As Buhari Fights Corruption Without A Strategy

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu  

President Buhari’s much-advertised fight against corruption has degenerated into a demolition derby. As happened with many previous efforts to fight corruption in Nigeria, different outposts of power and influence in the president’s coterie appear determined to use anti-corruption as a cover to settle intra-palace scores.

*Buhari 

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), headed by an acting chairman, is pursuing the prosecution of the President of the Senate before the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT). While those proceedings end, the Senate, whose President is accused of corruption by the EFCC, has declined confirmation of the acting Chairman of the EFCC, citing a report by the State Security Service (SSS), which accuses the nominee of abuse of power and of human rights. These allegations of human rights abuse against the EFCC’s acting Chairman are made without any hint of irony by an SSS that has earned a dismal reputation for respecting only court orders that it likes or in favour of only those it approves of.

Meanwhile, the judiciary, many of whose senior-most officers have become objects of ridicule at the instance of the EFCC and the SSS, must somehow bring itself to arbitrate with a straight face the winners and losers in this squalid mess.

To some, this report card is evidence that there are no sacred cows in this “fight” against corruption. It is indeed easy to mistake injury for progress when the goals are unclear and a strategy is non-existent. There surely is a fight but it is increasingly difficult to sustain the idea that it is President Buhari’s fight or indeed a fight for the interest of Nigerians.

To be sure, this is not the first time an administration will be up-ended by those supposed to implement its proclaimed commitment to fighting corruption. In 1970, General Yakubu Gowon declared that he would “eradicate corruption” from Nigeria within six years. It was an impossible mission proclaimed with the starry-eyed certitude of a 35 year-old intoxicated with power unmitigated by experience. Four years later, Godwin Daboh, instigated, it was suspected, by then Governor of Benue-Plateau State, Joseph Gomwalk, published an affidavit listing sundry allegations of corruption against Gowon’s Communications Minister, Joseph Tarka. Gowon’s indecisiveness turbo-charged the allegations. By the time Tarka was eventually forced to resign, Gowon’s commitment to fighting corruption looked terminally hypocritical. Less than one year later, Murtala Muhammed intervened to put the Gowon regime out of its misery.