BudgIT boss says Jonathan should be prosecuted along with Dasuki

The co-founder of BudgIT Seun Onigbinde Thursday said former President Goodluck Jonathan should be prosecuted along with his national security adviser Sambo Dasuki.

Dasuki is being tried for alleged misappropriation of funds meant for the purchase of weapons for the military to fight the armed group Boko Haram. He was recently released from Department of State Services custody after more than four years on Tuesday.

But Onigbinde said Jonathan should be docked too for the alleged fraud since it happened under him.

“GEJ is the one to sit in the dock with Dasuki firmly beside him & the entire downline,” Onigbinde said on Twitter.

Onigbinde resigned his appointment as the technical adviser to the minister of state for budget national planning after he faced an intense social media backlash over the appointment, mostly because of his past caustic criticism of President Muhammadu Buhari and his government.

He said the Nigerian government has “lost the case” because it has failed to charge the former president with Dansuki.

“If you have an respect [sic] for the sacred nature of public funds, there’s no single justification for using arms fund or security votes for political opportunism,” Onigbinde said.

Dasuki was accused of awarding “phantom contracts” to buy 12 helicopters, four fighter jets, and bombs and ammunition worth $2bn that never were supplied.

“Thousands of needless Nigerian deaths would have been avoided” if the money had been properly spent, Femi Adesina, an adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari, said in a statement 2015.

Adesina also alleged that Dasuki got the Central Bank to transfer $142.6m to a company with accounts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in West Africa for unknown purposes and without contracts.

Dasuki has since denied any wrongdoing. He said he was proud that in the final months under his watch Nigeria’s military ousted Boko Haram from a large swath of territory it had seized in northeast Nigeria.