Stop CASMIR ANYANWU From Causing More Death, Enough is Enough

By Collins Opurozor

Nigerians woke up on January 16, 1998 only to realize that their billions of Naira kept for safety with Progress Bank had been fleeced. Their hard-earned deposits had been stolen by one individual. All they had worked for – the very justification for their daily toils – had been ruthlessly looted.

Those deposits had come from men and women, young and old, who had laboured until their hands became raw. They had denied themselves of daily bread, went thirsty even, worked under the scorch of the sun and, in the end, entrusted the proceeds of their sweat into the hands of a financial bandit in the bank of death.

Many took their own lives, while many others died of shock, trauma, misery and agony. My own nephew died. Yet, some others who could not afford to pay their medical bills died of curable diseases, and the rest died of starvation. The few that survived were condemned to a life of penury, want, cynicism and despair, save for the negligible few who could miraculously have their bread buttered by some benevolent messiahs.

At the heart of all of these is a man named Casmir Anyanwu. He was the Managing Director of Progress Bank. He, and nobody else, single-handedly ran down the bank through diversion of deposits and conversion of same to personal use. The bank literally became his own means of production, his own cash cow, his own outlet for financing his terribly lewd and riotous lifestyle. This was how billions earned through honest endeavours and legitimate personal efforts were squandered by Imo’s prodigal son.

Twenty years later, in the hope that memories have faded away, Casmir Anyanwu resurfaced. One would have expected to see him a repentant man. One would have expected him to embrace a life which would be seen as a fit atonement for all the evils of his past, perhaps just like the Biblical Prodigal Son. One would have wanted him, now a man of eighty-six years, to imbibe the virtues of probity and compassion instead of the vices of falsehood and cruelty. However, anyone who had sought for these would patently remain disappointed, as the epiphany of Casmir Anyanwu on the political stage of Imo State has occasioned unbridled fraud, deception, wickedness and chaos.

Anyanwu’s ill-fated political outing began early in 2018 when he was contracted by the outgoing Governor of Imo State, Chief Rochas Okorocha, to coordinate people for his son-in-law in the Social Democratic Party, SDP. Okorocha, being aware of the uphill battle it would be to foist his obviously inept in-law, Uche Nwosu, on the APC family in Imo State, had fallen back on two strategies. First was to plant his cronies in various ostensibly smaller political parties so as to secure and safeguard the parties against people with bona fide political aspirations. It was also a move to use those political parties as a residual option to further the absurd political over-ambition of his in-law if the looming battle in the APC was eventually lost.

The second strategy of Chief Rochas Okorocha was to dangle a ruse of popularity by unleashing state apparatus, state paraphernalia, state resources and all manifestations and instruments of state power to orchestrate the anointment and endorsement of his son-in-law by the APC faithful across various strata of the party.

Casmir Anyanwu became Okorocha’s mole in SDP. He got paid heavily for the job only for him to part with so little to his followers. When Okorocha sought to know what he had done with the money paid to him, Anyanwu grudgingly rented a tiny office for the SDP, and scarcely stepped into it till date.

In the first week of October, 2018, virtually all political parties were organising their primaries. The deal was that Casmir Anyanwu should become the governorship candidate of the SDP so as to give up the ticket whenever Okorocha wanted or to collapse the party into APC if Uche Nwosu should get the APC governorship ticket. In the end, Uche Nwosu lost out in APC while Casmir could not secure the nomination of the SDP because of his inability to release the money he was given by Okorocha to organise direct primaries in the 305 INEC Wards in Imo State as the guidelines of the SDP for the conduct of primaries stipulated. Anyanwu instead gathered a handful of his supporters in Owerri and declared himself the governorship candidate of the SDP. His party promptly distanced itself from such travesty. This failure on the one hand immediately marred his relationship with Okorocha and the other hand pushed the leadership of the SDP to resort to alternative modalities for the nomination of candidates, particularly by consensus, since such arrangement was supported by the constitution of the party. This was how the party nominated Sir Okey Ezeh to be its governorship candidate in Imo State.

However, the emergence of Okey Ezeh quickly sent a disturbing signal to the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, in Imo State. The PDP knew it would be impossible to defeat Okey Ezeh. So they began to think. They began to plot. They began to scheme. Their resolution was that the necessary condition for defeating Okey Ezeh would be to create crisis in the SDP. Once again, Casmir Anyanwu, notorious for hatchet jobs, became the willing tool. He was quickly hired by one Emeka Ihedioha, his kinsman who had become the PDP governorship candidate in Imo State through a thoroughly rigged primary election which the court is set to upturn any time soon. This is the summary of the so-called crisis in the SDP.

In the wisdom of the National Leadership of the SDP and given that his activities, especially the job given to him by the PDP to undermine the electoral chances of the SDP by fomenting crisis and claiming to be the party’s candidate in Imo had become intolerable, Casmir Anyanwu was on February 11, 2019 duly suspended from the SDP.

What is now worrisome is that Casmir Anyanwu still goes on air raining insults on the leadership of the party, encouraging his very few supporters to take up arms against the supporters of Okey Ezeh. He commissions people across the State to be polling down campaign billboards belonging to Okey Ezeh, as well as to be tearing out Ezeh’s campaign posters. This is ongoing in Nkwerre, Oru East, Orsu, Ihitte Uboma and Aboh Mbaise.

His thugs had on two occasions invaded the campaign office of Okey Ezeh, looking for whom to maim, kill and destroy. Not yet satisfied with the people who gruesomely died as a result his liquidation of Progress Bank, Casmir Anyanwu seeks more blood of innocent Imo people by deceiving them and inciting violence here and there.

It is time for the relevant security agencies to pick this man up, chain him hands and feet, gag him, and punish him so severely for all the crimes against humanity he has committed. It is also time for the EFCC to explain to the public know why Casmir Anyanwu should be walking the streets freely even after diverting billions kept under his care by hapless depositors. For Casmir Anyanwu, the deaths he has caused are not yet enough. It’s, therefore, time to stop him from causing more deaths.