The widow of former Nigerian military leader, General Sani Abacha, Maryam Abacha, has dismissed longstanding allegations leveled against her late husband of looting Nigerian treasury while in power.
During a television interview on TVC on Sunday, 27 years after Abacha’s death, she stated that the financial controversies surrounding her husband were misunderstood, insisting that no money was embezzled during his administration.
General Abacha governed Nigeria from 1993 until he died on June 8, 1998.
Nigerian administrations, over the years, have recovered huge sums of money from foreign accounts linked to Abacha.
Funds, popularly referred to as the “Abacha loot,”; have been recovered from Switzerland, America, and Britain and used for various social investment programs.
However, Maryam Abacha contested admissibility of evidence presented over a period in an attempt to prove charges of financial impropriety.
She challenged credibility of publicly often mentioned witnesses and documents.
“Who is the witness of the monies that were being stashed?.
“Did you see the signature or the evidence of any monies stashed abroad? And the monies that my husband kept for Nigeria, in a few months, the monies vanished. People are not talking about that,”;Maryam Abacha queried.
She also suggested charges against her husband might be a result of deeper social cleavages, including ethnic as well as religious biases.
She accused Nigerians for falling hook, line, and sinker for the looting script and contended no one person—Abacha, Babangida, or Abiola—could dictate everything or decide what the country should be.
According to her, all citizens, no matter what status, have a meaningful part they should contribute towards building the country.
She also cleared her husband of any involvement in annulling the presidential election on June 12, 1993, blaming other actors in government at the time for making the decision. According to her, attributing such a defining national decision to Abacha unnecessarily bloated Abacha’s authority to unrealistic levels.
“I pray for Nigerians. I pray for all of us. I pray that we should have goodness in our hearts. We should stop telling lies and blaming people.
“Why are we so bad towards each other? Because somebody is a northerner or a southerner, somebody is a Muslim or a Christian, or somebody is nice or... It’s not fair.”;
