Our Senate Is A White Elephant

 By Ugoji Egbujo

Our Senate is a luxury. Akpabio, the Senate President, can’t choose his words carefully. Recently, he reminded a female senator that the Senate is not a nightclub. He was rebuking her for not obtaining his permission before speaking. In his flippancy and uncouthness, idleness could be gleaned. 

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Senator Akpabio received a letter from Ganduje, APC chairmen, and read it in plenary. Then, robotically, he revved the engines of the Senate and dumped Ndume. That sequence would have been fitting in a one-party communist state like China. Ndume’s sin was that he criticized the president. 

Constituency Projects: Legislators Manipulating Nigerians

 By Tonnie Iredia

Federal legislators  in Nigeria especially senators imagine that they are the smartest people in Africa, South of the Sahara and even North of the Equator. Perhaps they are actually smart considering the ease with which they get away with a legion of transparently repulsive allegations. Indeed, no one has been able to hold our senators down to the undesirable financial transactions that people know and see about them as a group.

When analysts raised the alarm many years back that Nigerian legislators were the highest paid in the world, they published their basic salaries which were not excessive but successfully hid their several secret allowances from sundry sources. They allegedly got paid for ghost legislative aides but  no one could prove it beyond reasonable doubt; just as they virtually hypnotised public officers from going public with their dirty oversight functions.  

Fraud: Another Minister May Soon Be Caught

 By Tonnie Iredia

In many developing societies where the government of the day is unable to provide basic facilities to improve living standards the way out is usually to resort to the tokenism of distributing palliatives to citizens. 

*Tinubu and Federal Ministers 

Nigeria adopted the option in 2015 – an option which from inception has been unable to wear a transparent and credible toga. No one including those in government had faith in Sadiya Farouq, pioneer minister of humanitarian affairs, disaster management and social development as well as her officials who were mandated to superintend the subject during President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.

Alleged Corruption: How Not To Save Magu

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Those who really want President Muhammadu Buhari to succeed in his campaign against corruption must be scandalised by the efforts of his so-called supporters to persuade him to dismiss the allegations of corruption against Ibrahim Magu as merely constituting a self-serving canard that is not worth his attention. The president’s friends do not see the need to investigate the allegations by the Senate that the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is amenable to the patronage of those he is supposed to investigate for corruption and his complicity in other myriad unethical practices that have rendered him ineligible to occupy that high office.

*Ibrahim Magu

These friends and those of Magu have instigated a rash of lobbying activities geared at making the president to re-nominate Magu for confirmation as the EFCC chair. It has been said that the debate on whether to retain Magu or not has split the kitchen cabinet of the president. The Senate is equally split as some senators led by Senate Majority Leader Ali Ndume are trying to persuade their colleagues to rescind their decision not to confirm Magu.

Yet, the issue requires far more than lobbying. For whether the anti-corruption campaign of Buhari retains whatever credibility it still has now or not depends on how the Magu issue is resolved. Thus for the anti-corruption campaign to continue and indeed gain greater verve, the allegations against Magu must not be glossed over. True, the Senate that accused Magu of corruption is perceived to have lost its lustre in a murky cesspool of malfeasance. Its leader, Bukola Saraki is being tried by the Code of Conduct Tribunal for corruption-related cases.

There are other members of the Senate, especially former governors, who are facing cases of corruption. Despite the mounting pressure from the public, the Senate has refused to be transparent in its finances. The fogginess about their salaries and allowances and their extravagant lifestyles conflict with the desperate economic crisis of the nation. But we must resist the temptation to quickly dismiss the senators’ position until their allegations are investigated. It is only after this that we can be sure whether the Senate took their position in furtherance of their own interest or that of the nation. It is hasty to argue that by the Senate’s position, it is evident that corruption is fighting back.

Those who are insisting on saving Magu without investigating the allegations against him are not helping the anti-corruption fight. For even if the president is able to persuade the Senate to make a barefaced volte-face and confirm Magu, this would not help the anti-corruption campaign as long as there are no convincing responses by him to the allegations of corruption. To the extent that Magu on whom unresolved corruption charges are hanging retains his job as the chief prosecutor of the fight against sleaze in public offices, the anti-corruption fight has suffered an intolerable travesty that would only render the nation a butt of crude jokes in the comity of transparent nations. If Magu is found guilty of the charges, Buhari should allow him to face prosecution.

Double Life In The Buhari Presidency

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is only those who have been inordinately enamoured of the Buhari presidency who are now shocked at the bleak fate that has befallen its anti-corruption campaign. But for critical observers who have been contemptuously branded as the stabilising forces for the regeneration of an era reeking with corruption, the campaign was bound to suffer a calamitous end. It was expected, like most of the policies that have been associated with the Buhari government, to be afflicted with the reverse Midas touch. Indeed, the crash of the anti-corruption campaign that has been so much-hyped as the lynchpin of the Buhari government’s quest for the development of the country is symptomatic of the failure in every other provenance of governance in this current administration.

*Buhari 

Clearly, the policies of the government are sullied by a certain antithesis to the improvement of the wellbeing of the citizens because they have been underpinned by unrelieved provincialism that has made them turn out badly. In the case of the anti-corruption, it was bound to fail because the presidency did not pursue it in a way that would have ensured its success. There was no way it would have succeeded when it was not targeted at all corrupt persons who have benefited from the national treasury at the expense of the common good. It was rather targeted at perceived or real enemies of the president, his cronies and political party. This is why politicians who are patently corrupt keep on decamping to the All Progressives Congress (APC) to seek protection from prosecution. And this is why those who consider their political careers endangered by decamping from their parties keep on taking full pages of advertisement pledging their support for Buhari and his anti-corruption campaign. If they knew that whether they decamped or pledged support for the anti-corruption campaign they would be prosecuted, they would not bother themselves with all this.

Because it was not to serve the interest of the country, Buhari did not bother to prosecute the campaign in line with the constitution of the country. The campaign that should have been for the whole country became defined by an us versus them mentality. It was thus inevitable that Ibrahim Magu who knew that he had breached fidelity to constitutionality in a bid to please the president would end up resorting to the same illegality to enrich himself at the expense of a genuine and selfless anti-corruption fight. With the approval of Buhari, Magu prosecuted an anti-corruption campaign that brooked no obedience to the rule of law. Court judgments were remorselessly disregarded. In this atmosphere of illegality, a former National Security Adviser Col. Sambo Dasuki is being held in detention despite judgments from the nation’s courts and even the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Court of Justice.