile seeking to force the co-habitation of strange
bedfellows. As the seemingly intractable crisis bedeviling ruling APC has demonstrated, shared value is
what ultimately nourishes and grows a party, not soaring sloganeering or fancy
insignia for that matter. 
In his own reading of the Supreme
Court verdict, euphoric Peter Obi was
quoted as saying, “The current
agitation over recession and restructuring will soon be over”.
It is
precisely because of mentality like this that PDP was forced to its knees in 2015. Such verbiage only suggests
the resumption of the wheeling-dealing of old. 
Enough of the carnality of “share the money”. What
this moment calls is a change of attitude.

PDP Governor’s forum chairman, Dr. Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State….What role will he play in the October 2017 PDP convention?

Fortuitously, PDP has the October
convention to demonstrate to the nation that it has learnt some
lessons. The process leading to it and its outcome will indeed tell if a
mortician would be invited or a receiver-manager needed to help negotiate
possible bankruptcy.