Childish Twists And Turns On Osungate—Bola Ilori

Ever since the monumental scandal that is being referred to as Osungate happened, there has been no end to the number of efforts employed by perpetrators of that heinous crime that manacled the Justice Naron Electoral Tribunal and made it captive to the weird and dark political interests of Olagunsoye Oyinlola and his PDP, in a bid to cover their tracks. Faced with the shock the scandal generated, Oyinlola’s lawyer, Kunle Kalejaye, who remains at the centre of what should be the biggest judicial scandal since the present malfunctioning democracy dawned in 1999, went gaga, boasting of his intent to sue those that revealed the sordid act. Together with Oyinlola and his spin masters, he was to put a lame excuse that the telephone network, MTN, denied issuing the controversial call logs published in TheNEWS, which not only pooh-poohed the explanation but also threw a frontal challenge to him to go to court and clear his name. The tepid excuse they celebrated never denied the genuineness or the fact that the call logs were MTN’s and that now made their alibi stink. TheNEWS, which lifted the lid on the sordid deed, was to dare Oyinlola and his counsel to go to court and, months after that revelation and after securing a very odious victory at Naron’s tribunal, Oyinlola and his lawyer have kept mute, with the hope that Nigerians would, in characteristic manner, shovel under the noxious deed and live with its infection. bola-ilori.jpg

But that has not meant that they and their allies are tired of inventing spurious, watery and laughable reasons to explain the smelly act of compromise they carried to infest and tarnish the name of the country’s judiciary. One of such efforts was the one jointly done by the pair of Olalekan Osiade and Lucas Ajanaku in The Compass, 15 September 2008 titled, “The great GSM text, call fraud”. It was an effort that goes to prove the age-old saying that there is no peace for the wicked. The way the duo went to invent reasons to explain why the scandal happened, demonstrated that Oyinlola, Kalejaye and the minions that perpetrated the fraud must have been handed their tainted victory by Naron and company, but are still haunted by their conscience and are restless because the of the soiled diadem. It was a messy job that refused to jell. The laughable manner they went to explain what must have possibly happened never attempted to strike a reasonable impression of what really happened in Osun. Same also with their careless attempt to attach the shadow of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu–a man now dreaded like death by the many lackeys of the darkness Obasanjo imposed on the South-West–for which The Nigerian Compass was undisguisedly founded.

It is funny the way the duo went on a fraudulent technical gyration just to disprove the fact that the GSM text scandal ever happened and how they fell flat in their bid to link their funny theory to what happened in Osun. They struggled to cast a slur on what happened between Oyinlola’s lawyer and the members of the discredited tribunal, but never explained why Oyinlola’s lawyer is yet to take the threatened option of legal redress, even when he is being provocatively dared to do so. If the duo are so sure, why not make it available to Oyinlola and his counsel so that they would for once, develop the courage to clear their names from this stinking mess? Why allow them to go on with the shameful burden of appropriating a discredited electoral and judicial victory every Nigerian believes was sourced from the gutters?

But to help the duo in their desperate alibi and to let them know that there is indeed a limit to the spin they invented, I want to put these facts straight to them and those that swallowed their uncooked effort hook, line and sinker. As Oyinlola and his lawyer have found no real cause and courage to concretely challenge the copious facts of their desperate compromise of the integrity of the Naron tribunal, there is no interface between the scraggy analysis Olalekan Osiade and Lucas Ajanaku did and what Oyinlola’s lawyer actually committed. Theirs was a desperate effort to confuse an act that was deliberately committed to compromise the integrity of the judiciary and to churn out the mish-mash of decisions that spewed from the tribunal as soon as it devoured the rotten grape and its teeth got tainted. Theirs was an effort to explain a willing act of compromise aimed at securing a desperate victory over Osun people. Their efforts went totally off the mark, never making any attempt to explain what really happened, different from the facts every Nigerian knows about the dirty dealings that happened between Oyinlola, his counsel and the tribunal.

Far from the puerile acts The Nigerian Compass is trying to forge, the following facts are sacrosanct and cannot in any way, be substituted by the juvenile outing of the duo for Oyinlola and his collaborators. SMS can be sent through many of the existing legitimate web-based SMS gateways, using user-defined display number or name. This is not rocket science or hacking, but designed as bulk SMS tool, particularly for targeted marketing. Many GSM subscribers would have received various text messages from banks doing public offers or SMS-banking alert. In this instance the recipient would see the display name of, for example, GTBank and he would realise that it did not carry any telephone number, so it could be configured to display any number. However, whereas the recipient may see an unrecognised display name, its call log with the GSM operator would detail clearly the name of the gateway that sent such mail. This technicality also applies to the issue of hidden number: if you hide your number and call somebody, the recipient would not have any name displayed but the real caller’s details would still appear on the GSM operator log.

Call logs detail the place the call was made from, the serial number of the cell phone used in making the call, the time, the credit balance on the originating phone before and after the call, duration of the call and the base stations of both the originating and receiving parties, even a hidden or user-defined display name. These were made clear on the complete log published by TheNEWS on the Osun case, which shows that the infantile lot now keeping night vigils to forge alibis for what happened in Osun have a real job on their hands. So, whoever commits crime, thinking that gateway pranks offer endless anonymity, is only engaging in self-delusion and may soon land where he or she belongs – in the gaol. Even if somebody should steal another person’s phone, he will have to use the phone somewhere else, so the call log will expose the miscreant. Rather than all these antics, Kalejaye should save himself by publishing his own call log. The Nigerian Compass can donate space for him to do that if the paper is genuinely interested in helping Kalejaye. The issues involved in Osun are beyond the kind of pranks the paper is trying to turn the entire matter into. Hundreds of calls and SMS, spanning over six months, with logs showing the residence of the tribunal judges and the office, houses and places of interest to Kalejaye and Oyinlola, are certainly beyond pranks. This is real and MTN should save its reputation by letting Nigerians know the sanctity of its network. Any network that collaborates with felons should be shut down in the interest of national peace and security. It is only MTN that can tamper with its own call log and even at that, forensic examination would still detect such hanky-panky.

So, even if the scenario they strove to invent was possible, what was its connect with whoever goes out to corrupt the judiciary for his own narrow benefits? They made no effort to link their cases with the Osun scandal although they started by sounding off such expectation. They made no effort to tie the Osungate scandal with the ones they spuriously quoted in their job and failed to string, into any believable story, their disorganised fight against Tinubu. The fictitious effort to haphazardly transfer a deliberate act of criminal compromise of the judiciary to Tinubu, just because he had become a permanent rebuke to the racketeers that are now feasting on the South-West, failed in its entirety. Therefore, The Nigerian Compass should be advised to look for better reasons of existence and better opponents to face. Looking at the effort, it was possible to know that the fear of Tinubu and the grave damnation he portends for the group of impostors that now runs rings round the South-West are going to breed the most acute case of desperation, as in the one we are seeing now. We are waiting for more of these jesters, but when is Kalejaye going to court? That will do wonders on his story and not these desperate twists and turns.


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