Controversial scholar Femi Aribisala has stated that the Buhari’s administration is yet to launch any war against corruption and the administration does not look like tackling corruption anytime soon.
Speaking at the roundtable organized by the department of Jurisprudence and International Law, University of Lagos tagged “winning the war against corruption”, he stated that “There is no fight against corruption in Nigeria. And if there’s no fight against corruption, you can’t even talk about war…..The 2015 election was not an anti-corruption election. We did not have any political party that presented an anti-corruption mandate to us. The party that won the election was just a makeover of the PDP, I mean the PDP people moved from the PDP to the APC. If they were corrupt when they were in PDP, they became clean when they were in APC. So there is no mandate against corruption. If President Buhari was determined to fight against corruption, my feeling is that he gave up after losing election three times. Because the fourth time, he formed an alliance with people who he despised before. And they were not necessarily people who had a track record of being anti-corruption. So today, I don’t know who is anti-corruption”
Nothing that the present fight against corruption is an offshoot of Pdp’s institutions, the controversial scholar continued that “The institutional fight against corruption that has taken place to the extent that it has, took place under PDP. The institutional structures, even the ones that the present government is relying on, are PDP structures. Whether it is EFCC, ICPC, TSA, all these came under PDP. In ten months of Buhari’s government, there has been no institutional structure that has been laid against corruption. We have simple had media circuses accusing people of corruption. You cannot fight corruption with corruption. And corruption is more than just the stealing of money. If you disobey the rule of law, you have corrupted the system. If you create an avenue where you have a big margin between the official foreign exchange rate and the parallel market rate, there’s gonna be corruption. If you have children of the rich getting into the CBN on nepotistic grounds, the corruption is still with you. If you have a budget that is padded left right and centre, and after this was revealed you passed it and say only a small amount changed in it, and we do not know what is in the new budget, you can’t say you are against corruption. There is no transparency in any of these things.” Mr Aribisala received a clapping ovation from the guests who were mostly students.
The chairman of the occasion Prof Itse Sagay and former vice president of the World Bank Oby Ezekwesili chided the crowd for the ovation given to Mr Aribisala. Prof Sagay remarked that “We are not here to make students clap….We are here on a very serious business. And students, don’t behave like American electorates who are ignorant…This is not a venue for PDP campaign. Most inappropriate comment. We are here on serious business. Let’s maintain that seriousness,” he said.