ON TINUBU’S IMAGINARY AMERICAN CASE, By JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

The Labour Party, an aggregation of political upstarts, which soon after decomposed into a personality cult centered around a serially lying narcissist with a sugarcoated tongue, is now fast and inexorably exfoliating into what it always was – an excursion to absolutely nowhere. While it remained switched to euphoric mode, an obviously substandard light bulb, most likely made in China and dumped in Nigeria by fanatical importers and sustainers of consumption like Peter Obi, who nevertheless claims to want to move Nigeria from consumption to production, then exploded within the rather vacant cranium of some political novice within its ranks, who thereupon had the “brilliant” idea of assembling the gullible into embarking on marches led by “yahoo boys”, tribal jingosts, secessionists and members of town and market unions.

Then a group of women happened to embark on a march of their own. Soon thereafter, a “mere” motor parks and gardens manager in the same Lagos also decided to embark on a road walk. Both events, organised by supporters of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, and his running mate, Senator Kashim Shettima, were so spectacularly successful that the rather highly disobedient OBIdients realized they are complete nonstarters in the political game of numbers! Indeed, with each passing day further exposing the cocky hypocrisy of Peter Obi’s pitiably fake posturing and woefully self-righteous sermonisations, the OBIdient movement has already long peaked and is now miserably on a downward spiral.

As for the People’s Democratic Party, PDP’s, Atiku Abubarkar, the self acclaimed “unifier”, his preparedness to sacrifice national unity in obsessive pursuit of a presidential ambition former President Obasanjo told us is predicated on a vision “seen” by his marabout, has not only implacably chagrined the entire Southern half of our country but also totally incensed countless Northerners committed to power rotation between North and South as the non reducible minimum for national unity and, indeed the very survival of our nation, itself. In consequence, Atiku’s party has quickly putrefied into a most shambolic carcass of its former self with its very core completely contemptuous of his inordinate ambition to steal the turn of the South to produce the President of this country.

So, what do you do when faced with the wishfulness of the OBIdients and the thievery the PDP has set its mind on both miserably crumbling away beneath your feet, while their greatest fear on Earth, the City Boy, quietly and most unobtrusively just keeps going about his business, setting the pace and giving his detractors the marking scheme of real politics? I guess you dredge up some utter crap from the early nineties and get a bunch of quack lawyers and halfbaked journalists to try stir up a hurricane in a teacup. That is what Obi’s Disobedients and Atiku’s Inarticulates have now been reduced to!

One character who clearly desperately needs a haircut, and seemingly interprets his role as one in which to make it a point to speak ever more angrily and frustratedly in support of Peter Obi, has kept saying repeatedly that Bola Tinubu was “indicted but not convicted” in America! This fellow, a certain Dele Farotimi, is actually a lawyer that apparently cannot even tell if someone has actually been indicted or not! Boy o!

Another lawyer, a certain Anthony Ehilebo, another of Atiku’s Men Friday, who once threatened fire and brimstone against Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike for opposing his lord and master, Atiku, as if he, Ehilebo, even amounts to anything in PDP, kept mentioning “indictment” and “hard drugs” again and again, clearly and rather disgracefully having not even bothered to exercise the due diligence expected of a lawyer, which should had immediately educated him that absolutely nowhere in all the processes he and Tinubu’s other pathetic detractors are bandying about was there any indictment, in the first place, or forfeiture of anything even remotely linked to drug running! How do lawyers even talk like that? How utterly, totally, most miserably, shamefully and disgracefully unprofessional! For God’s sake, all Tinubu ever forfeited was money the American Government assessed as tax due to it upon interest which had accrued to his savings and those of his family members and companies. Simple. How can any lawyer be so irresponsible as to pretend not to know that?

