Justice Development and Peace Commission has described the presidential pardon for former Bayelsa State Governor, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, as “misuse of power” by the Presidency.
The group’s Executive Director, Rev. Emmanuel Fadele, said this while addressing the state of the nation on corruption during a press conference on Saturday.
He said, “The President was too much in a hurry to pardon Alamieyeseigha. If he is from your tribe, your person and former boss, it does not matter. This is the aspect of the misuse of power that we are reading in the way he is using his power constitutionally.”
Fadele said Nigerians were wise enough to know that President Goodluck Jonathan only used the pardon as gratitude to his former boss, but expressed shock how he executed it under the veil of a pardon.
He said, “The news that the President has commensurately paid back his former boss, Alamieyeseigha, by removing all tar from him and coating it with pardon to political prisoners, jolted Nigerians.
“Nigerians are not fools, neither are they dumb. Somebody else should have done this, not him.”
He decried the level of corruption in the country, especially how it had eaten into the Nigerian judiciary.
According to the cleric, while notable offenders are hardly punished, those with less crime are made to bear stiff penalties.
This development, Fadele said, had negatively affected justice delivery in the country.
He said, “We can all see that justice has been corrupted, from the way judgments are handled on cash-and-carry basis. You find people who are highly corrupt in five-star hotels or prisons that are well furnished, during their jail term.
“Those that have stolen billions of naira, killed so many people, the multiplied effect of which can never be quantified, are let off the hook, granted national pardon, and will be then brought back again to rule us.”
The Deputy Director, JDPC, Mr. Joe Nkamuke, said corruption had waxed stronger in the country that nobody could properly account for how large sums of money, especially the ones allocated to the oil sector, were being spent.
Meanwhile, a civil rights group, Egalitarian Mission Africa on Sunday challenged two former governors of Bayelsa and Plateau states, Diprieye Alamieyeseigha and Joshua Dariye respectively to take a trip the United Kingdom to prove whether they have been shielded from corruption trial or not.
The Founder/Executive Director of the organization, Mr. Kayode Ajulo, who threw the challenge in a statement condemning the presidential pardon for Alamieyeseigha, which he described as “too selective”, said he would bear all the expenses of the trip.
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