A civil rights advocacy group, Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has described as unnecessary and politically-motivated, the President Muhammadu Buhari-led National Council of State decision to grant pardon to two former governors jailed for corrupt practices.

The group described the pardon as “ill-advised and hasty,” and expressed fears that “this discrimination on the basis of political connection would adversely harm the Rule of Law.

HURIWA recalled that Senator Joshua Dariye, a former Governor of Plateau State and a former Governor of Taraba State, Mr. Jolly Nyame, convicted for corruption, were pardoned on health and age grounds when they still have several years to complete their jail terms.

The rights group wondered how the President has reached a consideration that at their relatively young ages, that they were too old to be in prison confinement whereas there were thousands of awaiting trial inmates and convicted prisoners who were above 80 in Nigerian prisons and whose offences were as simple as theft of chickens from their neighbours.

The National Council of State during its meeting on Thursday, April 14, 2022, considered and granted state pardon to former Governors Dariye and Nyame respectively, who are serving terms in jail for corruption.

The two former governors were among 159 prisoners pardoned by the Council at a meeting presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa in Abuja.

Other beneficiaries of the state pardon include General and Minister under the Sani Abacha regime, Tajudeen Olanrewaju, Lieutenant Colonel Akiyode, who was an aide of a former Deputy to General Abacha, Oladipo Diya; and all the junior officers jailed over the 1990 abortive Gideon Orkar coup.

The rights group applauded the release of the military officers, most of whom were roped into phantom charges of coup plot by the then maximum dictator, General Sani Abacha.

HURIWA recalled that Mr. Nyame, who is 66, Governor of Taraba State from 1999 to 2007, was serving a 12-year jail term at the Kuje prison for misappropriation of funds while he was in office. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction in February 2020.

Similarly, 64-year old Mr Dariye who later got elected as Senator representing Plateau Central in 2015, who governed Plateau between 1999 and 2007, was jailed for stealing N2 billions of public funds during his time as governor, was sentenced in June 2018 but still completed his tenure from jail in June 2019.

HURIWA however condemned the early release of the duo particularly on the ground of seeking to use their political popularity in their minority northern Christian states of Plateau and Taraba to canvass electoral advantage for the All Progressives Congress in whose administration, since 2015, that the only high profile politicians jailed for corruption are the two Christian Northerners.

HURIWA said it was a scandal of monumental proportions that whilst the two Christians and former governors of the northern states of Plateau and Taraba were jailed for corruption, a bulk of other corrupt former Northern Governors, all Moslems, are roaming about freely because the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission skewed it's prosecutorial activities to target mostly Christians and Southerners allegedly because of the domination of Northern Moslems in the hierarchy of the EFCC.

HURIWA said the best way to begin a thoroughly professional anti-graft war was to ensure Federal character in the appointment of directors for the anti-graft body currently dominated by Northern Moslems.

HURIWA views the action of early release from jail of these politicians who had barely served 30 per cent of their total jail terms as a confirmation of the well-known notoriety of the President Muhammadu Buhari’s led administration as a harbinger of the most sophisticated forms of corruption but which administration chooses to use the instrumentality of the so-called anti-corruption crusade to whip opposition politicians into line.

“There has never really been any crusade against corruption in the real sense of it. What EFCC does mostly is to harass students carrying expensive phones and laptops and to parade them as YAHOOYAHOO. Whereas the real big time CORRUPT politicians who are looting Nigeria dry and mindlessly are allowed to have a field day.”

“It is now survival of the fittest and the most connected in Nigeria of 2022,” the statement added.

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