Patience Jonathan Petitions Buhari, Asks Him to Call Magu to Order

Former First Lady, Mrs. Patience Jonathan, has called on the acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu, accusing him of relentlessly prosecuting a plot to destroy her family.

For this, Mrs. Jonathan has enjoined President Muhammadu Buhari to call the EFCC boss to order, stressing that Magu’s vindictive disposition towards the former first family is portraying the organisation as an agency for revenge.

Mrs. Jonathan also counselled that bringing Magu back to the path of sanity and reason would serve as a means of salvaging the image of the presidency which she said the EFCC boss was ceaselessly desecrating through his malicious actions.

In the statement signed by her media aide, Belema Meshack-Hart, the former first lady also accused Magu of bias and intimidation, and lamented that the EFCC boss had been spreading barefaced falsehood and propaganda against her in the name of investigations.

She further claimed that Magu’s actions were tantamount to “unjustified witch-hunt,” stressing that no other first lady had faced such fate of brazen intimidation in the history of this country.

The statement said: “We wish to bring to the attention of Nigerians, the unjustified witchhunt and media propaganda against the former First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan and her family by the agents of the acting chairman of the EFCC, Magu and his media hirelings.

“For almost three years, this agency of the government has beamed its searchlight on her, her family members including siblings and parents, as well as her foundation and nongovernmental organisation; A. Aruera Reach Out Foundation, and Women for Change and Development Initiative, in the name of investigating their activities. However, we have since discovered that the real intention is to disgrace, intimidate, dehumanise and ridicule her and her family, through sheer cheap propaganda, sensational investigation and media trial that have been going on for too long.

“We wish to place it on record that in the history of this country, no wife of any president had been so far investigated in such flagrantly vindictive and disgraceful manner, as has been the fate of Mrs. Jonathan, in the hands of Magu’s EFCC.

“As a tradition, every first lady in this country has had one pet project or the other, with which they sought to intervene in the lives of the less privileged. Mrs. Jonathan started her NGO in Bayelsa State 11 years ago when her husband was the governor of the state. With it, she has, over the years, touched the lives of many Nigerians in different ways. It is then surprising that while other, First ladies and their pet projects were left alone, it is only her activities and that of her NGOs that are being subjected to indefinite probe and microscopic scrutiny by the Buhari administration.”