Not a few Nigerians were compelled to pause and think over a recent report by this newspaper which strongly suggested that President Muhammadu Buhari was tinkering with granting blanket amnesty to treasury looters to encourage them return the monies they stole in billions from Nigerian coffers and stashed away in foreign havens. “Amnesty for looters may fast track the recovery of our national wealth… cornered by… few selfish Nigerians. The idea is that, with the amnesty, many looters will quietly return their stolen funds directly or indirectly to the federal government treasury… President Buhari has no money to implement the APC (All Progressives Congress) campaign promises to Nigerians. The only option now is for looters to return their stolen money…”, one portion of the report said.
The information coincided with a period when caustic ethnic, religious and political invectives were being hauled at Buhari government’s anti-corruption campaign, with the obvious aim of dampening the momentum or totally bringing it to a halt. Readily available for citation on the ethnic turf is Professor Ben Nwabueze’s (he needs no elaborate identification, being a former Minister of Education and renowned constitutional lawyer from the East of the Niger) grouse against Buhari government’s limitation of its anti-corruption probe to the immediate past government of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan. Some notable individuals and groups from the Niger-Delta still rue Jonathan’s loss in the last presidential election with seething anger as well, with some of them voicing their protests against what they perceived as the witch-hunt of their own; or Buhari’s hypocrisy in the prosecution of the anti-graft war. The Catholic Bishop in charge of Sokoto Diocese, Matthew Kuka, eminently amplifies the religious arsenal, though he claims being misunderstood or misrepresented. Kuka’s position, widely interpreted or misinterpreted to mean his prescription that Nigeria remains in sin that grace may abound, is as follows: “I think this whole thing about probes and probes, there are no probes in a democracy… We are only saying a lot of this kind of speculation about probes is a distraction that nobody needs. So the most important thing is that we need a stable country first before we can talk about these things (probes)…”.
The political void is eminently filled by the former ruling party, the now opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which says the ruling APC, “in trying to escalate their stock-in-trade of lies, wild allegations and falsehood, … failed to understand that their ‘baseless’ fabrications are capable of throwing an unsuspecting nation into chaos”. The PDP was reacting to a recent claim by the APC of massive looting of the nation’s treasury amounting to N4.1trn and $33.06bn between 2009 and 2015. The funds APC alleged were creamed off included N3.8trn out of the N8.1trn earned from crude oil between 2012 and 2015, withheld by the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC); $2.1bn from Excess Crude Account (ECA) unaccounted for; Department of Petroleum Resources’ (DPR) unremitted N109.7bn royalty from oil firms; $6bn allegedly looted by some ministers of the Jonathan administration; and 160 million barrels of crude worth $13.9bn lost between 2009 and 2012. Others were $15m from botched arms deals, yet to be returned to Nigeria; $13bn in Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) dividends mostly unaccounted for; N30bn rice waiver and N183bn unaccounted for at the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC).
Indeed, Chairman of the committee raised by the National Economic Council (NEC) to investigate revenue generating agencies and Edo State Governor, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, revealed lately, in addition, that the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) earned N162bn and spent N160 billion in one year. In other words, NPA remitted a paltry N2bn out of the N162bn it generated in a year to government treasury and spent the whopping balance of N160bn on itself. Oshiomhole said another revenue generating agency failed to remit a kobo to the Federation Account from the taxes it collected based on spurious claims that what it generated was not enough to fund its operations. What a nation suffused in impunity! In truth, Buhari’s administration enjoys local and international goodwill today because the general belief that it is capable of tracking and rooting out corruption and its multiplier effects, including insurgency, from Nigeria, certainly not by granting amnesty to or placating corrupt fellows, but by recovering their loot and prosecuting and jailing those of them deserving of prison terms. We predict Buhari government’s eventual doom should it allow its focus to be swayed by ethnic, religious or political sentiments, and fail in delivering this all-important local and global expectation.
