We Need Change Of Tactics In The Anti-Graft War

 By Dan Agbese

It would be uncharitable to suggest that successive Nigerian leaders have spoken from both sides of the mouth in tackling corruption in the land. Dem don try. It would be naïve, of course, for anyone to suggest that the longest running war in the land has either been won or there are prospects it will sooner than later. The fact is that corruption is at an all-time high. President Muhammadu Buhari is unable to kill it. It is killing Nigeria.

There is a need to change tactics in prosecuting the anti-graft war for purposes of obtaining better results. Corruption will not end but it should be possible not to make it a way of life in the country. We have used probe panels to unearth the corrupt in our public services; the landed and other properties of the guilty were confiscated to deny them the right to enjoy the fruits of their corruption. But the corruption grows stronger.

Corruption: Nemesis Ripens What Our Hands Have Sown

 By Emmanuel Okoroafor

Corruption has woven itself into the tapestry of the Nigeria narrative such that it has become the eternal plague of this most populous African country. For decades, this malady in its various manifestations – embezzling, backhandedness, kickbacks, internet fraud, thievery and all what not – have defined us more than our characters, capabilities and accomplishments. It is so bad that even one United Kingdom (UK) Prime Minister had the cheeks to brand us “fantastically corrupt.”

For a country touted as the giant of Africa, the tragic flaw of corruption has whittled down Nigeria’s goliath stature to that of a Lilliputian. Today, it has become the gangrene eating away our corporate structure, the poison oozing from every pore of our collective body and the bile in our cup of wine. What is worse, even the younger generation has gradually bought into the corruption franchise. It is now fashionable to hear young people say, “If I get there (public position), I go chop (embezzle) my own.” Which means “if you can’t beat them, then join them.”

Nigeria: A Season Of Scandals

By Bright Emenena

Lest we forget, like many past government, this administration rode to power on the back of the promise to fight corruption. It is safe to say though, that more than any previous administration, the present administration comes top on the perception that a government will actually fight corruption. For many Nigerians, the one reason why this government was voted into power was the belief that corruption which was perceived as the problem of Nigeria shall be brought to a stop.

President Buhari then General Buhari was the symbol of this perception. For many who voted for him, he was an embodiment of integrity, a man capable of doing no evil, an incorruptible disciplinarian and in their view, was what Nigeria needed at the time. He was even applauded by many when he claimed he could not afford the presidential nomination form of his party despite having served as a military head of state, a key player in another military government adjudged as most corrupt by both local and international bodies, a former military governor, a petroleum minister and chairman of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), an agency that was also alleged of corruption. This was perceived by his supporters as evidence of his incorruptibility.

Fighting Or Celebrating Corruption?

By Egwuchukwu Hilary Ejikeme  

This country as it is presently organised does not hold any future, whatsoever, for our children. Never in the history of mankind has so much been owed so many by so few. Even though we were ignorant of it, the battle-line was drawn, ab initio, between the only two quasi-political parties I could distinguish in Nigeria: The very rich versus the poor masses, the leadership as against the people, the Bourgeoisie lined up against the Proletariat.

*President Buhari 

Whether as members of the Armed Forces or the business moguls or the politicians, leadership at once becomes a melting pot of sorts. At the very top, there is no tribe, no religion, no profession, and no division. The rest of us: Police, Army, Air Force, Navy, all other Nigerian workers – public/civil servants, artisans, drivers, petty traders and what not, must rise from our slumber and seek to change and redirect the course of governance for the benefit of our children.

What successive governments have done in Nigeria, including the present Muhammadu Buhari leadership, is to celebrate, rather than fight corruption. The issue of corruption in Nigeria is more fundamental than just inundating the pages of our national dailies and plaguing the air waves with individual cases of brazen misappropriation or looting of public funds. The leadership is only playing to the gallery.

Corruption has become like an alternative source of energy in Nigeria. My friend used to complain a lot about the noise pollution and the attendant fumes of his neighbour’s generating set, but that was until he was able to buy his own generator. Today, my friend’s generator is on, almost right round the clock, regardless of what his neighbours are passing through. That is the case of leadership and corruption in Nigeria. Now former President Olusegun Obasanjo doubled as the President and the Minister of Petroleum: There was then no Nigerian, good or trustworthy enough, to fit into that position. Probably because this continued throughout his eight years in office, our own Buhari, the darling and toast of The Fourth Estate of The Realm, has unwittingly stepped into the same unwieldy shoes. But can two wrongs ever make a right?

