National
Buhari Minister Under New Scrutiny Over Ransom Payment To Kidnappers
Erstwhile minister of digital economy in the Muhammadu Buhari administration, Prof Isa Ali Ibrahim Patanmi was on Monday morning under fire after his yeoman job in mobilising N50m to pay ransom for six young girls and their father kidnapped by bandits in the Federal Capital Territory.
GWG.ng reports that one of the girls, Nabeeha Al-Kadriyar, a 400-level undergraduate was killed by the bandits over the failure of their father to produce the ransom demanded by the bandits stirring a national outrage.
Prof Patanmi responding to the development entered the fray and immediately reported that a friend had provided N50m to add up to the N10m to pay the N60m ransom demanded by the bandits.
He said:
His tweet was, however, met with outrage as many in the twitter community expressed shock that he was the one who supervised the National Identity Number, NIN scheme which he claimed would help to trace kidnappers.
GWG.ng reports that President Buhari had a function on May 2021 asserted that the NIN project will be used to smoke out criminals.
“We will be able to easily identify and know the personality of Nigerians. We will identify people easily, including the crooks,” President Buhari said in May 2021 at the launch of the National Policy for the Promotion of Indigenous Content in Nigerian Telecoms Sector and Revised National Identity Policy for SIM Cards Registration in Abuja.
However, Pantami’s quick action in resorting to paying for the ransom despite his claims on smoking out the bandits and other criminals through the NIN immediately raised controversy on twitter.
Responding to the criticisms, Pantami tweeted thus:
However, the effort by Pantami was hardly comforting to his critics over his role in raising ransom instead of deploying the multi-billion naira technology he was supposed to have installed in smoking out the criminals.
There was, however, one rare support for Pantami from a twitter user who while commending his gesture, nevertheless, urged that it should be the last time that money was being contributed to pay ransom to kidnappers.
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