Published 27th Oct, 2023

By Joseph Adeiye

President Bola Tinubu appointed Etekamba Umoren as the new Akwa Ibom State REC despite his party activities and links to Senate President Akpabio and previous embezzlement cases.

Umoren was one of the 10 new Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) Tinubu appointed on Wednesday.

In its statement, the State House said that Tinubu expected the appointees to abide by the highest standards of professional and ethical conduct in discharging their duties.

However, FIJ has found that Umoren showed his partisan bias towards the All Progressives Congress and Akpabio many times.

Section 141 of the Electoral Act 2022 states that “No person holding an elective office to which this Act relates or a registered member of a political party shall be eligible for or be appointed to carry out the duties of a returning officer, an electoral officer, presiding officer or a poll clerk.”

While all electoral officers can deny being card-carrying members of any political party, a clearly determined partisan allegiance questions the ability of such officers to act transparently while discharging their duties.

Back in 2018, Governor Udom Emmanuel removed Umoren from his position as Secretary to the Akwa Ibom State Government. Umoren had been described as an ally of Akpabio. It was Akpabio who appointed Umoren as secretary to the state government while he was governor.

Akpabio, who was once a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), became a member of the APC and this led to conflicts between him and Emmanuel, his successor and PDP governor.

Aniete Okon, a PDP chieftain and senator, had claimed that Umoren’s removal had nothing to do with the PDP’s rift with Akpabio at the time.

Umoren showed support for Akpabio numerous times afterwards. He took it a step further to align with the APC with his comments following the 2019 elections.

“APC candidates won at the fields and collation centres but lost in the process of declaring the results by INEC officials; this is unacceptable to us. We have all the evidence and I want to assure you that Senator Akpabio will reclaim his mandate at the tribunal,” Umoren said in March 2019.

Umoren was accused alongside Akpabio and Udo Isobara, the former Accountant General of Akwa Ibom, of embezzling no less than N22 billion at the end of Akpabio’s tenure as governor in 2015.

Akwa Ibom received about N1.6 trillion from the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC) between June 2007 and May 2014, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation.

Leo Ekpenyong, a lawyer and activist, is one of the Akwa Ibom indigenes who accused Umoren and Akpabio of looting their state’s treasury.

“Between January and December 2014, it is on record that the trio of Godswill Akpabio, Mr. Etekamba Umoren and Mr. Udo Isobara made illegal but substantial withdrawals of cash from a designated state government-owned account with Zenith Bank with account number: 1010375881 amounting to N22.1 billion,” Ekpenyong stated in a petition to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

“It is worthy of note that reasons for such ungodly cash withdrawals against financial regulations and due process laws range between sundry use and unjustifiable expenditures by Godswill Akpabio and his numerous surrogates and proxies.

“For example, a whopping N18 billion was withdrawn fraudulently from the state FAAC account with the United Bank for Africa in tranches of N10 million and above by Mr. Isobara in a surreptitious manner to conceal their dishonest intention.”

The EFCC detained and interrogated Akpabio, who denied the accusations.

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