Maina: What they don’t want Buhari to know

Believe it or not. This is strictly a media trial. I am asking if Mr President was told these seven issues which nobody fighting Maina would want him to know. For the sake of posterity, I will ask and let the seven issues be public. I know the pension matter very well. I and Danlami […]

Believe it or not. This is strictly a media trial. I am asking if Mr President was told these seven issues which nobody fighting Maina would want him to know. For the sake of posterity, I will ask and let the seven issues be public.

I know the pension matter very well. I and Danlami Nmodu of www.newsdiaryonline.com met working on the pension scandal.  He worked in Tell Magazine while I was in TheNews Magazine.

We broke the first story’s details. At a point, I got calls to back off the report. I refused. I had my three-week-old Camry car crushed by a strange truck that massively rammed into the vehicle. Checks revealed where it came from.

I was attacked 10 days later with a gun. All they took was my 15-inch Apple laptop with a note: “go and continue writing all that nonsense you dey write on us.”

Now. Having established my depth. There are fundamental truths no one will tell President Buhari. Having forced Mr President to dance to a massive media barrage which painted Abdulrasheed Maina as blacker than Lucifer, who will tell President Buhari these truths like I know them? I owe the public and I therefore ask:

Did anyone tell Mr President that on the 2nd of November 2013, the Senate Joint Committee Chairman, Sen. Alloysius Etuk accused the Chairman of the Task Team, Abdulrasheed .A. Maina, of embezzling, stealing, misappropriating and mismanagement of N195 billion Pension funds, between 2005 and 2010, belonging to the following offices: Nitel, Nipost, NEPA, Railways, NPA, NNPC and several other pension offices in Nigeria? Yet Maina’s committee never existed until 2010. The Senate lied on live television. 

These institutions: Nitel Pensions, Nipost Pensions, NEPA Pensions, Railways Pension, NPA Pensions, NNPC Pensions NEVER had anything to do with Maina’s committee. Did they inform Mr President that the Senate Committee headed by Etuk was alleged to have collected N3 billion, in dollars from the people Maina caught for pension thievery? A petition written against the Joint Committee Chairman Senator Etuk by some aides of one of the suspected Pension thieves, Shaibu Sani Teidi, is before the EFCC and ICPC, detailing the grand conspiracy against the Pension Reform Task Team and its Chairman.

Why has the petition not received any attention and instead ONLY the Chairman is being hounded by the operatives of EFCC? The EFCC CANNOT investigate or prosecute Maina because they were also members of the Inter-ministerial Task Team working on the Pension Reform. Did they tell President Buhari that Goodluck Jonathan’s administration, without follwing due process and obedience to the Civil Service Rules, dismissed Maina for being absent for three days while his life was in danger, following gun-shot attacks on him in front of the Head of Civil Service Office, where his office was located in February, 2013? 

He was shot at with five bullets on the car he was in, a day after the Senate railroaded the Executive against him. Did they inform Mr President that based on perceived injustice and lack of fair hearing by the Senate Joint Committee on Establishment and Public Service, co-chaired by Sen. Alloysius Etuk and Sen. Kabiru Gaya under the leadership of Senator David B. A. Mark, the PRTT and its Chairman (Maina) took the 7th Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to court?  They filed a case at the Abuja Federal High Court in a suit Ref: FH/ABJ/C5/65/2013 where they obtained a favorable judgment on 23rd March, 2013. 

The judge in his ruling held that the Senate (7th National Assembly) failed to meet the constitutional provisions of Section 88 (1) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended). The judge ordered Maina to be restored back to the civil service; Till date, the Senate has failed to appeal the judgment of the Court or reverse its decision upon which it passed a resolution for the Chairman of the PRTT (Maina) to be sacked from the federal Civil Service. It has failed to comply with the provisions of Section 88. 

Did they tell Mr President that while the PRTT was making efforts at recovering over N3 trillion Pension Funds using its intelligence know-how, then Minister of Finance and coordinating Minister of the Economy, without off-setting our expenses in line with Presidential Directives of 23rd October, 2012, established the Pension Transitional Arrangement Department (PTAD)? 

Iweala co-opted most of the Deputy-Directors including Mr. Kaigama (D.D Accounts of PRTT) among others to the new structure; only Maina out of 13 members is the person accused of stealing, misappropriating and mismanaging over N195billion of pension funds. Later, when Kabiru Gaya recanted the N195billion story, they changed the charge to $2 million! 

Did they also remember to tell Mr President that the then Minister of Finance and coordinating Minister of Economy had failed to account for the balance of the N282 billion retrieved by Maina’s team (lodged in the CBN) from where N74 billion was factored into the National Budget of 2012? 

 Did they also tell Mr President that Senator Kabiru Gaya told Nigerians via interview he granted the Sun Newspaper of 3rd April, 2016 with caption “Buhari’s One year better than PDP’s 16 years – Sen. Kabiru Gaya” to discharge Maina of the unfounded allegation of stealing, misappropriating and mismanaging N195 billion between 2005 and 2010 even when the PRTT was not in existence. In his words: “You remember I was a member of the 6th and 7th Senate and I am still a member of the 8th National Assembly. During the 7th Senate, we were able to do a probe of the Pension Scam. I was a co-chair of that committee. During that investigation, we were able to discover N195BN stocked in accounts of various Departments, Agencies and Ministries (MDAs) for Pension and they were not using those monies.’ 

Did they tell Mr President that Maina is the ONLY Civil Servant out of 13 members of PRTT that is under prosecution? Where are other members of the Task Team? Could he have singlehandedly stolen these monies without the knowledge of his team when recoveries are made in team movements? And all monies paid had to be signed by the Head of Service from where the CBN pays into commercial banks and to beneficiaries; Did they tell Mr President that there were complaints in writing, of a subsisting case in the Industrial Court brought by Mr. Abdulrasheed A. Maina (Chairman, Pension Reform Task Team) against his illegal dismissal from service by the Office of Head of Service and Federal Civil Service Commission, to the office of the Attorney-General, the chief legal officer of the nation? It was the reason he reviewed the matter and decided to obey the court pronouncements by directing that Maina be re-instated, as ruled by Justice Adamu Bello in his judgment of 27th March, 2013.  There is no subsisting appeal by the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria or any other interested party that can stall the process.

If the President was told these seven posers we won’t be where we are today. Two, the media trial of Mr Maina is certainly beyond what the public is made to believe. His return means that some folks whose activities have not been exposed will possibly be exposed now.

Obtained from Gong News.