ARREST OKEZIE VICTOR IKPEAZU NOW.
The social media, mainstream media, the rumor mills, propaganda mills etcetera are inundated with Dr. Alex Otti’s testament in far away John Hopkins lecture in the USA where he jolted the listening world with shock over another made in Nigeria leadership dystopia. Governor Alex Otti made mind blowing revelations of Victor Ikpeazu heists that made OUK and TAO regimes look like kindergarten era in corruption. A whopping N107 Billion was discovered by forensic auditors to have been paid to non existent contractors, bogus contractors and at times phoney contractors with no modicum of value to the State.
Unraveling these corruption bad behavior by past leaders in the state were some of the reasons why Abians trooped out enmasse a year ago to elect a leader they trust and could hold accountable in the person of Dr. AlexOtti. It is only an unaccountable leader like Ikpeazu that can indulge in such a naked show of shame and criminal tendency. Governor Alex Otti has proven once again that the people that put him in that position did not make any mistake.
The governor should go beyond public condemnation or just making a prima facie case against this unwholesome corruption in Abia state. When you saw that Abia was denied infrastructure development for all of 24 years of PDP maladministration, it was because people you thought were leaders were in the real sense not different from Robin Hood or Alibaba with the DNA of stealing public funds.
Abians will expect nothing short of taking Ikpeazu and his cohorts through full scale investigations and scrutiny to unravel where they kept Abia State money that made them not to pay salaries, pensions, and yet could not point at any reasonable infrastructure development for the state.
I will take the example of the airport project hoax in context. I led a 15 man delegation of Abia Infrastructure Mandate, AIM to meet Ikpeazu in January, 2022 to discuss the sorry state of Abia infrastructure. One of our passionate pleas to him then was to consider building Abians, a befitting airport since all 5 Southeast states were then having their own airports except our State Abia. We even suggested to him a BOT or concessionaire arrangement whereby the state would not spend her own scarce resources.
He told the delegation that he was willing to work with us or any other group to build us an airport on Abia soil. He also promised to get back to us concerning a way forward towards commencement of the airport project. We didn’t hear from him again until we watched, some few days to his handing over to Alex Otti, as some phoney characters in front of State TV were conducting a purported airport flag off somewhere around Mbawsi in Isialangwa with one bulldozer clearly on display for site clearing.
That exercise started and ended the same day. I’m sure that must be Ikpeazu’s dramatic efforts to retire the N10 Billion he was said to have confiscated from the state accounts for the airport project. An investigation of the state account will reveal who got the money as they’re not faceless beings but human beings that received the transfers.
So ours is only be condemned to watching such travesty like circus show? In our usual assumptions that corruption in Nigeria is normal and just more jokes being dropped on our larcenic stables?. This one must be fought to its logical conclusion. Ikpeazu and his criminal gang must be brought to the book of justice. Ikpeazu’s criminal case file promises to be more melodramatic than that of the fickle minded Yahaya Bello of Kogi State. I hope the EFCC are listening and taking notes?
The ball is now in Alex Otti’s court to strip the culprits naked by invoking his prosicutorial powers as the governor with final say to bring the culprits to book. Let us fasten our seat belts and enjoy our new Victor Ikpeazu cruise ship of multi-billion heist.
Dr. Engr Odo Ijere
