By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi President Muhammadu Buhari is infamously impervious to, and even contemptuous of...
By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:@farooqkperogi
President Muhammadu Buhari is infamously impervious to, and even
contemptuous of, public opinion. That’s why his order to fire Abdulrasheed
Maina who was surreptitiously reinstated into the civil service and promoted to
the next level in spite of weighty allegations of corruption against him was
both refreshing and pleasantly surprising.
Of course, the real, far-reaching surprise would be if the
president is able to summon the testicular fortitude to fire the people who
conspired to pull off this audacious perversion of justice and civil service
protocols.
While it’s gratifying that the president has asked that the
issue be thoroughly investigated, the fate of previous investigations of
corruption involving people close to the president (such as Babachir David
Lawal) doesn’t inspire confidence that anything earthshaking will come out of
this.
But maybe—just maybe—the president has now had enough and is
determined to salvage what remains of his severely diminished reputation
through a full-throated attack on the corruption of not just his political
opponents but also of his close associates, which is frankly the sincerest test
of his will to fight corruption.
The Head of Service of the Federation, the Minister of
Interior, the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, and other
co-conspirators may yet get the boot. Should that happen, I’d be one of the
people whose confidence in the president would be restored. But don't hold your
breath.
What’s most significant, though, is the fact that
Abdulrasheed Maina is not an aberration in this administration. He is merely an
addition to a list that is already distressingly long. Let me recapitulate a
few names that are going the rounds in Nigerian social media circles.
A certain Louis Edozien who was fired in 2014 as Executive
Director at the Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC) for failure to
produce authentic credentials during an audit was reinstated and promoted to
the position of Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Works, Power and Housing
in November 2016. NDPHC’s General Manager in charge of audit and compliance by
the name of Mrs. Maryam Mohammed who audited Edozien’s credentials and
recommended his firing was unjustly fired last year in apparent retaliatory vendetta.
The position of Permanent Secretary is normally the crowning
accomplishment of career civil servants, but Edozien isn’t a career civil
servant and shouldn’t be a permanent secretary, according to the Daily Trust of October 20, 2017, which said “highly placed officials in the
presidency facilitated” this rape of justice. SaharaReporters of October 12, 2017 was blunter: “Mr. Edozien is a friend and business
partner to Mr. [Abba] Kyari,” it wrote. “The Chief of Staff's daughter also
worked directly under Mr. Edozien.”
Interestingly, although the president reversed the dismissal
of Mrs. Mohammed after she wrote to him directly, Abba Kyari allegedly
overruled the president and, the woman, who is the mother of orphans, is still
unemployed. In many respects, this eclipses the impunity and scandalousness of
Maina’s reinstatement and promotion.
There is also the case of a Chief Registrar of the Supreme
Court by the name of Ahmed Gambo Saleh who, along with two others, was charged
with a N2.2 billion fraud on November 3, 2016. “The defendants are specifically
accused of conspiracy, criminal breach of trust and taking gratification by
Public officers contrary to Section 10 (a) (i) of the Independent Corrupt
Practices and other related Offences Act 2000 and punishable under the same
section of the Act,” according to the Sun of November 4, 2016.
The same Saleh who hasn’t (yet) been absolved from the
charges against him was appointed Executive Secretary of the National Judicial
Council (NJC) on July 1, 2017. I know it’s technically outside the powers of
the president to intervene in issues involving another branch of government, but
we all know that the nocturnal bust of the homes of judges, including Supreme
Court justices, by Nigeria’s secret police in October 2016 had a stark,
unmistakable presidential imprimatur emblazoned all over it.
There is another “Maina” serving as a minister in Buhari’s
cabinet. According to the Premium Times of October 26, 2016, Buhari’s
Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Usani Usani, “was charged with fraud 15 years
ago, after he was indicted in 2000 by the government of Cross River State where
he served as a commissioner.” His indictment, the paper added, “is documented
in a state government White Paper.” It can’t get any more empirically
verifiable than that. Yet the man still serves as a minister in a government
that bills itself as an “anti-corruption” government.
The list goes on, but I’ll stop here because of the
constraints of space and time. It is ironic that a government with this depth
and breadth of love affair with corrupt people has the chutzpah to talk about
“fighting corruption.” But the clearest sign that this government is a joke and
that it’s “anti-corruption” fight is an even bigger joke came on October 25
when a presidential news release blamed “invisible hands” from the Goodluck
Jonathan administration for the Maina embarrassment.
“[S]ome influential
officials loyal to the previous government may have been the invisible hand in
the latest scandal that saw the return of Maina to the public service, despite being
on the EFCC’s wanted list,” the statement said.
When I first read it on a listserv on Wednesday, I thought
it was a spoof and let out a burst of deep, loud, hearty laughter. I said it
was impossible for this to be true until I read it in respected traditional
news outlets. I give up. The battle has been lost irretrievably.
Buhari’s Commendable
Biafra Gesture
News that Buhari has approved the payment of pension to
ex-Biafran police officers who served on the rebel side during Nigeria’s
30-month Civil War from 1967 to 1970 is heartening. It is little symbolic
gestures like this that nurture national cohesion.
National cohesion won’t magically emerge out of thin air
because some leader proclaimed that Nigeria’s unity is “settled” and
“non-negotiable”—or that the question of Nigeria’s unity had been settled with
some rebel leader at a private meeting. Nation-building is never “settled” and
is always in a state of negotiation and renegotiation.
Unity is consciously sowed, watered, and nourished by acts
of kindness to the disadvantaged, by equity and justice to all, by
consensus-building, by deliberate healing of the existential wounds that
naturally emerge in our interactions are constituents of a common national
space, and by acknowledging and working to cover our ethnic, religious,
regional, and cultural fissures.
If Buhari, from the incipience of his presidency, had
offered this sort of olive branch to parts of Nigeria that didn’t vote for him,
we won’t have the current immobilizing fissiparity that is threatening to tear
down the very foundation of the country. But it’s never too late to do the
right thing.
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