If Vice President Yemi Osinbajo expected a public outrage at his latest revelation that the whopping sums of N100bn and $289m were embezzled by the Goodluck Jonathan administration weeks to the 2015 elections, he must be disappointed by now. Up till now, nobody is exactly asking for Jonathan’s head on a spike. Osinbajo has confirmed people’s suspicion: that Buhari, the man who was elected to tear down the temple of corruption in Nigeria, is not as potent a force as he was marketed. Nigerians that thought they were getting two raging bulls must be wondering how they ended up with these hand-wringing jokers.
Osinbajo should not be surprised
at the yawns and wrinkled noses he got from Nigerians for his exposé, as people
now think that still blaming Jonathan is an old subterfuge, considering
everything else that has befallen us under Buhari. If Jonathan and his merry
band stole so much and up till now, the best you do is throw out repetitive
lines of how much he stole, maybe you should not be in government. Nigerians
voted you to fight corruption, not to join them to moan about it.
This day three years ago, it was
five days before the presidential elections. Everywhere you turned at that
time, you heard “Sai Baba” chanted to the tune of “anti-corruption.” Followers
of the candidate and now President, Muhammadu Buhari, evangelised about the
coming of this messiah whose no-nonsense stance will cleanse Nigeria’s Augean
stables for good. Even his former foes forgave him without him asking. Buhari
himself, aware of the weight of expectations imposed on him, sold himself as
the karma of corruption in Nigeria. Everywhere he went, he sang about fighting
corruption and Nigerians rocked themselves to its sonic sensation.
When Buhari was first sworn in,
bragging about what Jonathan’s administration had done wrong was the most
priced and bestselling share on the stock market, and the APC — still basking
in the euphoria of unexpected victory — made huge dividends out of it. Almost
three years after he was sworn in, the folks who rhapsodized about Buhari’s
anti-corruption agenda have found that he was no different from his
predecessor. He is just as clueless, and corruption — Nigeria’s Frankenstein
monster — has once again swallowed another one of its creators. Post-2015
Nigeria is still in the doldrums of ineptitude, nepotism, tribalism, and uncontained
violence.
Osinbajo is still talking about
what Jonathan did wrong when their government has barely been able to do a
single thing convincingly right. Osinbajo was also quoted as saying that at
some point, those who promoted strategic alliance contracts between the NNPC
and the NDPC made away with almost one-tenth of our national reserves! That is
a mind-boggling amount. Such a theft ought to be thoroughly investigated and
punished, and not just crunched into a sensational speech at an occasion.
Osinbajo, again, said that it was
only in talking about such mega-thefts that we could resolve such thieving.
True, he has a point that such scams need to be addressed, but he seems to
forget that talking is all Buhari’s government has done till now. People are
tired of accusations; they are tiring and demoralising. What we want to see is
what the government under his watch has done about such embezzlement. How many
of those people have been tried and how many are on their way to jail now? If
nothing of the sort has been done, then what is the point of informing us who
stole what?
You are only confirming that you
are weak, and your government is more or less a paper tiger. Mentioning
Jonathan’s name alone used to be a potent means of whipping Nigerians into frenzied
outrage about “corruption,” but people seem to be fatigued about the unending
talk of what is wrong; they want transparency, reforms, and action. They are
bored with people like Osinbajo constantly revving the engine of a vehicle that
has no wheels.
Not only are officials of this
administration adept at just talk, they, in fact, act as a striptease. Just a
few days ago, the Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against
Corruption, Prof. Itse Sagay (SAN), also said that if he released details of
the allowances of the principal officers of the National Assembly, Nigerians
would be shocked. But what exactly would be shocking to Nigerians about his
revelations, considering that Sagay already informed Nigerians last year that
lawmakers earned as much as N29m monthly? What else is “shockable” about what
he has to reveal? At worst, he will reveal that Senate President, Bukola
Saraki, possibly earns N1bn monthly. Even if we find out that things are that
sordid, what exactly is the reaction he expects the shock we will experience to
solve?
Sagay thinks Nigeria will explode
if people find out what the lawmakers cost them; but most people know, just
like they know that Buhari’s budget is just as padded as was his predecessors.’
They just insist on keeping their sanity intact by ignoring their thieving
leaders.
I think Sagay — much like Peter
Obi who also teased us with information about what governors earn — is
overestimating the capability of Nigerians to still be shocked with the
mindless looting that goes on in the country every day. Nigerians have come to
realise that both the APC and the PDP are bad for their mental and moral
health, and there is nothing one side can accuse the other of that it is not
guilty of too. That is why Osinbajo’s revelation did not get much more than
sneers and jeers. He is working in an administration whose anti-corruption
agenda has become more or less reduced to accusations and counter-accusations,
and he wants us to be moved by Jonathan’s profligacy.
Since Buhari became president,
his cronies too have been accused of corruption, seven million people have lost
their jobs between 2016 and 2017, and Nigerians have yet to recover from the
effects of a recession. Think of the degree of violence that has occurred under
Buhari — from the killings in Benue to Kaduna, Enugu, Taraba, and the abduction
of girls in Dapchi. How about those for “shock” and explosion? If the country
did not go on the streets to protest after Buhari spent half of last year
abroad, and up till now he has still not accounted for how much his health cost
the country, then what is Sagay worried about?
There is every possibility that
Osinbajo is right that Jonathan plundered the nation for his re-election. All
the money Jonathan’s administration spent in 2015, particularly in the last few
weeks of the election when he was crawling on his knees from churches to
traditional rulers must have come from somewhere other than his pocket. But
Osinbajo will not get the reaction he expects from Nigerians this time because
Buhari himself has not shown superior morals when it comes to the issue of
dipping your hands into the national pockets. 1n 2015, Buhari did not finance
his campaign with five loaves and two fishes. The money too came from
somewhere, and we know it was not his putatively untainted pockets. In fact,
Buhari has that mystique about him: he has a way of making people believe he is
personally not corrupt even though whenever he has needed money to finance his
ambition, somebody’s dirty hands have picked up the invoice. Up till now,
nobody in the APC has had the honour or dignity to account for their campaign
spending, yet they cry about others’ faults. By 2019, they are likely to do
exactly what they accuse Jonathan of: take money out of the national reserves
to finance their campaigns too.
That is why their moral posturing
moves nobody whose head on his/her shoulders can think their way out of a paper
bag.
Credit: Abimbola Adelakun, Punch
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