Atiku Abubakar has reacted to the appointment of his ex aide, Michael Achimugu by President Tinubu.
The Tinubu government had appointed Achimugu, a self-acclaimed whistleblower, as the Director of Public Affairs and Consumer Protection in Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority.
Achimugu was named in the list of 46 new directors announced last Thursday by the Minister of Aviation, Festus Keyamo, for the aviation agencies.
The name of Achimugu featured prominently during the electioneering campaign and the build-up to the 2023 presidential poll where he accused his former boss, Atiku Abubakar of allegedly stealing public funds through ‘Special Purpose Vehicles.’
The defiant whistleblower also claimed he was privy to how the former number two citizen laundered public money through the SPV.
A special purpose vehicle has been described as a type of business arrangement that allows companies to operate a subsidiary with independence from the parent company to mitigate financial risk.
To back up his claim, Achimugu allegedly further supplied audio clips and other documents.
The accusations and counter-accusations reached a crescendo on January 16 when the now-dissolved Tinubu-Shettima Presidential Campaign Council held a world press conference in Abuja to amplify the controversy by calling on security agencies to apprehend the former VP.
Addressing journalists, one of the PCC spokesmen, Dele Alake, who is now the Minister of Solid Mineral, stated that the PDP presidential candidate deserved to be arrested following concrete evidence that he abused his office as vice president from 1999 to 2007.
But seven months after the inauguration of President Bola Tinubu, the Achimugu has bagged an appointment in the new administration.
Condemning the appointment, Atiku through the Peoples Democratic Party expressed shock, saying the ruling APC government has shown no regard for integrity and the consciousness of the Nigerian people.
In an exclusive interview with PUNCH Online, the Deputy National Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Ibrahim Abdullahi, alleged that the level of impunity with which the APC president operates has also been reflected in how Keyamo went about the appointments.
He said, “It is good that Nigerians are seeing the level of desperation in the APC. In our position as the opposition party, the PDP condemns it in totality. We have articulated in our manifesto long in the build-up to the election campaign that anything to do with Bola Tinubu and the APC is taking Nigeria to the Stone Age.
“Achimugu was not a politician but a whistleblower. Now they have ignored other people in Nigeria who are more deserving of the appointment legitimately to bring someone who they want to silence because of his defectiveness in the job he was doing.
“They want to ensure nobody is spoken to or heard. We also saw it last week in the president and commander-in-chief calling a state governor (Sim Fubara) who was elected like him to work with some itemised conditionalities in his state as if we are not running a federation.
“The appointment of Achimugu is a condemned development in Nigeria as we have always said. It is something we view with a lot of suspicion. We can already see the hand of Esau and can predict the outcome. It is intended to silence people and continues with the emasculation of voices of dissent against the constitutional order and the rule of law. There has to be an end to this reign of impunity. Otherwise, we will wake up one day and realise there is no future for our children.”
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