Corruption is corruption: Any time or anywhere. When we sacrifice competence and meritocracy at the altar of mediocrity and/or federal character/quota system, it is corruption: Pure and simple. Nigeria is basically designed to fail, from the beginning. No team can ever win a match if it refuses to field its best players.

Corruption: Suspension For All

By Paul Onomuakpokpo  

While the plaudits tend to dim the caution against the danger of repudiating the constitutional forts that guarantee the stability of our society in the guise of prosecuting the anti-corruption campaign, we must keep on reminding ourselves of the desiderata for the realisation of the vision of a transparent society that President Muhammadu Buhari seemingly holds.

*Buhari 

As this column has often stressed, there is no doubt that corruption is an enervating plague that must be rooted out of our society to pave the way for an equitable distribution of the wealth with which this nation is immeasurably endowed.

Yet, in arresting and prosecuting the corrupt among us, we must guard against being befuddled by our identification with the ruling party. It is such uncritical alignment that has blurred the vision of those who should have declared the obvious excesses that have smeared the anti-corruption campaign intolerable.

True, no one who is keenly aware of the grim reality that the nation has suffered despoliation due to the complicity of the corrupt guardians of the laws of the land would query the raid on the residences of judges who allegedly have been living on sleazy funds. Again, we cannot easily render impeachable the idea of the judges being on suspension until they exonerate themselves from their alleged involvement in practices that strongly detracted from their professional integrity.

Thus, the National Judicial Council (NJC) may soon buckle under the pressure being mounted on it to suspend the judges. The NJC may no longer bear being accused of complicity with the judicial officers whose residences the Department of State Services (DSS) raided for allegedly perverting the course of justice after being bribed with dollars. Of course, apart from the DSS and the president, no one else knows how compelling the incriminating evidence against the judges are. But to save the judiciary from the moral absurdity of judges accused of corruption presiding over cases of financial sleaze, they may have to be suspended while their investigation lasts.

But it would remain an ominous omission that mocks the anti-corruption drive if it is only the judges that would be on suspension because of the allegations against them. This is where the Buhari government must allow equity to lend credibility to the anti-corruption campaign. The judges have alleged that they are being haunted by the security agency of the government not because their professional credibility is in question, but simply because they have refused to do the obnoxious bidding of some of those in the ruling party.

Indeed, they did not mince words. Justice Sylvester Ngwuta accused the Minister of Transportation, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi and Ogbonaya Onu of asking him to influence judgments in their favour. Ngwuta alleged that Amaechi asked him to illegally remove Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State and Nyesom Wike of Rivers State as governors. Before then, Justice John Inyang Okoro accused Amaechi of asking him to pervert justice by making sure that election appeal cases for Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Abia states favour him.

Nigeria: APC’s Incredible Nepotism

By Paul Onomuakpokpo  

No matter how much the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and its leaders emote about their resolve to foster a merit-driven system and serve the whole country, their immersion in winner-take-all politics is obvious to all. Of course, this is by no means out of sync with the party of President Muhammadu Buhari who declared that those who voted for him would enjoy the so-called dividends of democracy more than those who never supported his election.

President Buhari and IGP Ibrahim Kpotum

While it is clear that Buhari has floundered in many other areas of governance, he has demonstrated uncommon fidelity to this commitment since he assumed office. This accounts for his appointing mainly his family members, political associates and other close persons.

This nepotism that has defined the Buhari government is set to interfere with the recruitment of new police personnel. Such interference is alarming against the backdrop of the persistent outrage at the unprofessionalism in the police that is often expressed in their predilection for corruption. They shoot a motorist who refuses to give them a bribe of N50; they collude with armed robbers to prey on the citizens; they turn a witness or complainant into a suspect because of pecuniary gain – and the list of crimes goes on. For all this, the blame rightly goes to the method of their recruitment that shares no kinship with meritocracy. Most police personnel join the force to make money through corruption and not because of the competence and the passion they have for the job. They easily bribe their way through the recruitment and once they have got the job, they brazenly pursue an agenda to recoup their investment.

Thus, we would have thought that a time of recruitment of police personnel would be seized as an opportunity to get citizens who are very competent and passionate to enforce the law and protect the citizens and their property and stop the rapid deterioration of the force into a hotbed for the proliferation of criminals. But now, through the nepotism of the APC, only those who are close to the ministers and leaders of the party are the ones who would be among the 10,000 police personnel to be recruited this year. These ministers and leaders of APC have disrupted the recruitment by insisting that only their cronies should make the list. To placate them, the Police Service Commission (PSC) has been removing the names of those who have meritoriously passed the tests for the recruitment. They have been putting the names of their cronies who have either failed the tests or did not even apply for the job in the first place. Consequently, the recruitment that should have been concluded by now has been stalled.

