Clarity at last

Editorial

Ever since his emergence as military Head of State after the overthrow of President Shehu Shagari’s administration in December, 1983, President Muhamadu Buhari has maintained a passionate following in many quarters for his perceived fierce opposition to corruption. During its approximately one year in power before its overthrow, the Buhari-Idiagbon dictatorship hauled several elected public officers of the Second Republic before military tribunals which tried and convicted many of them to long years of imprisonment for corrupt enrichment.

On his assumption of office once again, this time as an elected president in 2015, Buhari’s anti-corruption credentials remained one of his strongest political assets. His austere lifestyle and comparatively negligible personal acquisitions despite the prominent positions he had held at various levels strengthened Buhari’s reputation for moral integrity.

Despite some of the criticisms levelled against the conduct of its offensive against corruption, the Buhari presidency has succeeded in retrieving humongous amounts of stolen public funds and physical assets at home and abroad. And even with the constraints of the country’s ponderous and complicated legal judicial process, the administration has secured a number of high profile convictions to its credit.

Yet, one baffling aspect of President Buhari’s anti-corruption posture has been his perceived indifference to, or cavalier dismissal of grave allegations of massive looting of public funds under the watch of former dictator, General Sani Abacha, between 1995 and 1998. The President had hitherto never denied statements widely credited to him to the effect that charges of corruption against the Abacha regime were untrue.

Some attributed his stance to the fact that Buhari served as Chairman of the defunct Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF) under Abacha and since there is no proven record of fraud in that agency, which controlled substantial funds during the period, Buhari believes accusations of massive stealing under Abacha to be exaggerated.

But then this position is difficult to sustain logically, especially since previous administrations before the current one had succeeded in getting large sums of the derisively labelled ‘Abacha loot’ repatriated to the country. If there was no loot, where then was the returned money coming from? Happily, the President has apparently changed his position as reflected in an article he published in ‘Newsweek’, a magazine published in the United States, recently.

In the article, Buhari expressed his administration’s gratitude to such countries as the US, UK and Switzerland for their return of “close to $1 billion of funds stolen from the people of Nigeria under a previous, undemocratic junta in the 1990s that have now been returned to our country”. Although he did not specifically refer to the Abacha regime by name, there can be no doubt as to which government the article referred to.

It would surely have been ridiculous for the president to continue to insist that the allegations against Abacha were fictional following the return of such magnitude of the stolen loot to our coffers. This new clarity is welcome. We hope it will also usher in a new era in the handling of public information on all retrieved stolen funds and what they are expended on. It is commendable in this regard that the administration is sticking to its pledge to commit the newly repatriated fund to the expeditious completion of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Abuja-Kano road and the Second Niger Bridge.

However, the Buhari administration should be worried that the scale of looting of public resources continues apace long after Abacha’s demise. There is indeed no guarantee that the magnitude of stolen funds since then has not far exceeded the Abacha scale now. Many public officers appear to have mastered the art of looting public funds even while appearing to adhere to due process. The Buhari presidency must get smarter and more ingenious in its anti-corruption war if it is to bequeath an enduring legacy in this regard in the remainder of its tenure.