For Nigerian public officers and others who have had their hands soiled in the past few years, the chicken appears to have finally come home to roost with last Friday’s inauguration of the Muhammadu Buhari administration. While the surreptitious rat race for cover by corrupt public officers against their imminent probe remains an open secret, not a few Nigerians, who are hoping to see the president’s pre-election threats translate to action, are anxious to see how the new regime intends to hit the ground running with its anticorruption war.
But while some are still skeptical about the commitment of the new government to tackle corruption headlong, those in the know, say sub-committees set up to come up with work-able blueprints that would lead to the realization of President Buhari’s preelection promises in different sectors of national life have started filling in their submissions.
One of the radical changes likely to define the Buhari administration, according to an impeccable source, is a proposal for the scrapping of the once dreaded Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) and Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC), which many believe have been reduced to toothless bulldogs that only bark but do not bite.
Both anti-corruption agencies, it was gathered, are expected to give way to a new single but effective anti-graft agency.
The proposal, Sunday Sun was informed, is one of the recommendations of a sub-committee headed by a former Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Abdur-rahman Dambazzau (retd). The committee which also has a former military administrator of Kaduna State, Brigadier General Lawal Jafaru Isa, (retd) and Colonel Yakubu Bako (retd), former governor of Akwa Ibom State, is said to have been saddled with the responsibility of coming up with a working paper on anticorruption and national security.
Besides the Dambazzau team, sources also informed Sunday Sun that there is another unofficial committee working with the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo with a similar mandate to produce a blueprint on the anti-corruption war for the new government.
The Osinbajo team is to liaise with international stakeholders including the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, (UNODC), to produce an anti-corruption working document for Nigeria.
Sunday Sun further learnt that the aggregate of the recommendations by experts in the committees is on the need to merge the EFCC and ICPC and to have a single and more potent anticorruption agency.
The new antigraft agency, which is expected to come on board, is to be supported by a soon to be inaugurated Nigeria Financial Intelligence Centre (NFIC).
Sunday Sun scooped further that the Buhari government is working on a plan to discard the usual practice, which limits the choice of head of the nation’s anti-graft agency to the police, in order to be able to accommodate more qualified Nigerians from other spheres.
Should this plan sail through, the source confided in Sunday Sun that a close associate of the new president, Colonel Hamid Ali, who was a former Military Administrator of Kaduna State and immediate past Secretary General of Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), may be drafted to head the new anti-corruption body.
The President, it was learnt, has equally been taking contributions from notable Nigerians one of whom is the Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.
The former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, (CBN) is believed to have furnished President Buhari with vital information that could aid in facilitating the probe of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the alleged printing of naira notes to fund the botched reelection bid of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan.
Sanusi who raised the alarm over the allegation of the missing money from NNPC’s account while he was CBN governor, has remained undaunted on his call for a thorough probe of the money in spite of a recent audit report of the corporation’s account. Reacting to the report of the audit in a recently published article in the Financial Times, Sanusi had insisted that the audit report confirmed that about $18.5billion of the NNPC’s earnings was not remitted to the treasury, contrary to what the Petroleum Minister Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke, claimed was the case.
“Contrary to the claims of Petroleum Minister Diezani AlisonMadueke, the audit report does not exonerate the NNPC. It establishes that the gap between the company’s oil revenues between January 2012 and July 2013 and cash remitted to the government for the same period was $18.5bilion.”
The Emir of Kano maintained that the breakdown of how the NNPC used the money raised serious questions about the legality of the conduct of the state’s oil company, saying that the only thing left to be done was for the authority to hold anyone found culpable in those transactions accountable and commence legal proceedings against them since, according to him, “Nigerians did not vote for an amnesty for anyone.”
While his electioneering lasted, Buhari had never left Nigerians in doubt about his administration’s resolve to fight corruption, which he once described as a form of evil that is worse than terrorism. His promise to tackle corruption has equally remained a ubiquitous refrain in all his public utterances since March 28, 2015 when he won the presidential election.
The new president had shortly after he was presented with Certificate of Return the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Abuja last month, re-echoed his administration’s anti-corruption by stance when he said, “Further-more, we shall strongly battle another form of evil that is even worse than terrorism the evil of corruption.
Corruption attacks and seeks to destroy our national institutions and character. By misdirecting into selfish hands funds intended for the public purpose, corruption distorts the economy and worsens income inequality.
It creates a class of unjustly enriched people. “Such an illegal yet powerful force soon comes to undermine democracy because its conspirators have amassed so much money that they believe they can buy government. We shall end this threat to our economic development and democratic survival.
I repeat that corruption will not be tolerated by this administration;; and it shall no longer
be allowed to stand as if it is a respected monument in this nation.”The Sunday Sun.
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