Legal icon and rights activist, Femi Falana, yesterday
dismissed insinuations that he wanted to contest the 2018 Ekiti
gubernatorial election, saying that it was ridiculous and demeaning for
anyone to link him with people eyeing the Ekiti State Government House. He said
such position was too provincial for his person, considering the worth of
accomplishments across the world.
The Lagos-based senior lawyer also advised the Federal
government to urgently adopt new strategies in fighting corruption, saying that
stolen money stashed in banks was bigger than the ones in private houses. He
said that there was need to spread the anti-graft tentacles to the
activities of certain agencies of government, usually regarded as “money
spinning.”
Falana said government needed to adopt new strategies
regarding its whistle-blowing policy, in such a manner that it would not be
limited to exposing places where questionable monies belonging to the public
were hidden, but also include exposing documents capable of helping in tracking
non-liquid cash kept in various financial institutions in Nigeria and abroad
Falana made the call in his country home in
Ilawe-Ekiti, in Ekiti South West Local Government Area of Ekiti State.
He noted that government would be shocked to discover that monies in the
custody of chief executives of some establishments were worth billions being as
some of them were currently being unearthed in some rooms and apartments across
the country.
He noted that doing so would also further give
credibility to the anti-corruption drive of the present government as well as
help expose those he referred to as incurably hardened than the conventional
armed robbers.
He particularly asked President Muhammadu Buhari to beam his
searchlight on a most recent report of the Nigerian Extractive Industry
Initiative, (NEITI) which he said gave shocking revelations about certain
alleged reckless financial transactions, running into billions of dollars,
carried out in some agencies of government that had links with oil and gas
exploration.
By Wole Balogun
