09042018 - AS APC'S NEC MEETS TODAY: Oyegun, Tinubu's ‘soldiers’ head for showdown

18 — Vanguard, MONDAY, APRIL 9, 2018
THE discrepancies that have
emerged over the exact figures of
funds and worth of assets recovered
so far by the anti-graft agencies,
especially the Economic and Financial
Crimes Commission, EFCC, are
becoming worrisome. The EFCC
under its Acting Chairman, Mr
Ibrahim Magu, is in the habit of
reporting its fund recoveries in the
media.
For instance, in November 2017,
Magu peddled the sum of N739 billion
(over two billion US Dollars) as the
amount recovered in the first two years
of his stewardship. In February this
year, it claimed that it recovered over
N500 billion in 2017 alone.
But in a letter issued on February
9, 2018, the Minister of Finance, Mrs.
Kemi Adeosun, said records available
to the Office of the Accountant-
General of the Federation, OAGF, had
only N91.4 billion as amounts
recovered since 2015. In that letter,
EFCC should not hold on to recovered funds
Adeosun requested the EFCC to
clarify where the cash recoveries were
deposited, with documentary
evidence.
We not only support that the
truth behind these discrepant figures
be ascertained, we recommend that the
EFCC and all other anti-graft agencies
should no longer keep custody of
funds and property recovered. They
should be handed over to the appropriate
authorities which are constitutionally
mandated to hold the nation’s assets or
directly to the Central Bank of Nigeria,
CBN, for eventual onward transmission
to the Federation Account when all legal
issues surrounding them have been
discharged.
It is totally unacceptable that the
Federal Ministry of Finance, FMoF,
is in the dark about amounts
recovered from those who allegedly
pillaged the nation’s treasury. It is also
baffling that two departments of the
same government should have
different figures as recovered
amounts. It could be an indication that
something funny might be going on
in between.
We should always be guided by
our past experiences. There is no
reason for the EFCC to continue to
hold on to recovered funds when the
Commission has not yet clarified the
truth or falsehood of an allegation that
its immediate past Chairman, Mr
Ibrahim Lamorde, “diverted” N2.05
trillion recovered funds. A security
expert, Mr George Uboh, who had
blown this whistle on the former
EFCC boss, had even dragged the
matter before the Senate in August
2015 but somehow, the issue has
mysteriously fizzled out.
Commonsense and propriety
demand that recovered funds should
be handled with utmost care and
transparency such that members of
the public to whom the funds belong
would easily track what is being
recovered and how it is being spent.
It is this lack of transparency and
accountability that is brewing
allegations of recovered funds being
“re-looted” by public officials.
If we are to make progress in
arresting endemic corruption in
Nigeria, the anti-graft war must be
totally depoliticised and re-jigged.
By Sufuyan Ojeifo
I
PERSONALLY consider the timing of
the apology rendered by the People’s
Democratic Party, PDP, through its national
chairman, Prince Uche Secondus, for the
party’s past mistakes while in power, to be
wrong. It was a case of a right action coming
at the wrong time.
The apology should have strategically
come at the point of inauguration of a new
government, after it must have successfully
defeated President Muhammadu Buhari in
the 2019 presidential election. By that time,
the nation must have been ready for the
party's new offerings.
That would have been the best time to
advert the attention of Nigerians to those
things that might be considered as mistakes
during its 16-year rule from 1999 to 2015
and seize the momentum of the celebrations
to promise that never again will it repeat
such mistakes now that it has been given a
second chance to govern the nation.
The apology of March 26, 2018 at a public
national discourse on Contemporary
Governance in Nigeria was an imprudent
own goal that has caused it a collateral
damage. Reason is that it provided an
opportunity for an almost comatose All
Progressives Congress , APC , which had lost
its momentum in running the opposition’s
gauntlet in recent times, to suddenly find its
voice.
The APC tried to strike a rhythmical
chord, even if tentative, in the haze of its
internal contradictions, confusions and
crises. Its offering in the circumstance was
that Nigerians should not accept PDP’s
apology. The APC was trying to appropriate
the triumphal edge in a battle in which it
has been roundly pummeled.
The PDP publicists, under the command
of the veteran journalist-turned-politician,
Mr. Kola Ologbondiyan, have doubled
down the party’s publicity machinery in the
campaign to deconstruct and pooh-pooh the
APC-controlled Federal Government and
President Muhammadu Buhari’s
OPINION
PDP and APC’s own goals in treasury looting game
incongruous political and governance
philosophies.
