Deputy Senate President Ibrahim Mantu yesterday denied an allegation that he offered bribes to senators to consider the impeachment of Vice President Atiku Abubakar.
His denial comes on the heels of Senate consideration today, of the report of its Judiciary Committee on the procedure it should adopt in handling the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Administra-tive Panel of Inquiry’s reports that indicted the Vice President for abuse of office.
Although President Oluse-gun Obasanjo had forwarded the reports to the Senate and the House of Representatives for their information, the former had referred it to the committee for advice.
The advice, according to Chairman of the Senate Committee on Rules and Business, Senator Ibrahim Tsauri, in a briefing with Senate correspondents at the National Assembly yesterday evening, is ready and has been listed on the Order Paper for discussion today.
But speculations had been rife in the National Assembly that huge cash incentives (N1.9billion) had been moved in to sway members in the direction of impeachment of the embattled Vice President, who had not only gone to court to contest the constitutional and legality of the indictment, but had last week sent his own side of the story to the Senate.
It was further speculated that each senator was to get N10million each once enlisted on the side of the Vice President’s impeachment.
The Deputy Senate President, Mantu, who had been fingered by a media report as the facilitator of the bribery and impeachment drive, however, denied the speculations, stating that they were not true.
Mantu spoke through his Chief Press Secretary, Mr. Sylvanus Namang, and said: “To straighten the records, Senator Mantu would like to dismiss the entire content of the publication in question as baseless and a deliberate attempt to cause friction between him and his well respected colleagues in the Senate, the Presidency and well meaning citizens of this country”.
“The Deputy Senate President to say the least regards his colleagues in the Senate as men of conscience who cannot be bought with peanuts.
“Secondly, the Senate’s position on the EFCC investigation report is well known. As men and women of integrity, they have stated without equivocation that they are going to treat the report dispassionately”.
In a related development, the Political Adviser to the President, Chief Akin Osuntokun, has dismissed as spurious explanations by the Vice President that he authorised the disbursement of nearly N400 million to some of his aides from the purse of the defunct Obasanjo/Atiku Presidential Campaign Organisation to save the campaign from defeat at the 2003 polls.
A media aide to the Vice President’s campaign organisation, Dr. Adeolu Akande, had at the weekend told THISDAY that in the heat of the 2003 presidential campaign his boss actually authorised the release of N105 million out of the N400 million in dispute, to two of his aides to help fund a special media committee when it became clear that the one ran by Osuntokun was found to be incompetent.
But in a statement made available to THISDAY yesterday, the presidential political adviser said the Vice President had a lot of explanations to make on the matter, including his alleged approval of N40 million to a former Executive Secretary of the Petroleum Trust Development Fund (PTDF), Alhaji Yusuf Hamisu, from the campaign fund.
According to Osuntokun, who was the director of publicity in the defunct organisation, a “dark pall of brazen treachery and insubordination hovered over the 2003 (Obasanjo/Atiku) Presidential Campaign” to the point where several “unaccountable withdrawals” were made by “people of tenuous association with Legacy House (the campaign headquarters).”
He said he was not surprised at the current tide of “betrayal and delusion of grandeur,” saying such acts dated back to the campaign days and ultimately led to the sack of key aides of the Vice President.
But responding to Osuntokun yesterday, Akande said the problem with the President’s camp was that they remained unable to face the truth.
“It is obvious,” he said, “that they are no longer able to hide the truth from Nigerians. And whether they like it or not, their pitiable attempts to deceive our people are meeting with monumental failures. The point is: they can no longer deny lack of knowledge of the campaign fund accounts that resided in both MOFAS and Marine Float.”