According to a report by Vanguard Newspapers, it may never be known whether President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, would have thrown in his cap for the 2023 presidential election race if he had an inkling of the level of rot amassed under the eight-year rule of Muhammadu Buhari.
It may also never be known whether President Bola Tinubu would have acted differently or taken courage, had he seen the books and known how much of Nigeria’s commonwealth had been stolen by a few, fat cats in the Buhari administration, on Monday, May 29, 2023, when he announced the removal of subsidy on PMS.
Nigerians may not know whether President Tinubu would still have gone ahead even if he had an idea of what had been stolen, just to fulfill a said messianic calling of rescuing Nigeria and charting a pathway for progress. However, what is now known is that billions of dollars were “made away with by some players in the Buhari administration”, a presidency source disclosed to Saturday Vanguard last week. What is also known, today, is that beyond the bravado and braggadocio President Tinubu puts up in public, he has a niggling headache about how to recover the quantum of funds stolen and what to do with the culprits. For security and intelligence gathering reasons, Saturday Vanguard was counseled by a very dependable Aso Rock source not to name names yet and to be careful in presenting details of an ongoing investigation into how billions of dollars disappeared. This is because even Jim Obaze, the Special Investigator appointed by President Tinubu, has not been sitting pretty on the job because of constant meddling and needless interference from a few powerful players in the present administration.
But it all first started as an unverified and unverifiable report that some powerful and influential operators close to President Buhari had become stupendously rich at the expense of Nigeria’s treasury. Figures in the billions of dollars were said to have been traced to some of them. The figures were too high to be believed prompting one of the sources contacted to ask: “Is it that some of these people you are talking about were the ones to whom funds for the purchase of our crude oil were paid? Did they pay these people directly for crude oil sales or what?’ Billions of dollars traced to individuals well, after weeks of investigation, Saturday Vanguard can, indeed, confirm that billions of dollars have been traced to certain individuals. A source privy to what is going on said that “some of the figures you get to hear are troubling. What does anybody want to do with $6 billion? What does anybody want to do with $8 billion? These figures are something else.” But how did these disclosures come to light?
