When will Jonathan sack Oduah

It never rains but pours. The storm is certainly not over for the embattled Minister of Aviation, Princess Stella Oduah who is now embroiled in a scandal of towering proportion – certificate forgery.
Stunning revelations by the intrepid online whistleblower, SaharaReporters, revealed that Princess Oduah (‘Princess’ as she has insisted she be addressed), lied about her Masters degree.
In her citation to the Senate during ministerial screening in 2011, Mrs. Oduah claimed she attended St. Paul’s College, Lawrenceville in Virginia, United States, from 1978-1982, where she bagged her first Degree in Accounting. “On completion of her first degree, she was not lured into taking up paid employment but was determined to have the best education and at the highest level, so she immediately stayed back to study for her Masters Degree which she achieved in 1983,” the citation said.
Thorough investigations have revealed that St. Paul’s College, Lawrenceville in its 125-year history never ran a graduate (masters) programme. More so, there was no trace of evidence that she earned a Bachelor’s degree from the said university.
Barely 24 hours after her claim to have acquire a Masters degree from St. Paul’s University in the United States was punctured, further investigation uncovered another false claim by the embattled Minister – fast gaining notoriety for earthshaking scandals – that she lied on oath to the Nigeria Senate, and indeed the Nigerian people, in her audacious claim that another American ‘university’, Pacific Christian University based in Glendale, sometime in 1998, awarded her an honorary doctorate degree in Business Administration.
Investigation by grapevine online news platforms showed that there is no university in Glendale called Pacific Christian University. It was on the strength of this qualification she was grilled and eventually confirmed by the lawmakers as a minister. This is a scandal and the law should be allowed to take its course.
Silence, they say, is acquiescence. Unsurprisingly, all her aides and spokesmen of departments and parastatals under her ministry have so far failed to respond to enquiries by journalists to the latest findings indicting the minister. To lend credence to the these scholarly journalistic work, it has been observed that frantic efforts have been made by the minister and her aides to revise her profiles on the internet in a desperate bid to clean up every reference to St. Paul’s College and Pacific Christian University. On Wikipedia for instance, it was observed that her page was edited 19 times between 1.56am and 5.05pm on Tuesday, January 7.
Meanwhile, the dust is yet to settle on the reckless abuse of office by the Minister’s approval of the purchase of two bulletproof BMW cars at an unimaginable cost of $1.6m (or about N255m) by the National Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), a federal agency under her ministry’s supervision. Coscharis Motors Limited, a dealership from which the two BMW cars were purchased by NCAA, gave N112million to the aviation minister, Ms Oduah as kickbacks while Cosmas Maduka, who owns Coscharis  Motors, pocketed N60 million for each of the two BMW cars.
But how long will President Jonathan continue to shield her from anti-corruption agencies despite massive criticism trailing her corrupt acts is the big question on everyone’s lips. Many reason that with the latest revelations, she does not deserve to stay one more second as a minister of the federal republic. The longer she remains in Jonathan’s government, the more embarrassment she becomes to the country, making a huge joke of the much touted anti-graft crusade of the present administration.
Read more: http://thenationonlineng.net/new/cert-scandal-how-long-before-jonathan-sacks-oduah/

The committee set up by President Goodluck Jonathan to probe the N255m bulletproof car scandal in the aviation ministry has indicted the Minister, Ms. Stella Oduah.

It was gathered in Abuja on Sunday that the report of the presidential committee tallied with some findings of the House of Representatives Committee on Aviation on the scandal.

The spokesperson for the House, Mr. Zackary Mohammed, had explained that the lawmakers wanted the minister sacked.

He said, “The word ‘review’ here means a change in status. It is a mild way of saying that Mr. President should sack the minister.”

A major recommendation of the Aviation committee, which was adopted, reads, “The House urges the President to review the continued engagement of the Minister of Aviation, Stella Oduah, for having contravened the Appropriation Act, 2013 and the approved, revised thresholds by exceeding the Ministry of Aviation’s approval limit of N100m by the purchase of 54 vehicles valued at N643m.”

It was learnt on Sunday that the panel, like that of the House, also discovered that the minister’s approval for the cars exceeded the N100m limit.

A top government source, who disclosed this to The PUNCH on Sunday, said although the committee indicted Oduah , it did not say whether she should be sacked or not.

But sources told The PUNCH that there was every likelihood of the President using the cabinet shake -up that would follow the presentation of his ministerial list to the National Assembly to relieve himself of the moral burden of Oduah’s continued presence in his government.

One of the sources said Jonathan did not take any action on the matter when the issue was raging last year because it was not in his character to be seen as being stampeded into taking any decision.

He said, “Those who know oga knows that he is not the kind of person that can be stampeded into taking a decision. That was why he remained calm in the face of the public calls for the minister’s sacking last year.

“As it is now, since he is planning a cabinet shake-up, he may use the opportunity to ease the woman out. After all, during shake-up like the one being planned, he owes no one any explanation. He has the power to hire and fire.” - NigeriaEye

Embattled Minister of Aviation, Stella Oduah, has not returned to Abuja after SaharaReporters broke the news of her certificate scandal, presidency sources said on Tuesday.

They told SaharaReporters the minister informed President Goodluck Jonathan that she was attending to her medical needs in Brazil, following which she apparently left for an undisclosed country.

Mrs. Oduah, who was also embroiled in a BMW purchase scandal prior to the certificate mess, reportedly took off from Nigeria after the report of a presidential panel indicting her for a string of corrupt practices was leaked to her. The panel reportedly went beyond its initial brief to unravel a string of corrupt acts of the minister including how she connived with commercial banks to receive kickbacks for renovation projects initiated at airports across the country.

The panel, which was set up by President Jonathan in October to look into how she squeezed the cash-strapped Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority to purchase two armored BMW cars for $1.6million.  The story was also broken by SaharaReporters.

Rather than face the consequences of her own actions, Mrs. Oduah has been telling anyone willing to listen that she merely “stepped on powerful toes” in the country. SaharaNews