Heavens won’t fall if Obasanjo’s tried – Sagay

Sharp reactions, yesterday, trailed submissions by Chairman, Presidential Advisory Committee on Anti-corruption, Professor Itse Sagay, that former President Olusegun Obasanjo should be tried over alleged improprieties in the execution of the National Integrated Power Projects, NIPP, initiated by his administration to boost power supply.


The call was made upon claims by President Muhammadu Buhari that Obasanjo had himself claimed to have spent $16 billion on the projects without producing the power.

Obasanjo was, however, quick to rebut Buhari with pointers that the amount spent on the NIPP was a third of the amount attributed to him by Buhari.

The claim and counter-claims nonetheless, calls for a probe of the NIPP have recently escalated, especially following Obasanjo’s frontal submission that Buhari should not seek a second term based on what he claimed to be the President’s incompetence, clannishness, and failure to deliver on his promises.

Wading into the fray, Sagay had in an interview, said that heavens would not fall if Obasanjo was tried.

His position was backed by Festus Keyamo, SAN, spokesman of the Buhari Campaign Organisation. The two were, however, opposed by elder statesman, Dr. Junaid Mohammed, and Mr. Akin Oshuntokun, himself a political associate of ex-President Obasanjo.

Reasserting his claim in a telephone interview with Vanguard yesterday, Sagay said:  “I did not say heaven won’t fall if Obasanjo is jailed; what I said was that heavens wouldn’t fall if Obasanjo is tried. I was asked whether it was possible for Obasanjo to be tried, I said yes. While the government is not willing, it is a matter for legal prosecution if it happens; heaven will not fall.

“It is the trial and not the jailing. He is not the only one to be tried, but that was the specific term I was asked because of his ‘I am very pure and better than everybody’ attitude. He pretends and behaves like a hypocrite, a person who puts himself up as something that he is not and then condemns all other people like what these Jewish Pharisees used to do. We cannot tolerate that sort of thing in this country.

Backing him, Keyamo said:  “I agree with Prof. Sagay. I think that this entire attitude of treating past African leaders with kid gloves should stop. Many of them think that they have immunity and that they are demigods.

“I support it entirely that if any of them is found wanting, no witch-hunt, the person should be brought to book; not unnecessarily witch-hunt.

“If Obasanjo is found wanting, he should be brought to book, heavens will not fall, earth will not melt, and no single Nigerian will protest. Obasanjo has no political constituency.”