By Paul
Onomuakpokpo
It is not unusual for
the fierceness of the support for the administration of President Muhammadu
Buhari and his All Progressives Party (APC) to find expression in the riposte
that the citizens must not expect an automatic realisation of the
change the party and its helmsman promised. Their expectations have often been
scaled down with the reprimand that if it took the last administration 16
years to liquidate all props for corporate probity and sanity, it smacks
of sheer perfidy on the part of the citizens to ask the president and
his party to rebuild the nation in just one year.
But this position has
turned out as a self-fulfilling prophecy since the Buhari administration is
pathetically denuded of the hallmarks of stellar performance as it
marks one year on Sunday. No doubt, the promise to fight corruption
was irresistible. Let’s get all the money stolen from the national treasury and
deploy it in the development of electricity, roads and other
infrastructure. No one really opposed fighting corruption. Indeed,
the citizens thought that fighting corruption was a grand idea and that once
this was resolved, the nation would sally forth towards its destined path of
greatness.
But a year after, the
fight against corruption has been reduced to a part of the nation’s cocktail of
chimeras. Forget about the arrests and their razzmatazz of
media trials. The question the citizens are asking now is, how effective has
the anti-corruption campaign been in the past one year? This is simply because
the Buhari administration’s prosecution of the anti-corruption
campaign has been divorced from the rigorous
imagination that would have earned it more credibility. It is
convenient for the Buhari administration to engender an environment in
which the focus is only on the members of the opposition whom the anti-graft
agencies arrest and ask to refund the money they have stolen. But the
inconvenient and a much more credible way to prosecute the
anti-corruption campaign on the back of audacious imagination would have been
to extend it to both foes and friends. Now, it is the people who ought to be among
those being tried who are dictating the terms of the anti-corruption
regime. Let’s strip the argument that we should start from somewhere
and use some people as scapegoats of all its sophistry. As long as the
anti-corruption campaign has not caught up with all former leaders who made
their billions simply on account of occupying public offices, and as long as it
is only targeted at the members of the opposition and critics of the policies
of the Buhari administration, we cannot regard it as one of the achievements of
the past year.
