A former Senior Special Assistant on Public Affairs to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, Dr. Doyin Okupe, has revealed that his office was funded monthly by the embattled former National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (retd.).
Okupe, who served under Jonathan from 2012 to 2015, said this on his official Twitter handle.
He, however, said he had nothing to do with the arms scam which cost the country over $15bn in stolen funds.
Okupe said, “I was not paid arms deal money. The NSA paid for the running of my office monthly from August 2012. Dasukigate was in 2014. I did not take part in the campaign.”
The former spokesman for Jonathan, however, received bashing from several of his followers online who wondered why his office should get security votes.
A Twitter use, Ojezs, asked, “You’re just implicating yourself. Is it the NSA office that employed you?”
Another user, Ayoola Ayodeji, wrote, “You probably mistake some of us for hungry people. A day will come when you won’t be able to sleep because poor people are outside your gate.”
In his response, Okupe wrote, “You guys are idiotic. You wait and pray for the innocent to be punished. It will not happen. You must think some of us are terrified.”
It had been reported in January that Okupe got at least N1.6bn off Dasuki in three shady cyber security contracts.
One of the contracts had instructions to hunt down unfriendly media websites with Distributed Denial of Service attacks.
It was believed to be a project conceived to shut down online media platforms perceived as friendly towards Muhammadu Buhari, the then presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress ahead of the 2015 election.
The other contract was to intercept all optic fibre cables landing in Nigeria. The third was a passive mass and target GSM interception that had the ability to decrypt ciphers and operate undetected.
The contracts that were allegedly awarded Okupe’s cronies, reinforces claims that the former NSA merely doled out cash and contracts to cronies and political associates and violated procurement regulations in the process.