Following a high profile alarm raised in the media by the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mr. Abdulrasheed Bawa, that a ‘big-man’ has threatened to kill him, civil rights advocacy group, HUMAN Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has warned that nothing untoward or sinister should happen to the anti-graft czar.

“We believe that the appointment of this youngster as the substantive Chairman of EFCC could be a fresh breath into the increasingly waning and ethically diminished anti-graft crusade of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration. Seeing his refreshing youthfulness and his expressed or vocalized zeal to battle relentlessly the hydra-headed monster of economic crimes especially amongst top flight government officials, we are hereby expressing our solidarity with him and urging the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces to extend the best protection available humanly speaking to his trusted appointee who seems to have started well, so his adversaries will not put him in the way of harm or danger.

“If anything happens to him, then it will be well known that forces embedded within the administration are the key suspects given the unprecedented quantum of sophisticated and crude economic crimes and corruption that have eroded the few gains made by the six-year-old administration of President Buhari.

“So, it is in the self enlightened interest of President Buhari that Abdulrasheed Bawa and other officers of the EFCC are protected from any sort of sinister violent plot.”

HURIWA’S statement to the media was signed jointly by its National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, and Zainab Yusuf, the Director of Media nationwide.

It called on patriots to speak out, saying: “We are asking on credible Civil Rights leaders to speak out to put pressure on both the EFCC Chairman and President Muhammadu Buhari to name, shame, prosecute and punish the particular identifiable man that the EFCC chairman said made a call and threatened to kill him. In the last five years, life has become very cheap in Nigeria and mass killers are roaming freely even within the corridors of power in Abuja and nothing is happening.

“The early warning by Abdulrasheed Bawa should not be treated the usual fire Brigade approach whereby government would wait until the threat is executed before running around trying to spread propaganda.”

In another development, HURIWA has asked the Senate not to confirm as National Commissioner Laureta Onochie, who is a person widely known to be deeply divisive and a strong member of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and one of the die-hard partisan loyalists of President Buhari.

HURIWA said any attempt to confirm Onochie as a Federal Commissioner of INEC will be the death nail to the coffin to the independence and impartiality of the electoral management body just as the group said her confirmation would unambiguously become the everlasting evidence that the National Assembly has become a rubber-stamped institution and open to corruption and compromises.

“We believe that Onochie who openly confessed her membership to the APC and has posted a lot of statements on social media platforms to demonstrate her aversion for multiparty democracy but prefers a one party state, is not a fit and proper person to be so appointed into INEC.

“Her enlistment into INEC means that the 2023 election has been rigged already in favour of the ruling APC. Her going to INEC means the official obituary and death of INEC,” HURIWA said.

Asking Senator Ahmed Lawan-led Senate to maintain the already established precedent by rejecting Onochie’s nomination as National Commissioner of INEC, the rights group recalled that on December 3, 2019, the Senate rejected the nomination of Raheem Muideen Olalekan as the Resident Electoral Commissioner representing Osun State of INEC.

According to the Senate, confirmation of Muiden Olalekan as REC should be deferred until he satisfactorily clears himself of all the allegations leveled against him by the petitioner.

Resolutions of the Senate were subsequent to the consideration of the report of the Chairman, Senate Committee on INEC, Senator Kabiru Gaya. Presenting the report, Senator Gaya said that the Committee did not recommend the confirmation of Muideen’s nomination because he could not defend the allegations of bias leveled against him by a petitioner.

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