December 15, 2019

The court found that Orji Uzor Kalu (OUK) embezzled 7.3 billion. That is the amount of public fund the court said he embezzled. The court then ordered for one (only one) of OUK businesses (SLOK HOLDING) to be liquidated and the proceeds of the liquidation sale forfeited to the Federal Government, and nothing more. You don't really need to be a lawyer to challenge the reasoning behind such judgment. Now, let's consider the following questions that the court ignored: (1) How much will SLOK be worth after it has been liquidated? What is the fair market value of its assets? Will it be exactly 7.3 billion or will it be more or less? (2) If it is more (like 10 billion), what happens to the 2.7 billion excess? And if it is less (like 5 billion) what happens to the 2.3 billion deficit? (3) So, does it not mean that after the liquidation of SLOK, there has to be an accounting in order to determine whether the proceeds of the liquidation sale is more or less than the 7.3 billion? (4) Without providing for an accounting to be done as to the value of SLOK, it means that the court has awarded an unknown and unknowable amount of money (the proceeds of  the sale of SLOK) against a known amount of embezzled funds (7.3 billion). (5) Is OUK the only shareholder of SLOK? If even his wife or mother holds even 1% share in SLOK, the court can only sell the shares of OUK, and not the entire company. In other words, the court cannot sell anything in SLOK that doesn't belong to OUK. (6) Based on that flawed judgment, EFCC has sealed off the Sun Newspaper, which is an entity on its own. There are many questions: (a) Is the Sun Newspaper wholly owned by SLOK and is therefore covered by the judgment? (b) If anybody else, including OUK in his personal capacity, owns even 1% of the shares of Sun Newspaper, then the judgment does not cover the Sun Newspaper company, but only the shares of SLOK in the Sun can be attached. So, you can't be sealing the company. This is because the court limited the judgment to SLOK. (c) EFCC knows that OUK is going on appeal. The judgment is only one week old. The judgment has not even been enrolled and the EFCC is wasting effort even though it knows there will be an order of stay. Why the gragra? (d) Of all the businesses controlled by OUK, why is his newspaper the first to seal? Is it not to prevent him from using his paper to counter some of the lies peddled against him? (7) Based on the judgment, EFCC is sealing the houses of OUK. But the order is limited to the interest of SLOK. Unless those houses can be said to be owned by SLOK, they cannot be sealed based on the judgment because the judgment did not send them after the assets of OUK, but rather the assets of SLOK. The judgment of Justice Idris is a travesty and it will be set aside on appeal for many reasons.

DPA deliberately runs a two-step membership program. In the era of social media, it is easy for people to pose to be who they are not. This has been very devastating in a country like Nigeria with poor personal identification system. It is difficult to know a person based on his or her social media profile. We therefore, almost by default, created a two level identification system. First, we allow a person to join any of the DPA social media forums - Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. It is relatively easy to join. All you need is to have a social media account that is at least 6 months old, with some evidence of genuine activities or you need to be invited. Once you join our forum, you are expected to learn more about our programs and our discussions and to meet, interact with other forum members. Eventually, a forum member has to determine how to move to the next level. If you want to expand your engagement with our organization, you will need to become a registered member. Given, that you have been a member of our forum, you are pre-qualified to become a registered member. This two-layered membership system has helped us. But no system is fail proof. So, we do make mistakes. Once in a while, we let into the forum very toxic people with the capacity to pollute anything they touch. We had such experience yesterday. One lady recently invited by a member to join the forum went wild today. Out of the blues, she claimed she was an original member of this forum, but she left when she found that the Founder was a fraudulent man. She claimed that this forum has 2 million members but only 100 people comment on posts. She claimed that the Founder is not awaiting trial, but has been convicted of murder. Of course, other forum members who read her outrageous claims were surprised how such a person was allowed in here. But that is our system. We screen backwards. That is, we give you chance to show that you can't belong here before we take you out. At the same time, we are not really threatened by such behavior because the person is not a registered member. That's the beauty of the double layer system of membership.

In a piece shared with its forum members, the organization differentiates itself from other popular social media groups. The piece titled "DPA does not measure membership participation by comments to posts" which was posted on the organization's Facebook reads as follows: DPA DOES NOT MEASURE MEMBERSHIP PARTICIPATION BY COMMENTS TO POSTS December 15, 2019 Once in a while, you come across critics who try to measure DPA Forum membership engagement by the number of comments to our posts. But that is a very wrong approach that reflects ignorance of what DPA is and how this forum works. Such critics are basically comparing DPA to Igboist or Rants Headquarters and such other groups. In those other groups, their goal is to excite reactions from as many as possible members. They do so based on the type of topics they discuss. For instance, a member of Igboist may make a post of just one sentence such as: "Have you ever been disappointed by someone you loved?" If you publish that as a post, everybody has something to say. So you can expect 90% of their group members to have an opinion or experience to share on the subject. However, it is different in DPA. For instance, if a law professor posts a professional or scholarly article on Prenuptial Agreements, you don't expect a lot of people to have experience or opinions to share on the subject. Yet 99% of the group members learned something from the post. DPA aims to discuss serious subjects and to teach law and related subjects to our members. Indeed, it will be abnormal for us if 2000 people were to express an opinion on any of our posts. The reason is that we take time to go through people's reactions to our posts in order to address any issues and clarify points raised by them. What we expect from our members most of the time are questions, not their own opinions on the subject matter of the post. And to minimize the questions, we try to use simple language and straightforward illustrations to discuss the subject matter. Take for instance the first post yesterday on prenuptial. We deliberately used the illustration of a tailor, custom-made or ready-made clothes in order to make easy for an average person to reason along as he reads the post. We were just trying to reduce the number of people who would have questions based on the fact that they did not understand the post. When we make a post, we measure participation in three different ways: (1) How many people learned something new from the post? We estimate that 99% of members who read a typical post would have learned one thing new or the other from it. (2) How many people had questions on the post based on comments received? We are disappointed when many people have questions based on comments because it means we did not explain the subject thoroughly. (3) How many people came to us inbox with requests for our help with the personal problems they have had on related issues? For instance, over 20 people have contacted us privately with personal questions on prenuptial, after reading our post yesterday. Another thing to bear in mind is that over 75% of DPA posts are done by professionals who have formal training on the subject of the post. So, most of the time if you react to a post on DPA, you are reacting to a post by a professional. It is not like in the other groups where anybody can post on any subject. In those groups, a shoemaker can post his views on constitutional law and all the shoemakers in the world will join with their own opinions on constitutional law. Yes, certainly we encourage more engagements from our forum members. But bear in mind that we are not like other groups that measure progress by the number of people they have talking at the same time. We prefer that our members read 50 quality comments than to have to wade through a thousand comments that are meaningless beyond their comic value.