Okupe under attack for saying Dasuki funded his office monthly

A former Senior Special Assistant on Public Affairs to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, Dr. Doyin Okupe, has come under attack for revealing that his office was funded monthly by the embattled former National Security Adviser, NSA, Sambo Dasuki.

Okupe, who was Jonathan’s aide between 2012 and 2015, made the revelation on his Twitter handle, adding that he did not receive any money from the alleged arms scam said to have set the nation back by 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.”

However, the revelation drew the ire of Nigerians, who felt the former Jonathan spokesman only implicated himself with the tweet.

Many wondered why Okupe’s office should be funded by Dasuki who was not his employer in the first instance.

A Twitter user, Ojezs, asked: “You’re just implicating yourself. Is it the NSA office that employed you?”

Read also: Be patient, your pains will soon end, Oyegun tells Nigerians

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.”

Peeved by the responses, Okupe wrote in return: “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 would however be recalled that Okupe was reported in January of getting at least N1.6bn from Dasuki in three curious cyber security contracts.

One of the contracts had instructions to hunt down unfriendly media websites with Distributed Denial of Service attacks. The project was allegedly conceived to shut down online media platforms perceived as friendly towards Muhammadu Buhari, who was then presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC ahead of the 2015 election.

The other contract was to intercept all optic fibre cables landing in Nigeria, while the third was a passive mass and targeted GSM interception that had the ability to decrypt ciphers and operate undetected.

It was alleged that the contracts were awarded to Okupe’s cronies without following due process.

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