Fresh from his 10-day working vacation in the British capital at the weekend, the media pointedly put the question to President Muhammadu Buhari on what Nigerians should expect from him going forward.
“More Nigerians”, he said, “are expecting that we are going to jail more of the thieves that brought economic problems to the country. I think that is being expected of ME and I will do it”.
No one, it seems to me, ever doubted where the president stood on the monster called corruption. However, if the expectation was that the rest period in the United Kingdom would have afforded our president ample time for deeper, perhaps more comprehensive reflection on those seemingly intractable problems that have hobbled past and current efforts to build a united, peaceful and prosperous country, it must have come to many as disappointing that he almost instinctively, relapsed into his now traditional default mode of chasing after the wind of the ‘looters’ of our commonwealth.
To start with, it should alarm Nigerians that the president will implicitly and perhaps most cavalierly, discount the strictures embedded in our constitutional order simply to press the case against the so-called looters even when they are yet to be put to trial. As far as yours truly can see, the president, as the symbol of executive authority, could cause the building of as many jailhouses as the national appropriation would permit; he could even sign as many executive orders to address perceived lacuna in the existing laws as he deems fit – the most recent being Executive Order No 6 which seeks to restrict the use of suspected stolen funds; nowhere in the constitution, it needs to be made clear, is the president empowered to declare any Nigerian a looter any more than the presidency could procure any extra-legal measures to put any citizen out of circulation – no matter how heinous or grievous the perceived misdeed might be.
That role, it bears stating, belongs exclusively to the judiciary.
That a president sworn to the observance of the due process and of the law would harbour such exaggerated notion of presidential powers would seem to me at the heart of all that is wrong with our country. The same would apply to the anti-graft and security agencies, all of which, in the frenzy of the moment forget that they are in fact creations of law, going overboard with mindless activism – despite the clear delineation of their roles as investigative and prosecutorial bodies – all in the cause of a so-called presidential anti-corruption agenda.
No doubt, the president may be right in his assumption about Nigerians sharing his revulsion for corruption. Most likely, they do. After all, they bear the direct consequences of the uncountable billions routinely filched from the treasury – monies that could have been judiciously deployed to improve their living conditions. What is debatable is whether they – by this I mean citizens – would tolerate means that are more foul than fair all in the name of stanching out the scourge. This is even more so, from a presidency, which although imbued with such awesome powers, have neither enhanced the institutional capacity of the anti-graft bodies to do the hard work, nor evolved a coherent strategy to stop corruption from budding.
Let me preface this by admitting that the president has done quite a lot to bring corruption into the front burner. Perhaps more than all the previous leaders before him, he has deployed the moral force of the bully pulpit to awaken Nigerians to the consciousness of the scourge as a lethal, not-too-silent killer of nations. The implementation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA), for instance, has not only eventuated in massive curbs in wastes in the federal bureaucracy in particular, it has somewhat, streamlined our public finance and its unfathomable processes. As it is, gone as it were, is the era where public officers, did as they pleased with public funds, only because their helmsmen thought little of the appropriation process.
Of course, we have seen a new zeal on the part of the anti-graft institutions to confront the menace, even if the agencies are still largely light years behind as far as the cutting edge technology required for the fight is concerned. This we must also admit is when showmanship is not allowed to undermine the rigour of due diligence needed to deliver. And with the judiciary recently providing a spark in what had hitherto proven to be an unwinnable war, a country primed to confront the un-silent killer has finally begun to emerge.
Clearly, while the economy may not have returned to robust health, the mindless haemorrhage is increasingly becoming history.
As important as these are, they are certainly not sufficient to deal a fatal blow on corruption. That factor, long lost in the current treatise on corruption in these parts, would again be missed by President Buhari in his single-minded resolve to herd the nation’s colony of looters into the jailhouse. That factor, if I may put it simply is the push for a fairer, more just and equitable society.
Surely, the fight is certainly not exclusively that of the executive to fight. While the president could prod the anti-graft agencies to investigate corruption whereever found, the job of determination or exculpation from guilt obviously lies with the judiciary. To go beyond that is to undermine the institutional integrity without which the body is at once reduced to an executive lackey.
But the more fatal is the assumption that the anti-corruption stands any real chance without a deliberate move to expand the frontiers of opportunity for everyone.
To be sure, that factor boils down to the basic question of how a diligent worker is expected to own a home without a mortgage system in place without dipping his finger into the treasury; we are not even talking here of a pensioner, who, after, toiling faithfully for 35 years in public service has nothing of shelter to boast of. Or a young man, who after spending more than decade in employment and on a salary that would hardly suffice to take him home, and with all the societal pressures, is nonetheless expected to cough out more than a million cash upfront to purchase a car in the absence of a functional credit system.
And we sure know how rents and wages are paid in these parts; whereas the former are in advance, sometimes as many as two years; the latter, which comes in trickles, are oftentimes hopelessly in arrears, sometimes for as much as six months as we have seen in some of the states in recent time!
That is the reality of our society. Time we began to evolve functional institutions in credit delivery.
It is not too late for the president to ponder on these even as he moves to expand the jailhouses.
