“I think this is long overdue. The list came up sometime last year to President Buhari’s administration, for them to act on it, but till this minute, nothing has happened to any one person on that list.”
A Nigerian politician and the former Deputy National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC) wants to see the Nigerian government prosecute the 15 entities it named last week as terrorism financiers.
They include nine individuals and six Bureau de Change firms.
Timi Frank doubts the government’s sincerity in fighting terrorism and opines that the government only decided to publish the names because Nigerians have been pressuring Abuja, three years after the United Arab Emirates (UAE) listed six Nigerians as terrorism financier suspects.
“One thing is to put up the list, the next is to see the kind of action the government is going to take to make sure every person that is mentioned in that list faces justice,” Frank told Nigeria Info 99.3 Lagos on the show Hard Facts, on Monday.
He believes the Nigerian government failed to act on the UAE list, under former president Muhammadu Buhari, because of the “presence of high-profile” names on the file.
“We believe and we want to hope that this government would do the right thing and immediately act on that list,” he said.
The former spokesperson, however, said that so many Nigerians believe that the current list is doctored.
He added that neither the Buhari nor Tinubu administrations have “shown the capacity, the tenacity, and the will to end insecurity in Nigeria.”
According to him, terrorism has become a business avenue for politicians and security agencies to make money.
Frank wants to see heads of security agencies resign over their inability to check terrorism, banditry, and large-scale crimes in Nigeria.
