Knowing how mercilessly they had butchered the national treasury, they came prepared to meet President Buhari toe to toe, deliberately mis-characterising his determined anti-corruption war as nothing more than targeting PDP top shots.
No, far be it that I would ever try to be clever by half. But outsmarting one of the three distinguished Ekiti elders I speak with a minimum two or three times a week – they sometimes even, generously, initiate the calls – is about the only way to properly background this week’s article. Going by age, I refer above to Chief Oladeji Fasuan (84), a retired but by no means, tiring economist, former top civil servant, and pivot of that inimitable team that mid-wifed Ekiti State, Chief Dele Falegan (82), top economist and banker, and a former Director of Research, Central Bank of Nigeria, and the polyglot Prince, Julius Adelusi-Adeluyi (75), pharmacist, lawyer and mentor extraordinaire. You do not have these griots, and that rare privilege of reach, and be foolish. In a conversation with Chief Falegan this past week, he told me about an article he should be writing pretty soon, which article, God willing, you would read on these pages, about a general misconception many Nigerians have concerning President Muhammadu Buhari. This, according to him, is describing the president as BABA GO SLOW, whereas, he should more appropriately be branded ADAKEJA. That word, in our native Ekiti dialect, means he, who acts, very deliberately and stealthily, to inflict maximum punishment on the enemy. Chief talks here of the enemies of the Nigeria poor whose identities are now pouring out like a broken dam. Thanks to a head of state with a single-minded determination to drastically reduce, if not completely eliminate, corruption in Nigeria.
Last week’s massive ‘name and shame’ of those who must, at best, be a mere tip of the iceberg (Dasuki, after the long showboating, is believed to have started talking) of those persons Nigerians must hold responsible for the country’s continuing pauperisation and who, if found guilty by the law courts, must equally be held vicariously responsible for the thousands of deaths and the unbelievable ruination Boko Haram has continued to inflict on Nigerians by diverting funds intended to properly arm our soldiers, has copiously demonstrated the president’s determination. The president knows Nigeria better than to rush into things like appointing every Tom, Dick and Harry ministers just so to satisfy some naysayers, and like many presidents before him, further destroy the country. Rather, he decided to, first and foremost, very carefully probe into the Augean stable he inherited, using that very odious institution that has, like forever, scripted and underpinned the country’s shameful corruption history, namely, the Civil Service.
For months, PMB engaged, almost solely, with the top guns of the civil service; a people now described, with considerable justification, as EVIL SERVANTS – to get to the very bottom of why Nigeria has remained perpetually rooted to the very nadir of the Human Development Index in spite of its massive human and natural resources. Everywhere President Buhari went since his inauguration, he has not hidden his single minded determination to fight corruption which, in his words, would kill Nigeria if we do not first slay it. A former military head of state, he knows only too well, how the military, like locusts, devastated the country leaving us only with massive hilltop mansions overlooking sprawling shanties that have become the lot of a clear majority of Nigerians.
He has equally observed, ringside, how our ruinous politicians have not helped matters, either. He must have concluded that things are today far worse than when, as military head of state, courts sentenced people to decades long jail sentences before others from his military constituency came to completely institutionalise corruption and made it indistinguishable from our very way of life. This sorry state of affairs must be the driving force of the president’s anti-corruption war which the PDP corrupt ensemble has never ceased to describe as witch-hunting. It is the reason Nigerians are beginning to see a near-dead EFCC, suddenly resurrect, naming and shaming individuals whose names you dare not mention during the Goodluck Jonathan years. A caveat here, for the EFCC, though. As we have come to know from the former president’s one time godfather, the inimitable Chief Edwin Clark, there was very little EFCC could have done since President Jonathan hadn’t the liver for any anti-corruption war.
Long before stories of the former National Security Adviser, as cash dispenser, hit town, there had been an earful of Diezani Alison Madueke’s exploits in the NNPC, the undying Malabu scam, the serial oil thefts, and, of course, the massive oil subsidy scam over which Nigerians had to engage in the fight of their lives, to attest to President Jonathan’s complete inability to lead a serious fight against corruption in spite of all the make belief – Aviation Minister, Stella Oduah’s armoured BMW car scandal was a case in point.
However, if the PDP never thought a day would come when it would be disgraced out of office and, therefore, got witheringly slaughtered at the polls, their fight against President Buhari’s anti-corruption war is, obviously, more hard-headed. Knowing how mercilessly they had butchered the national treasury, they came prepared to meet President Buhari toe to toe, deliberately mis-characterising his determined anti-corruption war as nothing more than targeting PDP top shots. Although on the surface it looks like Metuh fighting a one-man war, there is no doubt he is the mouth piece of an apparently overworked, if not overstretched, rogue rapid response team set up by the PDP to pour scorn on the anti corruption war. And they are not relying only on his now proverbial verbal diarrhoea to counter every indication of their people having, again, been caught in the act.
Just as the president is determined to fight corruption to the hilt, so are these corrupt politicians ready, buoyed by huge funds, and a battalion of senior lawyers at the ready, hoping to make tonnes of money. It is these lawyers with sated consciences, who go out there, waging war against a cankerworm they should be out fighting with all their God-given skills but claiming to be apostles of human rights; fundamental human rights that deny Nigerians billions of naira that could have been spent to cut down on our atrocious maternal mortality ratio, ensure that more of the approximately three million Nigerians living with HIV and AIDS have access to medication and revive our moribund education. With some PDP leaders now named and shamed by their public exposure as sharing the funds meant to properly kit our soldiers, many of who were being slaughtered by a better armed Boko Haram (hundreds of them were actually sentenced to death for not standing up to the enemy until saved by the president on the advice of the military), it will be fascinating to see Olisa Metuh out again, blabbing about “exposing the hypocrisy, the double standard, and the dictatorial proclivities of the Muhammadu Buhari-led APC government in its orchestrated anti-corruption fight in Nigeria.”
NATION
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