Posted by By STEVE NWOSU on
The last may not have been heard of the enormous fund and monumental corruption that went into the financing of the campaign of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for last April's presidential election, as President Umar Yar'Adua is believed to have ordered a probe of how a whopping N40 billion raised for the campaign vanished into the air.
The last may not have been heard of the enormous fund and monumental corruption that went into the financing of the campaign of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for last April's presidential election, as President Umar Yar'Adua is believed to have ordered a probe of how a whopping N40 billion raised for the campaign vanished into the air.
The money said to have been raised primarily from the many questionable import duty waivers granted all manner of businessmen and cronies is said to have disappeared between two key actors, one a powerful presidential aide, and the other a northern business mogul friend of the then president, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo.
With several accusations bordering on the questionable management of the campaign funds and with all manner of people claiming to have contributed huge sums to the Yar'Adua/Jonathan campaign effort - and, as a result, demanding some form of compensation from the new government, President Yar'Adua was said to have become alarmed at the amounts being mentioned and had requested to be furnished with an estimate of the money allegedly expended on making him president.
Saturday Sun gathered that an initial audit of the campaign chest revealed that the money ran into hundreds of billions of Naira, which naturally got the austere former Katsina State governor alarmed. He had subsequently requested for a little more detailed report which revealed that some N40 billion of the amount that has so far been confirmed could not even be traced.
Further investigations had traced a sizeable chunk of the money to two men said to be very close to Obasanjo. It was also revealed that, contrary to the impression created in the public domain that one of the two (the businessman) had generously contributed to the campaign purse, the shrewd billionaire was actually making money from the campaign. Apart from the money he made directly by cornering other people's donations, it is also believed that he may have also convinced his friend, the collaborating presidential aide to use his own cut of the loot to invest in his (the businessman's) companies - which could mean that the clever businessman may indeed have kept all the loot.
Confirming the development, a highly reliable source in the Presidency told Saturday Sun that recent investigations into the shoddy dealings in the Customs had revealed that, beyond the sleaze perpetrated by the department's leadership, much of the controversial waivers granted by the Obasanjo government was actually done to empower the beneficiaries who were, in turn, supposed to plough back part of their stupendous profits into the PDP campaign purse.
'They got the waivers on the understanding that they would use part of the money to fund the party's campaign and that is why some of us believe that, contrary to what many people are claiming today as having helped fund the campaign, the money came from the ports and those who were deliberately empowered to fund it", the Presidency source said.
According to him, it was as a result of this understanding that it seemed that nobody connected with the ports could do any wrong in the last months leading up to the elections, 'for those against whom the complaints came were invariably those who had some form of executive backing to bend the rules a little bit and make returns".
But as it turned out, however, many of the beneficiaries, including a Lagos-based businessman who is now having serious brushes with the anti-corruption agencies, did not only go beyond their brief, but also went ahead to outrightly swindle the government, repatriating only an insignificant fraction of what was expected from them.
To make matters worse, the businessman in question who was equally entrusted with collecting the contributions of other beneficiaries also appropriated those contributions - ostensibly after seeing that the campaign project was already awash with cash and that what was being remitted was no longer going into the campaign, but was providing free money for presidential aides and other key figures in the campaign fundraising committees.
'It was possible because, at a time, there was so much money coming in from so many places that nobody could keep a tab on it any longer…As soon as it became clear that Yar'Adua was the anointed successor, everybody wanted to identify with him and they all, ultimately, plugged in by contributing to the campaign fund. But the party already had more money than it needed, so people were just pocketing money left, right and centre… But now, the chickens have come home to roost and Yar'Adua is now set to hold people to account", he said.