The chairman of the defunct Pension Reform Task Team, Abdulrasheed Maina, has said he will resume his trial only when his doctor gives him a clean bill of health. Maina, who claimed to be suffering from knee injuries, spoke in a recorded video clip which circulated online on Thursday.

The about six-and-a-half-minute-long video clip showed him fielding questions from an unseen “journalist” who claimed to have embarked on an “independent investigation” to verify if Maina had jumped bail as being speculated in the media.

Maina was shown lying in a bed as he fielded questions, with his son, Faisal, who is also being prosecuted for separate charges, seated beside him.

The left knee, which he claimed was injured, was not shown in the clip, Punch reports. 

Maina, who is being prosecuted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission for allegedly laundering N2bn, has been absent from court on seven consecutive occasions since September 29, 2020, when his trial was scheduled to have resumed.

On October 2, Borno South Senator Ali Ndume, who stood surety for Maina to enable him to get bail, told Justice Okon Abang that he could no longer find the defendant.

But Maina, who was in hiding for about two years before he was re-arrested by the EFCC last year, said in the video clip that he had not absconded from his ongoing trial.

Asked when he would resume his trial, he said, “The doctors are here. You need to ask the doctors. But what they told me was that I would need six to seven weeks for recovery.”

But when asked further if he was ready for his trial, he said, “Of course I am ready, as soon as I am healed.”

“They told me that the next knee cap, they may not be able to do it here,” Maina added.

Asked to respond to specific allegations that he had jumped bail, Maina said, “You have done your independent investigation. You were able to get my location Punch reports.

“Now, you have seen me. You have seen the situation , and you can tell whether or not I am running away from my trial.”

Maina also alleged that the judge had in the course of the trial shown bias against him, citing an occasion when the judge asked him to stop gazing at him. 

He said, “My lawyer asked him why, and he said ‘I don’t want him to look at me because I have a wife and children, and I want them alive’. Does that suggest that looking at him would kill his wife and children?”