The former spokesman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Olisa Metuh said he was threatened and eventually arrested after criticizing President Muhammadu Buhari as an ‘unrepentant tyrant’.
Metuh said this while giving evidence as the 15th defence witness in his trial alongside his company, Destra Investments Ltd, in a seven-count charge of receiving the sum of N400m arms funds from former National Security Adviser (NSA), Sambo Dasuki in 2014 at the Federal High Court in Abuja.
Metuh said in the course of his duty as the Publicity Secretary of the PDP in December 2015, he responded to the president’s Media Chat where he informed Nigerians ‘that his government can arrest and detain any Nigerian at will’ by telling him that he was becoming ‘an unrepentant tyrant.’
Metuh said the statement “resulted in another round of warnings and threats from the government that they would ‘not take it kindly with Olisa Metuh as the Publicity Secretary of the PDP’.”
He said the former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir Lawal, who led a Federal Government delegation to a burial programme in Ebonyi State threatened him in the presence of the elders of the PDP in the South East that the Federal Government has decided to teach him a lesson.
Earlier, Justice Okon Abang refused an objection by prosecution counsel, Sylvanus Tahir, to reject the irrelevant aspects of the defence by Metuh.
The case has been adjourned to November 26 to 30 for hearing.
