Political heavyweights and sworn enemies in Nigeria’s Southwest have clashed over the controversial life of Senator Buruji Kashamu, who died at the First Cardiology Hospital in Lagos, due to complications from COVID-19.
The clash began when former President Olusegun Obasanjo in a letter titled ‘letter of condolence’ addressed to the State government, said that the late Kashamu manipulated the law and politics to escape justice over alleged criminal offences in Nigeria and abroad.
“I receive the sad news of the demise of Senator Esho Jinadu (Buruji Kashamu), a significant citizen of Ogun State. Please accept my condolences and that of my family on this irreparable loss,” Obasanjo stated.
But the elder statesman took a striking aim at the controversial life of the late Senator Kashamu. An action described by many as a shocking combination of condolence and gloat.
“The life and history of the departed have lessons for those of us on this side of the veil. Senator Esho Jinadu (Buruji Kashamu) in his lifetime used the maneuver of law and politics to escape from facing justice on alleged criminal offence in Nigeria and outside Nigeria.
“But no legal, political, cultural, social or even medical maneuver could stop the cold hand of death when the creator of all of us decides that the time is up,” the former president said.
But the former governor of Ekiti State and a chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party, Ayo Fayose, condemned Obasanjo’s statement.
“It is regrettable that Obasanjo could say what he said about Buruji Kashamu after his death and when he can no longer question him. Why didn’t he say that when Kashamu was alive?” Fayose said.
“Can Obasanjo say in good conscience that he did not at some point collaborated with Kashamu and most of the things he (Kashamu) did politically were not with his collaboration.
“Nigerians will watch out for Obasanjo’s own end. He should stop forming saint because he is not. He should also remember that his own end will come too and nobody knows how the end will be,” the former governor stated.
Obasanjo had in 2014, in a letter to Bamanga Tukur, the National Chairman of the PDP, resigning membership of the party, said that he could not be in the same political party with Kashamu.
“I cannot and will not subscribe to a wanted habitual criminal being installed as my zonal leader in the party; a criminal for whom extradition has been requested by the US government,” Obasanjo wrote in 2014.
Kashamu’s struggle with law and justice
In 1998, Mr. Kashamu was indicted by the United States over conspiracy to import heroin following incriminating evidence provided by his alleged co-conspirators. But Kashamu denied the allegations. He said that the leader of the drug-smuggling gang was his brother, Adewale Kashamu, also known as Alaji, who was allegedly killed in 1998, by men of the Nigerian Customs.
In 2003, a court in the United Kingdom dismissed request to have Mr. Kashamu extradited to the US after he was arrested by the police in UK while traveling with a Beninese passport. The judge held that Mr. Kashamu, indeed, had a look-alike brother who was killed in 1998.
“The government believes in good faith that Kashamu, and not any alleged brother, is the co-conspirator in this case,” Premium Times quoted US government as saying. Witnesses identified him through his arrest photograph as the person they knew as ‘Alaji’
In Nigeria, efforts to have Mr. Kashamu extradited to the US were frustrated by several injunctions.
In 2015, the National Drug Law Agency (NDLEA) in a bid to arrests and extradite him, laid a six-day siege to Kashamu’s residence. Kashamu locked himself in the toilet to avoid arrest, Premium Times reported. The siege ended following a court order standing down the NDLEA.
In May 2020, a Federal High Court in Abuja ruled that the Federal government could not extradite Mr. Kashamu due to subsisting court orders in his favour which had not been challenged.
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