A member of the Nigerian Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC), Professor Femi Odekunle is dead.
Reports say Odekunle died at the Covid-19 isolation center in Gwagalada, Abuja, the nation’s capital on Tuesday evening.
At the briefing of the presidential task force on Covid-19, Boss Mustapha, Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) had said: “A good friend of this government just passed on at 6:30pm”.
It is unclear if Mustapha had referred to Odekunle or another person but he said discussions were ongoing to help the deceased hours before news of his death broke.
The West African country is currently experiencing a second wave of the pandemic.
The SGF had earlier noted that within one week since Nigeria entered the second wave of infections, 16 out of every 100 tests returned positive.
Odekunle became extremely popular when in July he kicked against the arrest of Ibrahim Magu, a former acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), describing his ordeal as a power play by blocs in the corridor of power.
Odekunle had alleged that Abubakar Malami, Minister of Justice, is the arrowhead of the bloc that is not really interested in President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption fight.
A graduate of the University of Ibadan, 1968, he got his PhD in sociology and social psychiatry from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in the United States, in 1974 and was acknowledged as the first professor of criminology in Nigeria.