Secrets Reporters
A formal petition delivered to President Bola Tinubu has accused Emem Nnana Usoro, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in charge of operations, of seizing and exclusively controlling a multi-billion-Naira estate belonging to the late businessman Jerry Edirin Wesley, locking out his widow, his aged mother, and his entire extended family in the process.
The petition, which is in our custody and filed by the rights advocacy group Crusade for Justice on behalf of Mrs. Grace Wesley and the Wesley-Efedede family, opens with an account of how the relationship at the centre of this dispute is alleged to have begun, and how it ended at a dying man’s bedside.
According to the petition, Usoro then known as Mrs. Emem Nnana-Usoro David-Etuk and working as management staff of a prominent bank became entangled with Jerry Wesley through his banking relationship with the bank. The petitioners allege she “took over” Wesley despite knowing he was legally married to Grace Wesley, and that the two began cohabiting across a spread of properties they describe as hers.
It was from that Maitama house, the petition states, that Wesley was taken to a COVID-19 isolation centre in Abuja’s Gudu District, where he died on 1 February 2021. The petition alleges that Usoro collected Wesley’s death certificate from the hospital following his death and has since refused to hand it over to his family despite repeated demands refusal the petitioners say continues to date. They further allege that Grace Wesley was never given any opportunity to participate in her husband’s burial, which the petition says took place in Abuja the day after his death, without her involvement.
If true, the sequence the petition describes would mean a wife was excluded from her husband’s final hours, his burial, and even the official document confirming his death while the woman the family says was present at his bedside retained control of all three.
The Wesley-Efedede family has previously taken related legal action: the petition references an existing suit at the Customary Court, Warri, Delta State, Suit No. USACC/N/17/2022, concerning Usoro’s alleged interference with Wesley’s UBA bank accounts. No court has yet ruled on the estate ownership questions raised in this petition.
SecretsReporters deliberately refused to contact Emem Usoro for comments, as she had earlier refused comment when we first reached out to her but instead connived with the Nigerian Police to abduct our senior reporter Stanley Ugagbe who contacted her earlier in May, where he was blindfolded and chained before he was later taken to court under the autocratic cybercrime law enacted to shut journalists, activists, critics and opposition figures from reporting or speaking against the government and those with money to pay the country’s police.
Stanley has since remained in prison following his arraignment, which was done during judges’ vacation to keep him longer than expected. The Nigerian Police acting on Emem Usoro’s instruction had earlier labeled SecretsReporters publisher Fejiro Oliver and the newspaper as a foreign spy carrying out espionage on the country, an allegation the publisher described as “insane, wicked and bogus formulated to shut down the hard stance of the medium daring publications”
