Official Denial, Appeal To Ethnicity, Diversionary Publications And Media Blackmail: Desperate Measures Employed By Mrs. Oduah To Stave Off BMW Scandal

She deserves to be probe,for God sake...

When SaharaReporters broke the news of the
scandalous purchase of two BMW armoured Cars
by the cash-strapped Nigerian Civil Aviation
Authority (NCAA), the Minister of Aviation,
Mrs. Stella Oduah and her collaborators went
silent, hoping that the two-day Muslim
public holiday would blunt the report.

Instead of responding the allegations Mrs.
Oduah reportedly called on the Reno Omokri,
the social media man at the Presidential
Villa to handle scandal.

Reno's job includes using a loose network of
paid "anti-bloggers" to attack the
credibility of such reports by leaving
comments on Facebook, Twitter, Blackberry
Messengers and the comments sections of
websites.

The "anti-bloggers" went straight to work by
claiming that Mrs. Oduah's signature was not
found on the documents SaharaReporters
published and as such, that she could not
have been involved. As that argument didn't
seem to hold water, they quickly started a
new line of argument to the effect that she
was sufficiently wealthy before becoming a
minister and thus could afford the cars.

That line of argument was the first official
reaction from the minister's office through
the spokesperson of the Federal Airports
Authority, Yakubu Datti.

If Mrs. Oduah thought Mr. Datti's
intervention would work, it turned out to be
a failure as the response outraged the
Nigerian public which was reeling from
recent accidents in the aviation sector.

By Wednesday, Mrs. Oduah had instructed her
media aide, Joe Obi, to own up to the
purchase of the cars but to claim that they
were made because the minister faced
"imminent threats" from certain forces in
the aviation sector.

While the admission was aimed at creating a sense of siege and thus capitalize on the insecurity in the country, that argument only incensed more people, such that, Presidency sources said, President Goodluck Jonathan began asking questions on what to do to appease Miss. Oduah's enemies.

As the condemnation grew, Miss. Oduah reached out to leaders of Aka-Ikenga, an Igbo social cultural group, to help frame it as an "ethnic issue" in view of the fact that the two main culprits in the transaction are Igbos.

She figured a response by Aka-Ikenga
would scare off the public and help mobilize
her ethnic group in support of the corruption involved in the car purchase. Mr.
Omokri's crew also went on to strengthen
that argument, attacking newspapers,
websites and blogs republishing the stories
as being "anti-Igbo."

They claimed the attack on Miss.Odua was
because she upgraded the Enugu Airport to an
International Airport. Even though this
argument helped mobilize some unsuspecting
Nigerians, it didn't serve her too well as
several individuals from her ethnic group
condemned the purchases.

Meanwhile, several newspapers had picked up
the story. By Thursday, Miss. Oduah had
urged her crew to try another trick: getting
some blogs to publish the story that the
Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, had
bought three armored cars for N600 million,
one of which he gave to his predecessor,
Bola Tinubu.

The only lacunae with the strategy was that
Miss. Oduah's supporters could not produce
the compelling evidence to prove that
Fashola bought the cars, but even if that
were to be true, many argued, it could not
be used to justify the Minister's monumental
corruption.

By Friday Miss. Oduah tried another strategy: she invited the media to a press briefing in Abuja. However, lacking the courage to come out of her office to address the media, she sent the Director General of the NCAA, Fola Akinkuotu to take the stage.

A befuddled and clearly confused Akinkuotu
then addressed the media in the most bizarre
manner, making claims that further
embarrassed the Minister as to the rationale
for purchasing the cars.

An unprepared Akinkuotu spent more time
accusing whistleblowers in his agency for
leaking the documents. When he was rounding
up the press conference, he promised to take
reporters to see the vehicles, but quickly
disappeared when two reporters volunteered
to follow him.

Later in the night, Mr. Akinkuotu did what
most Nigeria officials do best: offer money
to newspaper editors to help kill the
report. The problem was that most of the
newspapers had already concluded production
and couldn't reverse their publication.

Dateline Sunday: Miss. Oduah and media aide,
Joe Obi, commissioned some writers to pen
articles to defend the minister, blaming
union leaders andcertain voices critical of
her for wanting to destroy the aviation
sector.

Such an article penned by one "Capt. Ore Kingsley", titled "Why Stella
Oduah Must Be Punished" admitted that the
BMW purchases were egregious but went on a
rant to blame Captain Dele Ore and others
for the "gang-up" against the minister.

A few minutes later Mr. Obi had circulated
another spurious report claiming that
Fashola bought N600 million worth of armored
cars, claiming that a Ghanaian website,
Modernghana, made and published the
findings. But the sad part is that the Miss.
Oduah and her aides didn't understand that
Modernghana.com is an aggregation website
that collects news from any source without
verifying authenticity.

As of the time of publishing this report,
Miss. Oduah had recruited Peoples Democratic
Party (PDP) party elders and the Secretary
to the Federal Governmen, Pius Anyim, to
embark on outreach to critical segments of
the Nigerian society and to help appease her
opponents, it is unclear if this will work
as President Jonathan has already claimed he
wants to look into the scandal.

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