EFCC hits renowned columnist Sonala Olumhense
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, (EFCC) on Sunday took a swipe at renowned columnist Sonala Olumhense.
Olumhese, the EFCC said, falsely accused it chairman Abdulrasheed Bawa of failing to submit the commission’s annual report to the National Assembly, due September 30.
But, in its rebuttal the anti-graft body said it had complied with the law and urged Olumhense to verify his claims.
“It is curious that a journalist of Olumhense’s experience made no attempt to verify his fact before publishing,” stated Wilson Uwujaren in the EFCC statement.
“Had he done so, he would have saved himself the embarrassment of an article that is as irredeemably flawed as it is damaging, especially for Olumhense’s reputation and those of the newspapers that did not bother to fact-check his tendentious piece on the EFCC”
“To be charitable to him, these are completely false claims that exposes the intellectual hollowness of Olumhense.
“The truth is that since the Commission was established in 2003, it has never defaulted, not even once, in submitting its Annual Report to the National Assembly, by or before the 30th of September every year.
“As for the claim that the Commission’s Establishment Act was missing from its website, a visit to the EFCC website, www.efccnigeria.org will expose Olumhense’s mischief as the law had been a resource item on the platform for several years.
Olumhense’s mischief is not new. It has become a yearly ritual for him to castigate the Commission over the false claim of non-submission of its Annual Report, using hopelessly false and jaundiced arguments.
“And despite the best efforts of the commission to educate him, he has stubbornly refused to be rescued from the trap of falsehood he set for himself. He is fixated and appears irredeemably lost to promoting falsehood about the Commission.
“An ignorant columnist, especially one with a famous name is a danger to society. All the gibberish about EFCC Annual Report have left readers of Olumhense’s column across the world misinformed. If this misadventure is reflective of his weekly interventions on national affairs, it is safe to conclude that the columnist poses a dire threat to our collective intellectual health.
“Olumhense and the newspapers that lent him their platforms to ventilate falsehood against the EFCC are hereby challenged to fact-check these facts and then, have the courtesy and professional integrity to apologise.”