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In the twilight of President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration, the innately timid Nigerian leader made a slip – a very careless one at that – which the then ferocious opposition led by the incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari and his political allies feasted on with aggression.
During one of his media outings, the former president said to the shock of the nation and the world that, “stealing is not corruption” and his enemies, good at nothing but celebrating the fall of their rivals, immediately went to town and took their time to do a content analysis of that rather inane statement.
Long before or shortly after that, the incumbent Governor of Sokoto State, Aminu Tambuwal, who was then Speaker of the House of Representatives, added his voice to the demystification of the then president, when in his capacity as speaker, said Jonathan’s body language encouraged corruption.
It was generally one of the attacks that the former president didn’t quite recover from until he lost his re-election in 2015. Indeed, it formed the central campaign theme of the then intending Buhari government, which canvassed three sole agenda: corruption, security and economy.
Interestingly, while many other concerned Nigerians, who though were disappointed in the Jonathan administration warned that Buhari lacked the capacity for the things being attributed to him, Professor Junaid Mohammed, particularly gave an anecdote, which subtly suggested Buhari was incapable of fighting corruption.
In his otherwise disappointing story, Professor Mohammed told of how a certain Hassan Muazu, Director of Accounts at the now rested Petroleum Trust Fund, then headed by Buhari, had committed some financial infractions. The said Muazu, who is older than Buhari, is the elder brother to Air Vice Marshall Usman Muazu, former governor of the old Kaduna State, when Buhari was military president.
So, Mohammed did his findings, took the report to Buhari and a stupefied Buhari pleaded to let him carry out his own independent findings. He set up a team, including men of the DSS and police, and three months after the team submitted its report, Buhari sent for Mohammed.
At the meeting, which held at the PTF house, now the office of the ICPC in Abuja, Buhari confirmed to Mohammed that his findings were true and that his own team even discovered more infractions.
However, he said he could not do anything, because of his relationship with Muazu. Mohammed enjoined him to merely allow the law take its course and back off. But Buhari declined and that was the end of the matter.
Sadly, that was the man sold to Nigerians as the messiah that would fight corruption, when in actual fact he has no such capacity. The stench of corruption that daily oozes out of the corridor of power, is such that can never be made up for, definitely, not by Buhari, whose body language mystifies corruption.
His penchant for covering up his own in the face of obvious infractions demystifies the grounds upon which he was sold to the Nigeria people in the first place and subsequently elected. The sleaze is niggling and it’s made worse by the absence of a good and responsive leadership.
From his personal aides to his choice ministers, directors of parastatals and agencies as well as friends of the president, corruption is all they have in common and those that may suffer scapegoatism are definitely not in the category of the ones ‘clearing the treasury’ now.
Say it as it is: Buhari is a let down – total. He has done nothing but compound the woes of the Nigerian people. Argue all you want, he is not better than Jonathan.
That’s an assertion evidenced by facts, because in Buhari’s government, Jonathan’s assumption that stealing was not corruption has not only been affirmed, corruption has been upheld and institutionalised as a way of life!
To your tent oh Israel!