Nigeria: The Crisis Of Buharism

By Tony Afejuku

There is no iota of doubt about it after all: we have ceaselessly experienced a crisis of Buharism since our present president, Buhari, was exalted by us into the presidency of our country.

Glaringly, diurnally it is entering our exalted consciousness and imagination that our pre-election idea or picture of him was one that exalted a man who had (and still has) an exalted impression of himself. But we must make no mistake about it. The man has elegance, but we have come to realize that this elegance that enabled some persons to call him “Mr. Integrity” possesses some veneer that is not well irriguous.

*Buhari 

Perhaps I, in my creative imagination, am deficient in my employment of language to characterize the kind of president that we have witnessed since Buharism entered our authoritative lexicon of political thought. In the present writing I am not too certain of the language to employ to depict Buharism. In fact, I am inclined to employ a language that cannot but be deader than Latin: the language called Fula of the Fulani people.

How I wish and itch in vain to speak and write Fula! Let me be uneconomical with words. I itch to understand and express Buhari’s thoughts in Fula, but how deader than Latin is Fula to me! Thus in vain and in vain will I try to understand the great man Buhari and his Fula philosophy of political governance in a democracy and republic such as ours, such as our country’s – our Nigeria’s that always we must hail. Recently I had a lengthy conversation, which spoke volumes, with an octogenarian who is based in the South West of our country.

The octogenarian is fully at breast with our president’s mind-set and the happenings in Aso Rock. Lengthy  conversation He bared and opened ad infinitum his mind on the Buhari presidency. He informed me, among other things, pertinently of how Hadza Bala Usman came on board as the current managing director of our Nigerian Ports Authority.

Should Change Begin With Me Or Buhari?

By Onyiorah Paschal Chiduluemije  
The foregoing remark credited to and drawn from the speech delivered by President Muhammadu Buhari during the launch of the National Re-orientation Campaign tagged Change Begins With Me, on Thursday, September 8, 2016, is, to say the least, quite unbecoming of the President. Indeed, the man who is now a proverbial tortoise that once upon a time assured all animals at the beginning of their journey, of an existing promised land, like an Eldorado, and only for it (the same tortoise) to announce in the course of the journey, and to the chagrin of all animals, that the so-called promised land which they had all set out to behold and possess was the same as the land they had just left in search of milk and honey (thus obviating the need for their journey).

*President Buhari and Lai Mohammed

But unlike what obtained in the old (and abandoned) land, all animals were now individually saddled with the responsibilities of tracing and accessing the new Kingdom through the different paths apparently leading to it, basically because the main entrance to the promised land was practically unknown. This tale in a nutshell, aptly illustrates the analogous (abrupt) paradigm shift in the APC’s and/or President Muhammadu Buhari’s ‘change slogan’ afterthought called Change Begins With Me.

Of course, it is almost unbelievable that the same man who – with hindsight – apparently tricked the electorate into voting him into power with an unmistakable promise of a positive change in the living standard of all, is today squarely pontificating about a clearly diversionary tactic called Change Begins With Me, and, as it were, almost patronising both the hungry and the angry for “failing” to first of all ask themselves what they have done to change their ways before expecting the government to change their lives.

As it were, many an APC supporter would have by now definitely found it extremely difficult to fathom the essence of this seemingly derogatory remark against the people made by no less a person than President Muhammadu Buhari, which, critically viewed, ought not to have arisen in the very first place. And the reason for this thinking is not far-fetched. For one, a campaign promise of change made to the people remains a campaign promise, and so it does not necessarily follow in a thriving democracy that the people must be willing to dance to the tune and/or comply with the dictates, wishful thinking, whims and caprices of their elected representatives, before the latter could be reasonable enough to bring to fruition all that had been promised during the electioneering. Therefore, it makes no sense at all for anybody, be that Mr. President or whoever, to begin to impress it on the masses to alter their ways as a condition precedent for being “entitled” to demand, inter alia, that the APC-led government accomplish its campaign promises. 

Ironically, though, the same President who now appears to be patronising Nigerians and scoffing at their increasing demand for a positive change to take effect as promised by the All Progressives Congress, is yet to repent of his own old ways or, better still, renounce his ethnic and religious preferences and inclination towards people and issues of national importance. Evidently, there is no gainsaying that his glaringly lopsided appointments so far still reek of and speak volumes about facts associated with his unpalatable past.

