Time to rethink Nigeria’s anti-graft crusade APART from the struggle for the dominance of the party structure, one other thing that can be said of the ongoing face-off within the Peoples Democratic Party is that it has exposed the brazen role state governors play in rubbishing the already discredited war against graft in the country. Reports have it that one of the conditions tabled by some of the seven feuding governors of the New PDP for them to sheathe their swords and return to the main PDP fold is immunity from investigation by the two foremost anti-graft agencies in the country. As if that outrageous condition is not offensive enough, they even reportedly demanded that the curious immunity should be extended to members of their families and, perhaps, their hangers-on. This is in particular reference to a state governor whose son was arrested for allegedly attempting to travel out of the country with a sum of money over the legally approved limit of $10,000. This is not surprising. What the governors have done, going by the reports, has further deepened the negative perception of the people about the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, which are generally perceived as tools to be manipulated by the Presidency to go after its political opponents. But it is repulsive, for the dissident PDP governors to so brazenly ask President Goodluck Jonathan to place the already toothless anti-graft agencies on a permanent leash. This is just too shocking. Many will argue that apart from the bright spot under the leadership of Nuhu Ribadu, the EFCC, for instance, has degenerated into a downright tepid organisation that no longer inspires confidence in the public, especially under the President Jonathan administration and the chairmanship of Ibrahim Lamorde. The commission’s claim that it secured 400 convictions out of over 700 cases taken to court and recovered over $9 billion is nothing but a sideshow of political stunts. The searching question is: How many of the 50 high profile cases Farida Waziri took to court and another 10 inherited from Ribadu, her predecessor, have been successfully prosecuted to date? Although corruption has always been endemic in the country, which prompted the creation of the anti-graft agencies, it has now assumed the form of a gargantuan monster, feeding ceaselessly on the lifeblood of the country. Lamorde’s recent lamentation about people’s perception that “the EFCC is selective in investigating persons suspected to have committed economic crimes, and that the commission has gone to sleep”, has become a cheap mantra. The United States Ambassador to Nigeria, Terence McCulley, once said that “…corruption not only saps the confidence in people in government, it also discourages both national and international investments.” He could not have put it better: corruption has turned Nigeria, the much-touted giant of Africa, into a mere Lilliputian being that can neither provide good education for her children nor quality health care and infrastructure for the citizenry. Close to two years after some Nigerians fraudulently appropriated more than N2 trillion from the country’s treasury in the name of administering the subsidy on petroleum products, nobody has been successfully prosecuted. Even a lawmaker, who publicly admitted collecting a $620,000 bribe from a businessman to strike out the name of the latter’s company from the list of fraudulent subsidy fund beneficiaries investigated by the parliament, still sits pretty in the National Assembly chambers, making laws for the rest of us. In early 2012, the former Chairman of the Pension Reform Task Force, Abdulrasheed Maina, publicly said corrupt pension officials in the pensions department within the Office of the Head of Service were embezzling over N3.3 billion monthly while EFCC declared that it discovered a fresh N14 billion fraud in what came to be known as Police Pension scam. A few months later, Maina himself got enmeshed in a nasty scandal that is yet to be resolved. And what has the government made of the Ribadu-led Committee on Petroleum Revenue Task Force that uncovered, among other things, a missing $183 million in signature bonuses paid by oil firms between 2008 and 2011? Or how far has the EFCC gone in unravelling other serious allegations, including the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparent Initiative’s that the nation lost a total of N272.9 billion to graft, non-remittance of revenues by oil companies, vandalism and inefficiency of the public refineries between 2009 and 2011? This explains why the Human Rights Watch, an NGO, said that though the EFCC arraigned 35 nationally prominent political figures on corruption charges, including 19 former state governors, many of these cases had made little progress in the courts, and not a single politician was currently serving prison time for any of these alleged crimes. “Though the commission has secured four convictions of senior political officials since 2003, they have faced relatively little or no prison time,” HRW declared. Is this the record Lamorde wants the citizens to accept as lofty? It is outrageous for the EFCC to continue to blame the judicial process for its ineptitude. Jonathan does not only have to reject the request of the governors, he must make sure that the anti-graft agencies are sufficiently strengthened to be able to go after the big-time corrupt Nigerians, not just the small fry that carry out internet frauds. Without successfully reining in corruption, Nigeria can never make progress, no matter the price at which a barrel of crude oil is sold in the international market.
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 05:15:01 +0000
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