2019: Atiku Has No Moral Burden, Lawyers Urge Nigerians To Disregard Alleged US Indictment

Nigerians have been urged to disregard a United States Senate report allegedly indicting former vice president and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP.

The US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on investigations chaired by Senator Carl Levin had allegedly indicted Abubakar during 2010 investigations of violations of U.S. money laundering laws. The former vice president was said to have laundered funds into U.S, banks through his wife Jennifer Douglas, based in that country.

But speaking to THE WHISTLER on the legal and moral implications of the alleged indictment, lawyers expressed the view that a senate hearing is not a law court, and as such has no legal implications for the aspiration of Abubakar.

Johnson Usman, an Abuja-based legal practitioner, said under Nigerian law, indictment by a panel is no longer a ground for disqualification of a candidate standing for elections.

“Before the amendment of the 1999 constitution, indictment was a crime and a basis for disqualification of a candidate. If you’re indicted by a panel and a white paper is issued, you stand disqualified. But that provision has been deleted when the constitution was amended, and indictment is no longer a ground for disqualification,” he explained.

He stated that under the provision of sections 131,137 of the amended constitution, the ground for disqualification is an indictment by a competent court of law, and not an investigative panel.

Supporting this point of view, Ohazurike Tochukwu, Director, Legal and Documentation, Independent Service Delivery Monitoring Group, also stated that the senate investigation being referred to was not a court hearing where every side was allowed to tell their own side of the story.

He said: “To the best of our knowledge, Atiku Abubakar was not a witness neither was he summoned to that congressional hearing. What they did was to refer it to the EFCC to undertake further investigation. And if after several years, EFCC has not found anything to charge him with, it means either he is not corrupt, or he is so smart as to be able to hide the evidence from all prosecution agencies.”

On whether the alleged places a moral burden on Abubakar’s candidacy in the 2019 election, Tochukwu argued that since there is no legal indictment or legal process against him in any court of law, he suffers no moral burden going into the election.

“Everyone has a fundamental right under the law. You are innocent until proven guilty. So, if he has not been found guilty of any crime, the question is: moral burden of what? So for me it is not a moral issue, it’s more of political allegation and not moral. For it to be a moral issue, there has to be compelling evidence; may be the case is in court and things like that. If all our prosecutorial agencies have not found anything to charge him with, then there is no moral burden anywhere.”