They have tackled every misstep and
policy inconsistency of the APC government
such that the governing party had been
largely beaten back in the battle for control
of the people’s minds. The apology by the
PDP was a breather that the APC capitalised
on to forcefully rebound.
And, in rebounding, its usual mantra of
“looted public funds by the PDP” was
deployed prestissimo for some damaging
effects. The APC’s only option was to make
a big issue of alleged looting of public
treasury that purportedly took place under
the PDP-led Federal Government,
superintended by former President,
Goodluck Jonathan.
But instead of turning out as the governing
party’s joker, the option of deploying the
issue of corruption has blown up in its face
as counterproductive. The reason is that
corruption in public office and criminal
looting of the treasury are characteristic of
successive administrations. The APC
administration, in that circumstance, has
been unable to escape essential indictment
because of the presence in its fold of
allegedly corrupt former public office
holders who were hitherto in the PDP.
The APC thus scored an own goal by trying
to assail the nation and the world with a
catalogue of criminal diversions of public
funds allegedly perpetrated by the PDP in
the prosecution of the 2015 presidential
election. By that strategic blunder, the
Buhari administration confirmed the extant
prejudice that it has all this while been
accused of in the anti-graft war.
Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed,
in a bid to dismantle PDP’s claim to having
been reformed, rebranded and repositioned
for 2019 and its generation next agenda,
released a one-sided, obviously partial list
of Nigerians who allegedly looted the public
treasury. The first list of six persons
comprised PDP leaders.
The second list of 24 more persons
comprised PDP leaders, former National
Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (retd.),
former ministers, former military chiefs and
businessmen who executed one business or
the other in the Jonathan administration,
even though many of them still have their
cases pending in court.
Lai Mohammed, who is a lawyer, shunned
the legal restraint of the matters being subjudice
by declaring them as looters of public
funds. He faces two risks: one is contempt
It is in its place as the
governing party to tackle the
problems inherited and not to
resort to incessant complaints
about the magnitude of the rot
that the PDP government left
behind
(contempt outside the court) while the other
is civil suit of libel that those whose names
had been published when they had not been
indicted by any court of law can file against
the Federal Government with Lai
Mohammed as co-defendant.
The published list did not include names
of indicted looters of public treasury in the
APC neither did it include the names of
former PDP leaders who plundered public
treasury at different times since 1999 till
date but who are now sheltered in the APC.
Their identities are well known to the
Nigerian public. Nigerians must have been
terribly scandalised by the sheer double
standards exhibited by the APC government
in the attempt to point a finger of guilt at
the PDP as being a party of looters whereas
the remaining four fingers point back at it.
There is no own goal in a game of football
as exemplified by this treasury-looting game
that could be more lugubrious than this.
The faux pas has caused the Buhari
administration a collateral damage. Its socalled
integrity has been damaged. The
administration has unraveled as tentative
and lacking strategic capital to attract and
sustain the confidence of a distraught
population.
Rather than the cacophonous spat that the
PDP’s apology has precipitated, what we
should have seen happening really is a
season of somberness for the APC to look
back and assess its successes and failures
ahead of the 2019 general elections. It
should have, without the prompting of
Nigerians, embarked on an audit of its
campaign promises in a bid to account to
the Nigerian voters who invested their
mandate in its administration.
Since the APC came in the saddle amid
the perceived failures of the PDP to provide
leadership, it is in its place as the governing
party to tackle the problems inherited and
not to resort to incessant complaints about
the magnitude of the rot that the PDP
government left behind. Buhari was elected
to perform and not to complain. This is the
tragedy of the Buhari administration. It has
unraveled as incompetent and ineffective to
adopt the essential summation of former
President Olusegun Obasanjo.
Its latest frenzy to make political capital
out of the incongruous list of corrupt
politicians, which tended to portray indicted
politicians in its ranks and party as saints
and perhaps untouchables, is against the
run of morality, fairness and good
conscience.
The APC and the Buhari administration
are therefore complicit in providing cover
to a special breed of public treasury looters
whose sins are overlooked in furtherance of
some political considerations. This is an own
goal by them and Nigerians are laughing
at them in derision. Truth!
•Mr. Ojeifo, a journalist, wrote from Abuja.