If President Buhari’s pledge to fight corruption was a calculated ploy to win votes, it was a good one.  It probably won him a significant number which, added to the massive sectarian support he received, pushed him across the finish line.  Many older Nigerians believed his corruption-fight proposal because in his first coming as military dictator (1984-85) he also tried to hold the looters to some reckoning.  His problem then was the alliance of lawyers, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), and the politicians.
He got rid of lawyers’ rigmarole by instituting the “special military tribunals” (SMT) chaired by military officers with a high court judge as a member to ascertain that the proceedings do not go contrary to law.  When, however, he was ousted in 1985, the judgments of the SMTs unraveled.  It is clear to any honest observer that when he finally won the presidency in 2015 in a democratic election, he must have vowed, “never again,” he, this time, must go by the book.
The fight began positively with credible recoveries and arraignments.  But after nearly two years it seems to have stalled and in jeopardy because Buhari’s office is in disarray for mysterious reasons.  The administration’s acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Mr. Ibrahim Magu, has now been recommended for confirmation to the Senate on two occasions by President Buhari.  And on two occasions has the Senate withheld its confirmation on the strength of a report emanating, ironically, from the Director of the Department of State Services, a government agency directly under the control of the President’s office.  This is the last cloud that has enveloped the fight against corruption, and which signals the eventual unraveling of Buhari’s second effort.
During the 2015 campaign, Buhari spoke of Nigeria being a nation paralyzed by endemic institutionalized corruption.  His political party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) promised “to prevent abuse of executive, legislative and public offices through greater accountability, transparency and strict enforcement of anti-corruption laws whilst strengthening the EFCC and the ICPC.” The APC also committed itself to amending “the Constitution to remove immunity from prosecution for elected officers in criminal cases” and to get “local governments to publish their meeting minutes, service performance data, and items of spending over N10 million.”
When President Muhammadu Buhari publicly declared his assets and the Vice President Yemi Osinbajo did the same, Nigeria was agog that a new movement against corruption was afoot.  Soon a rash of arrests of top officials of the defeated Goodluck Jonathan administration and some members of the then ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), seemed indicative that a new era was on the horizon.  Soon, a couple of senior military officers were accused to having misapplied billions of Naira which should have been used in the prosecution of the war against the terrorist group, Boko Haram.
The first bad sign was the total indifference of the new ruling party to the corruption fight, majority of them, and former members of the defeated PDP.  Excepting Senator Shehu Sani, former civil rights activist, no other member of the now ruling APC elected to follow the example of the President and Vice President in declaring publicly his or her assets.  No member in the hierarchy of the party did so, no member of the House of Representatives did so, nor any member in the states houses of assembly.  In other words, there was no sign that the party wished to identify with the fight against corruption in any visible way.
There could be no doubt that the pervasive influence of corruption in Nigeria would require considerable mobilization to break the noise barrier and make any real impression.  Nothing of the sort has happened.  The President as the moral leader of the nation had demonstrated his sincerity by declaring his assets but he seems not to have been willing or able to persuade his colleagues top embrace the idea.  The arraignments have not yielded a single conviction.
If the war on corruption had yielded little results in the executive and judicial branches, it did even worse in the legislative branch where corruption and brazen abuse of office has continued and seems to have grown worse.  It reached a crescendo last year when allegations of fraud against the House leadership were made by the Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, Abdulmumin Jibrin, when he fell out with the Speaker, Dr. Yakubu Dogara.
Now, corruption in Nigeria cannot begin to be addressed because the National Assembly, that is, the Senate and the House of Representatives, is the front and centre and even when the members are caught red-handed, nothing ever comes out of it.  It is the most out of control institution in the world, without accountability, its finances conducted in utter secrecy, its earnings the deepest of secrets in the world.  Jibrin was perhaps the first honest member of the top hierarchy of the National Assembly to admit on television and speak to Nigerians frankly that there is endemic corruption in the Assembly.  Nigerians already knew that but he underscored the difference between incidental corruption, opportunistic corruption and systemic corruption.  The corruption in the National Assembly he stated clearly is institutional and deserves nothing short of a revolutionary action to alter, change or remove it.
But even more fundamental is that the National Assembly is the hub of Nigerian democratic experiment and, thus, if the headwaters are soiled, it is unrealistic to expect to get clean water downstream…  The fish, they say, rots from its head and that has been the situation from 1999.  The budget padding scandal of 2016 was a once in lifetime opportunity for the Buhari administration to cleanse the National Assembly, especially, when an insider was willing to lead the way to get the chambers reformed.  But the Buhari administration dithered and let the House hound Jibrin into exile.  Nigerians are simmering quietly and many have quietly concluded that the Buhari fight against corruption has ended in one of the greatest disappointments in public policy ever attempted.
The National Assembly is an everyday scandal.  It is the only one of its kind in the world which has forced a member to flee the country.  Arguably, it is the world’s largest collection of ethically challenged people.  The Ibrahim Magu controversy would have been funny if not that it illustrates how dysfunctional the realm has become and why, in terms of corruption, the country is taking a backward step.

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