The former minister of justice Mohammed Adoke recently criticized the former president Muhammadu Buhari for having “the most incompetent government we have ever seen in our country,” but Mallam Garba Shehu slammed him as the epitome of corruption. Adoke was harsh in his comments, noting that Buhari was the most stupid leader Nigeria has ever had and would ever have again and that a group of political idiots he personally put together had made it possible for him to damage the country. That was a complete defeat.
The expected response came from Shehu, Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity: “The fact that this individual (Adoke) is a free man, walking away from the industrial corruption their administration put on the 200 million-plus Nigerians is an Eighth Wonder.” Nigerians wouldn’t have cared if he had stopped there since it would have been, to borrow a cliche, “two fighting.”
According to a lot of Nigerians, Buhari and Adoke are just two crooked officials. But if there is a debate over which administration is more corrupt—the one Adoke served in or Buhari’s administration—many will concur that Buhari takes the prize, which is the exact point that the intrepid Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, Matthew Kukah, made recently when he said that Nigeria “saw the ugliest phase of corruption whether in moral terms, financial terms, and other terms” under Buhari.
The joke is therefore on Garba Shehu and his degraded character when he offends Nigerians’ sensitivities by asserting that “the success of the Buhari government in the direction of the battle against corruption is unprecedented.” But he is not to fault for such a heinous slur. I hold President Bola Tinubu accountable for allowing Buhari to live a free life instead of doing his eight years in prison for wrecking Nigeria. While the Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly, Mudashiru Obasa, has been exonerated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) of corruption, Tinubu is waging his own phantom war against corruption instead of entangling Buhari in it by detaining the suspended Central Bank governor, Godwin Emefiele, and the EFCC chairman, Abdulrasheed Bawa.
As a result of an EFCC application, the Federal High Court in Lagos froze the bank accounts of Obasa, a political ally of Tinubu, in September 2020. However, on August 16, 2023, Justice Nicholas Oweibo granted an application from Obasa’s attorneys to unfreeze his three accounts, which are located at Standard Chartered Bank, without the EFCC’s objection. These accounts, according to the EFCC, were under investigation three years ago “for the offences of conspiracy, diversion of funds, abuse of office, and money laundering.” What then transpired? Has the inquiry been finished, and no suspicious findings have been made? I’ll leave that aside, though. To return to Buhari.
The musical chairs game is not shocking to anyone. Nigeria is in disarray. However, the greater tragedy is that Buhari, who got us to this awful state, is currently on an unwarranted vacation in Daura as his successor picks up where he left off in the pretentious anti-corruption discourse. However, nobody is tricked. However, the nemo dat premise goes beyond legalese.
However favorable the optics of Emefiele’s imprisonment may be for the Tinubu administration, intelligent Nigerians are neither impressed nor duped. And they won’t be until the master puppeteer, the one who almost destroyed Nigeria’s social cohesiveness along with its economy and politics, takes responsibility for his leadership. Everything that could go wrong for Nigeria under Buhari did go wrong, not because decay was inevitable, but rather because he purposefully put the country on a precipice, which is the exact point that Muhammadu Sanusi, the former emir of Kano, made recently when he said that Nigeria was living a false life under Buhari.
They treated the economy as they saw fit and disregarded advice from specialists, according to Sanusi. Only sycophancy was successful in the previous eight years. The sycophants exchanged N540 for dollars they had purchased for N400. Due to his ability to purchase dollars at one rate and sell them at another, an untrained child with no history of service now owns a private jet and homes in Dubai and England. The Central Bank was lent about N30 trillion.
Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president, describes it as reckless. Obasanjo claimed that Buhari was careless with the economy of Nigeria in an interview with TheCable. “Buhari was splurging cash carelessly. I am aware of Buhari’s economic ignorance. I recorded that in my book. But I had no idea he was also capable of such irrationality,” he admitted. Olawale Edun, the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance under Tinubu, accused Buhari of running an economy with weak and declining currency, poor growth, and double-digit inflation. “If we remember back to the last time when the economy was steady, increasing, when inflation was low, and the interest rate was affordable, that was roughly ten years ago. At his first press conference, he stated that growth was roughly 6% in 2013 and 2014.
Even Kayode Fayemi, a former governor of Ekiti State, acknowledged this week that Nigeria’s last period of economic growth occurred under Jonathan’s rule. The protest that followed the elimination of fuel subsidies under President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration in 2012 was politically motivated, Fayemi, who served as Buhari’s Minister of Solid Minerals for four years, also acknowledged. In the past, Vice President Kashim Shettima had acknowledged that Nigeria’s economy was in a terrible state, blaming it on the stupidity of the Buhari administration for enslaving an otherwise excellent country with bad leadership.
When he served as petroleum minister, corruption in the oil industry spread to the point where whatever crimes Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke was accused of were trivialized. Nigeria effectively turned into a criminal organization under Buhari’s leadership, and he was at the epicenter of the coordinated heist that took place at the Central Bank, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, and all the other government ministries, departments, and agencies that were controlled by his henchmen.
Nigerians need to be aware of what transpired while Sadiya Umar Farouq was in charge of the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management, and Social Development. Nigerians need to be aware of Hadi Sirika’s involvement in the Nigeria Air project. Festus Keyamo, the new minister of aviation and aerospace development, cannot simply halt the project; Nigerians demand to know what transpired.
What about Abubakar Malami, a former minister of justice, and the contentious business dealings he is said to have handled, such as the sale of assets worth billions of naira that politically exposed people had forfeited to the EFCC? Tinubu must go all out while the CBN officials are being questioned. Examining Buhari is necessary. He was in charge of that administration. When will the Tinubu government question Buhari and those in his inner circle about their crime against the Nigerian state should be the question on the minds of all well-meaning Nigerians right now.
Why is it not too early to pursue CBN officials, I ask people who might object, given the possibility that it is too early? When will the current CBN forensic probe be expanded to include the oil sector, where Buhari served as the de facto Petroleum Minister for eight years? These inquiries are pertinent given that any anti-corruption campaign in the post-Buhari era that leaves out the Daura herdsmen will be a sham.