Even Channels Television’s Seun Okinbaloye, a man who ends up spending the greater part of his time on television thoroughly irritating the more intellectually astute segment of his audience by compulsively posing, consistently making grammatical errors on air, regularly delivering disjointed remarks, needlessly asking quite bland and often pedestrian questions, while generally blowing his own trumpet, instead of keeping it real and just going straight to the point, kept insisting to Festus Keyamo, a Learned Silk and someone in the position of a pedagogical mentor to him, quite apart from being a long time prosecutor, that Tinubu was “punished” because he, Okinbaloye, had apparently read the colloquial meaning of “forfeiture” in some obscure dictionary on his phone! To imagine that this fellow, Okinbaloye, is apparently a law student who, most astonishingly, doesn’t even seem to know what it means for someone to be charged for a crime as opposed to being sued in a civil action or to not even have been sued at all but to merely have an interest in a matter “in rem”, as was the case with Tinubu!

If Okinbaloye was a student in my law class, I would be strongly minded to certify him a dullard if not declare him, outright ineducable. The very worst thing a lawyer or, indeed, law student can possibly do is to render imputation of criminality on anyone a court of law has not found guilty of any offense upon due process of criminal trial. To do so is to engage in the very worst form of quackery and brigandage, even to the most unconscionably unprofessional, obscene and abominable degree.

Indeed, as if acting a script in total violation of the neutrality dictated by his job and obligatory on his platform, Okinbaloye even kept haranguing Keyamo that he was giving him an opportunity to make his case before Nigerians as if Okinbaloye is in any position to speak for Nigerians or howsoever remotely in any condition to deliver even just the street on which he lives in an election! Some people can be truly full of themselves in this country! But that is the standard of journalism in certain sections of the media where people imperiously posture as experts in fields they are obviously pitiably unschooled in. Thankfully, the bulk of our nation’s media continues to showcase adherence to the highest standards of professionalism in its constitutionally recognized role of disseminating truth to the general public.

So then, as to the truth of our subject matter, what, in a nutshell, is Tinubu’s American “case”, if, indeed, we may even call it a case, in the first place? As to its most remote origin, my personal suspicion is that someone, most probably a fellow Nigerian close to Tinubu, himself, but, suffering from an acute case of pull-him-down syndrome, decided to make false allegations against him to the American Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI, out of pure envy and deep-seated jealousy at his mercurial success and fast rising profile, even back then. The FBI, on its part, then rushed to freeze Tinubu’s accounts and those of his companies and persons close to him, which, by the way, is actually often standard procedure in such matters.

Having meticulously carried out thorough investigations of the highest standard, the same FBI came to the conclusion that Tinubu had absolutely no case to answer, as admitted by the FBI, itself, and, confirmed by the US Government through its Nigerian embassy. Nevertheless, the FBI had also concluded that there was tax due on Tinubu’s accounts to the Government of the United States which his bankers, not Tinubu, hadn’t remitted. Thus, the entire sum eventually forfeited was therefore just unremitted tax! That forfeiture was a civil forfeiture as distinct from a criminal forfeiture and absolutely any lawyer should understand the difference.

In fact, if Tinubu was personally to blame for non-remittance of tax, for instance, the FBI we know all too well, would had most certainly charged him with tax evasion at the time. It was because they, themselves, found him to be without fault in the entire matter that they then profusely apologized for the inconveniences they had caused him, his family members and companies, and, then begged him not to escalate the matter legally, eventually leading to the final resolution of the matter vide the legal device of an out of court settlement. That anyone claiming to be a lawyer or even law student, for that matter, does not know that there can absolutely never be an out of court settlement with respect to criminal proceedings or that there is a clear and unambiguous difference between civil and criminal forfeiture is truly stomach churning from a professional standpoint.

Well, that is the truth, the whole truth, and, nothing but the truth about Tinubu’s so-called “American case” that those already guaranteed to miserably lose elections next year have been constrained to keep peddling about in the face of impending defeat. Indeed, Bayo Onanuga had most succinctly written off the entire nonsense as “dead as dodo”, even as Festus Keyamo had painstakingly pointed out that there is absolutely no issue in this utterly contrived tsunami in a bottle that the minions of Obi and Atiku are latching on to rescue both men’s already miserably derailed campaigns. That said, will all the coconut heads out there be gracious enough to please spare us such poorly packaged shenanigans, going forward, and find something better to do to salvage the fast disappearing ambitions of their unmarketable principals?

Onokpasa, a lawyer and member of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Campaign Council, writes from Abuja.