By Ikechukwu Amaechi
As President Bola Tinubu pretends to be providing leadership for our beleaguered country, one question remains unanswered: what to do with former President Muhammadu Buhari. In the eight years that Buhari, a putschist and former military head of state, held sway as civilian president, he destroyed the country, literally.
*BuhariIn recent times, those who knew he was a disaster in Aso Rock but dubiously claimed that he was the best thing to happen to Nigeria are beginning to sing like a canary.
First, it was Nuhu Ribadu, former chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, and current National Security Adviser, NSA, who said Tinubu did not create most of the problems Nigerians are complaining about. “Most of the problems we are talking about are not the creation of this government … We inherited a very bad situation,” he said two weeks ago.
Then, speaking with journalists
after a meeting with Vice President Kashim Shettima on Tuesday, Senator Adams
Oshiomhole, erstwhile governor of Edo State said Tinubu inherited “a terrible
economic situation”.
Oshiomhole, former national
chairman of the All Progressives Congress, APC, who currently represents Edo
North Senatorial District in the National Assembly, said: “The government
inherited an economy in which the total national revenue was barely enough to
service our debt burden. Spending 96 per cent; which is to say every one
hundred naira Nigeria earns, 96 kobo is to pay debt. Nothing can be worse.”
He is right. It cannot be worse.
But what really jumps out at anyone who cares to interrogate Oshiomhole further
on why Nigeria is at a crossroads is his disingenuousness – the attempt to
distance the APC from the Buhari mess. After the failure of their subterfuge to
ensure that they are spared the task of having to account for the apotheosis of
Buhari, there is now a seeming willingness to throw the former president under
the grinding wheels of his own iniquitous bus. But in doing so, there is also a
deliberate attempt to insulate the APC from blame and the reason is simple.
Every election is a referendum
on the party in power. If the APC took Nigeria from top to bottom, as Buhari
assured they will, how did the party win the 2023 election? They did when Prof
Mahmoud Yakubu, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission,
INEC, did his abracadabra.
In the eight years that Buhari
ruined the country, no day passed without the APC blaming the country’s woes on
the 16 years of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. But having realised how
irrational it would be to continue blaming PDP for the country’s woes after
eight disastrous years of APC, those who made a singsong of the PDP
mismanagement of our commonwealth are now shielding the ruling
party.
To be sure, this is not an
allocutus for Buhari. Far from it. But the question also needs to be asked:
When did Oshiomhole and his co-travellers realise that the Buhari
administration was a curse to Nigeria? Just now? Of course no! They knew all
along that the man they packaged as the country’s saviour is, indeed, an
undertaker – a fraud. They simply dealt Nigeria a bad hand. But the bigger
tragedy is that Buhari will, most certainly, get away with his perfidious acts
in office.
In Nigeria, there seems to be a
rule that anyone who occupies the office of the president enjoys Section 308 of
the 1999 Constitution (as amended), which provides immunity from trial for the
President, Vice-President, Governor and Deputy Governor not during the
subsistence of their tenure as envisaged by the law, but for life.
Nigerians would have been able
to swallow the bitter pills that Tinubu is forcing down their throats without
much ado if they are convinced that Buhari, who ran, unarguably, the most corrupt
government since 1999, will be held accountable. Elsewhere, presidents are
called upon to give account of their stewardship and those found wanting are
punished. In 2022, Argentina’s vice president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner,
was found guilty of fraud in a case dating back to when she was president from
2007 to 2015. She was sentenced to six years in prison and received a lifetime
ban from holding political office.
Former Croatian Prime Minister,
Ivo Sanader, was found guilty of corruption in 2020 and sentenced to eight
years in prison. He is currently serving out his sentence.
In 2011, former French
President, Jacques Chirac, who died in 2019, was convicted of corruption and
handed a two-year suspended jail sentence and ten years later, Nicolas Sarkozy
became the second former French President to be convicted of corruption and
sentenced to three years in jail, two of them suspended.
Former Israeli President, Moshe
Katsav, was handed a seven-year prison sentence in 2011 for rape and four years
later former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was convicted of fraud, breach of trust
and tax evasion. Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is serving his
sixth term, is on trial for fraud, breach of trust and corruption, having been
indicted in 2019 for receiving gifts from millionaire friends and granting
regulatory favours for media tycoons in return for favourable coverage.
Najib Razak, former Malaysian
Prime Minister, is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence, which began in
2022 after he lost an appeal in a corruption case. In 2020, he was found guilty
of criminal breach of trust, abuse of power and money laundering.
Former South Korean President,
Park Geun-hye, the first woman to hold the position, was sentenced to 24 years
in jail for corruption in 2018 on charges related to bribery and coercion and
her predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, was jailed 17 years for embezzlement and
bribe-taking in 2020. Lee’s predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun, who was president from
2003 to 2008, killed himself a year later amid an investigation by prosecutors
into allegations he accepted more than $6 million in bribes from a South Korean
businessman while in
office.
Here in Africa, former South
African President, Jacob Zuma, has been jailed for being contemptuous of court.
In an article in The Guardian of
London on April 9, 2023 titled “From Trump to Sarkozy: the political leaders
who have been prosecuted”, Jon Henley noted the interesting case of Geir Haarde,
former Prime Minister of Iceland, who was tried and convicted for not doing his
job well enough. “Geir Haarde was the only politician in the world to face
prosecution over the 2008 financial crisis. He dodged three more serious
charges, but ended up being convicted, in essence, of not doing his job well
enough,” Henley wrote. Right now, former U.S. President Donald Trump, who is
aspiring to stage a comeback to the White House, is facing 91 criminal charges
stemming from four criminal indictments filed against him this year by both
state and federal authorities.
Jeremy noted that across the
globe, 78 countries have jailed or prosecuted leaders who left office since
2000. So, why must Nigeria be different? Even if no criminal charges are
brought against Buhari – I don’t see why not having presided over a criminal
enterprise in the name of governance – he should be put on trial, like the
former Iceland Prime Minister, for not doing his job well enough. And everyone
agrees that he willfully did a very poor job in Aso Rock. Unless and until
leaders realise that there will always be a day of reckoning, good governance
will continue to be a mirage.
*Amaechi
is the publisher of TheNiche newspaper
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