A former Police Commissioner, Emmanuel Ojukwu, has said that the Federal Government should arrest and prosecute terror financiers and not just make media announcements of their existence.
According to the ex-police boss, the regime of the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), has failed to name and shame sponsors of Boko Haram and other terror groups because some of the colleagues and family members of government officials are culpable.
Ojukwu spoke on Thursday while featuring as a guest on Channel Television’s ‘Politics Today’ programme monitored by The PUNCH.
He was reacting to a statement by the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, on Thursday, that the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit uncovered 123 companies, and 96 others linked to terrorism financing in 2021.
Earlier in 2021, the Buhari regime had arrested 400 alleged Boko Haram sponsors and financiers including bureau de change operators but about a year later, the office of the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, has not prosecuted the moneybags behind the nefarious activities of the bloodthirsty marauders who have viciously mauled thousands of Nigerians in the North-East for over a decade.
Speaking on the television programme on Thursday, Ojukwu said terrorism financing is a criminal offence and Nigerians have nothing to do with the information that the terror sponsors had been uncovered.
He said, “To finance terrorism is a criminal offence, the laws are there, activate the legal process and get them arrested.
“This is not the first-time government – both federal and states – have told us they know the financiers but there have been too many talks and no action.”
Asked whether there could be any reason the government was trying to keep the names of the terror financiers, the former police boss replied, “For political reasons; some of their allies and colleagues are involved and they want to hide them because it is like a cult and there are disaster merchants, those who benefit from disasters. There are some compromises here.”
“We don’t need to hear the names, just get them arrested and prosecuted, put them behind bars, that is where they belong,” he noted.
Also speaking on the programme, a former Director of the Department of State Services, Mike Ejiofor, said, “Government should go all out and prosecute these people to serve as a deterrent. At least if we know some of them by names, and they are seen, they have brothers and relations.”
He said the government must do everything within its means to stabilise the country before the 2023 elections.
Like Ojukwu, a former Navy Commodore, Kunle Olawunmi, last August, had said that Boko Haram terrorists mentioned names of current governors, senators and Aso Rock officials as sponsors during interrogation but the President demonstrated an unwillingness to go after the high-profile politicians for reasons best known to him.
The Boko Haram war has lingered for over a decade. Thousands of innocent Nigerians and soldiers had been killed by the insurgents in war-wracked North-East Nigeria including Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states. Though the government of the day has repeatedly insisted that the terrorists had been decimated and “technically defeated”, the ferocious fighters continue to wreak unprintable havoc on the Nigerian state.
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