Alamieyeseigha, former governor of Bayelsa State, has said that the state
pardon recently granted him by President Goodluck Jonathan was part the plea
bargain between him and the Federal Government, then headed by Umaru Yar’Adua.
In an interview published in the April current
edition of the London based NewsAfrica magazine, Chief Alamieyeseigha said his
own part was to deliver on peace in the Niger Delta by convincing the militants
to accept the Federal Government’s amnesty programme. And this he did. I
convinced the militants to accept the FG’s amnesty and I have not stopped ever
since. The country owes the peace in the Niger Delta partly to my efforts. Till
today, every day, I get one report or the other and I intervene because they
all see me as their father, leader and governor general”.
This pardon did not start from Goodluck (President
Jonathan). It was part of the agreement with the government. Because Goodluck
knows the story from the beginning, he was just carrying out part of an
existing agreement’. He said he was prepared to fight the corruption charges
against him to the end but accepted the plea bargain for three reasons (which
he had also said in the court then before the judge passed the sentence}: ‘one
because of my age and deteriorating health; two because of the escalating
violence in the Niger Delta, the loss of the lives of the youth protesting that
I had to be released’. The third reason was that he saw Yar”adua as a man of
integrity.
Speaking for the first time on the plea bargain
which saw him plead guilty without spending a single day in jail in 2008,
Alamieyeseigha said he was in Dubai on medical treatment when Nuhu Ribadu, the
then chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) generated
a letter purportedly from the government that he ’was persona non grata and
planned to overthrow the government of Nigeria”. The allegation came about
after his five of his former colleagues and Atiku Abubakar, the former Vice
President, visited him at the hospital. The Federal Government then sent
security men to whisk him back to Nigeria and straight to the EFCC cell,
although he was in the middle of his medical treatment.
“I could not even walk because I had a metal
implant in my groin’. He said: “Ribadu said he did not care if he died there.
The following night, Ibrahim Lamorde, (the present EFCC boss) brought a phone
to me and said it was President Yar’Adua who wanted to speak to me. He
(Yar’Adua) said ‘Ginuwa (his traditional title in Katsina), I cannot be
President and see you die because they will kill you. I am the President of the
Federal Republic of Nigeria not Olusegun Obasanjo (anymore). The information
available to me suggests that they will kill you. So come out. Do not contest
anything’. Asked by the magazine who he thought the ‘they’ were, he responded
‘forces in government’.
According to Alamieyeseigha, Yar’Adua, promised
him that ‘you are not going to spend one day in prison. I will give you pardon.
Come out and help solve the Niger Delta problem. But I know how stubborn and
difficult you are when you believe in something. So, I am going to send your
younger brother (Goodluck Jonathan) the Vice President to you: to speak to you
and to convey my decision’.
The former governor said the Vice President came
following day and was shocked to see his state of health: ‘He (Jonathan) made a
statement, “This is the man in this state that wants to overthrow the
government of Nigeria? He conveyed Yar’Adua message. I slept over what the
President and the Vice President said and I felt they were making sense’. On
why Yar’Adua did not give him the pardon before he died, Alamieyeseigha said
the then President had asked him to apply but the political forces against him
then generated a security report that he was paired with Atiku to contest the
2011 election against Yar’Adua and Jonathan. “They advised him to step it down
till the duo got their nominations from the PDP.
“I laughed because there was no way under the
heaven that I could contest election against my younger brother, Goodluck
Jonathan.”
