The All Progressives Congress (APC) has urged President Goodluck Jonathan to come clean on the circumstances surrounding the $9.3 million that was impounded in South Africa, which has become the latest in a series of global ridicule to which the scandal-prone Jonathan Administration has subjected Nigeria and her people.
In a statement issued in Abuja yesterday by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the party also called on the National Assembly to launch an urgent investigation into the issue, saying the silence of the peoples’ representatives on the issue is deafening, unfathomable and unacceptable.
It said there is no doubt that the President is at the centre of the whole issue, considering the presidential treatment given to the plane and its cargo, since the plane departed from the Presidential wing of the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja, away from the reach of the Nigerian Customs Service which could not therefore have cleared the plane and its passengers.
“It is absolutely urgent for President Jonathan to clear the air on this alleged off-the-shelf equipment or arms purchase, which runs against all known protocol for such purchases anywhere in the world. Military equipment and weapons are not bean cakes to be purchased by the road side. There are globally-acceptable protocols for such purchases by governments, otherwise what differentiates a government from an insurgent group that is shopping for arms?
“Is the Jonathan Administration not aware that the UN General Assembly on April 2nd 2013 adopted a landmark Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) precisely to regulate the international trade in conventional weapons by avoiding the kind of road-side purchase that the Nigerian government is said to have been involved in? Though the ATT has not come into effect, the fact that Nigeria is among the few countries to have signed and ratified the treaty shows that the country is concerned by unregulated arms trade,” APC said.
The party said the resort to “procedural error” to explain away the whole issue cannot work, because Nigerian authorities cannot pretend not to be aware that currency brought into or taken from South Africa is monitored by law, and that anyone bringing into that country more than R25,000 in South African currency or $10,000 or the equivalent thereof in foreign currency must declare such.
Meanwhile, the Acting Director-General, Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Mr Benedict Adeyileka, yesterday said that more than 60 per cent of the aircraft operated by Nigerian airlines were on lease.
Adeyileka spoke in Lagos through NCAA’s General Manager, Airworthiness & Standard, Mr Kayode Ajiboye, at a seminar organised by Aeroconsult with the theme “Sustaining Safety in the Nigerian Aviation Sector’’.
He said that most airlines preferred aircraft lease financing to reduce their operational cost.