President Buhari’s Triumphalism

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Until last week, it might have been dismissed as delusional to think that President Muhammadu Buhari considers the citizens as people he has conquered. But if the body language of the president has failed to magically make available the dividends of democracy to the citizens, it has at least in recent times reinforced the notion of his seeing himself as a conqueror, and thus a blight on our democratic experience.

*President Buhari 

Here are a people who have been brutalised by decades of misrule and who invested so much hope in the  Buhari’s change mantra. Over a year after waiting for the realisation of the promised change, Buhari has unabashedly disavowed it. Passing the buck, Buhari has rather asked the citizens to make the change a reality.

Yet, Buhari and his party members are the only people who know the breadth and length of the change he envisaged. The citizens did not sit down at a table to arrive at a template of his promised change. At best, the president only revealed snippets of the change: a robust economy that would guarantee full employment and a parity of the naira and the dollar, and as a palliative measure for those who are still jobless,  the payment of a stipend of N5,000.

Buhari’s new mantra of change beginning with the citizens is an expression of his sense of triumphalism. The new mantra brims with the hauteur of a president who has not only impenitently abdicated his responsibility, but who is yet to come to terms with his own failure to grapple with the problems he was elected to solve. The citizens could tolerate the president’s incompetence while hoping that with his seeking the advice of those who should know better, he could still fulfill the people’s expectations. But with a mindset that the citizens have been conquered, the president does not need to attach any importance to such advice. Or why would the president tell the people that change begins with them when he is expected to make good his promise? As far as the president is concerned, he has used the change mantra to gain power and those who are interested in its actualisation are free to torment themselves with that triviality.

But the president may not be wrong after all. From his Olympian height, he can only see the citizens he has conquered. The conquest began with his ministers and other aides who are supposed to advise him on the right decisions to take. We must be reminded that the president did not hide his disdain for his would-be ministers. They were only imposed on him by the constitution. And this was why he considered them as noise makers whose contribution to national development could only be consigned to a marginal space compared to that of civil servants in whom he reposes more confidence.

Buhari's Second Coming: A Tragic Mistake!

By Remi Oyeyemi

For those who have followed my writings, it is not news to them that I have no iota of confidence in President Muhammadu Buhari either as a candidate or as President of Nigeria. It is not news that it has been difficult for me to believe that anything good could come out of Buhari’s Nazareth. My convictions are based on his trajectory on the political landscape of Nigeria. A trajectory of corruption, incompetence, deceit, nepotism and a genre of noxious tribalism are the contaminating clouds characterizing his contoured career.

*Buhari 

But for someone like me, who is an avowed unbeliever in Buhari, it is nothing personal. It is all about the future of my children who despite having several opportunities for being Americans have fallen in love first of all with Ijeshaland, the Yoruba Nation, the unfortunate country called Nigeria and the continent Africa. That is the order of priority in which I have tried to educate them and they understand, or rather I did everything to make them understand, why it has to be that way.
 
So, because this is about the future of my children, I have prayed ceaselessly and hoped untiringly that President Buhari would disappoint me in his second coming. This is despite the fact that I did not think he would be able to rescue Nigeria. This is despite the fact that I know his second coming is a tragic mistake. This is despite the fact that I know that Buhari is a born-again corrupt military man turned politician dressed in the borrowed robe of integrity. This is despite the fact that I know that he does not believe in Nigeria.
 
But somehow, you just hope that you are wrong. You hope that the man could have been softened by age and experience. You just hope that at his age he would realize the futility of vanity and would seek to ingrain his name in immortality by doing the right thing and disappoint doubting Thomases like me. You hope that some of your friends and colleagues who bought into him hook, line and sinker would come around to wipe it in your face “we told you so.”
 
It would have been beautiful and worth it if I found myself in that position. It would not have mattered if President Buhari had disappointed me and performed very well. I would have appreciated it. I would have praised him. I would have been converted to one of his hailers. I would have been shameless about making a u-turn. All would have been worth it for the sake of the future of my children.
 
But rather than disappoint me, President Buhari further confirmed why I have been against him in the first instance. He cemented his reputation that made Nigerian electorate reject him three times as a congenital failure and incorrigibly untruthful. He continues to prove that he is not worthy of even the fake integrity with which he has been invested by the Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s propaganda machine that ensured his election as Nigeria’s president.