Nigeria arrests ex-Minister Saleh Mamman after 75-Year sentence
He had made promises about power. Instead, he took the money meant to deliver it and ran.
For weeks after a Nigerian court handed down a 75-year sentence against former Power Minister Saleh Mamman, the man himself was nowhere to be found. Convicted in absentia, because he had not even bothered to show up for his own sentencing, Mamman had slipped into hiding, perhaps calculating that in a country where powerful men have historically found ways to escape accountability, distance and time were his best allies.
He calculated wrong.
In the early hours of Tuesday, operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission swept into Nigeria’s northern Kaduna state and picked him up, the result, the agency said, of “weeks of surveillance and intelligence gathering.” The chase was over.
The case against Mamman is striking not just for its scale, but for what it represents. A court in Abuja found him guilty on 12 separate counts tied to the diversion of funds earmarked for two hydroelectric power projects, money that was supposed to bring electricity to Nigerians but instead, through a web of proxy companies and carefully placed associates, found its way elsewhere. The judge determined that at least 22 billion naira, roughly $14 million, had been siphoned from projects that could have made a measurable difference to a country that desperately needed them to succeed.
The sentencing, spread across multiple charges running consecutively, added up to 75 years behind bars. And that is before a separate corruption trial in Abuja, involving allegations of fraud worth 31 billion naira, has even concluded. A warrant for his arrest in that case had already been issued after he failed to appear in court there too.
EFCC chairman Ola Olukoyede was unambiguous about what his agency intended to do next.
“For us, getting the convict to serve his jail terms is extremely important in view of the seriousness with which we are tackling corrupt practices,” he said.
The arrest has landed with particular force given the context in which Mamman served. Between 2019 and 2021, under former President Muhammadu Buhari, he held the power ministry at a time when Nigerians were being asked to be patient, to believe that relief from chronic blackouts and unreliable electricity was coming. He made those promises. He did not keep them. And now a court has found that while ordinary Nigerians ran generators and prayed for stable power, public funds meant to build the infrastructure that would provide it were being quietly redirected.
Nigeria is, by any measure, a country that should not be having this conversation. It is one of Africa’s largest energy producers. Yet frequent blackouts remain a stubborn feature of daily life, strangling businesses and households alike, with millions left dependent on fuel-powered generators that have become increasingly unaffordable as fuel prices rise.
The conviction and arrest of Saleh Mamman will not fix Nigeria’s electricity problem. But in a country where the prosecution of genuinely powerful figures has so often stalled, faded, or quietly disappeared, the fact that the EFCC hunted him down and dragged him back into the reach of the law is, at minimum, a signal that some consequences are still real.
Whether that signal echoes or fades will depend on what comes next.
Source: myjoyonline.com
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