EBERE WABARA ewabara@yahoo.com 08055001948

SOMEWHAT, plomb, I had always be­lieved that the Goodluck Jonathan ad­ministration was the worst in corruption rating the country has ever had under a civilian leadership. Transparency Inter­national by its reportage of our country’s corruption profile on a global reckoning erased any modicum of doubt or uncer­tainty I may have developed. I had never believed any regime would be as bad as the Second Republic National Party of Nigeria (NPN) let alone surpassing the official banditry record of that time.

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) remains the worst political association Nigeria has had and may ever have. Ev­erything about it was just ignominable and was (yes, it is gradually becoming history hence my deliberate usage of the past tense) reckless and deviantly unscrupulous with our national patri­mony. God will never allow us to expe­rience such a callous group populated mostly by devilish kleptomaniacs, some of whom have ended up in the hallowed Chambers of the Senate after yet another round of electoral theft.

This is not to say, however, that the other political parties—defunct or exist­ing—were/are not almost as bad as the PDP. The only difference, for instance, is that the All Progressives Congress (APC) does not have the same level of impunity and unconscionable banditry adrenalin. In terms of membership and individualistic records, both organisa­tions are peopled by the same characters united be vaulting personal desires ag­gregated on unique platforms that have nothing to do with self-dignity, propriety or the common good of their followers.

In other words, no political party mem­ber should gloat over anything credible whether in the oppositional frame or cur­rency of rulership.

The truth of the matter, which nobody can contradict, is that the APC has as many corrupt politicians as the PDP, if not more! For most people, the ony ray of hope is the impeccable nature of Buhari. Remove President Buhari and it would be a thin line between the PDP and the APC, most especially in the absence of profound and enduring ideologies.

The only assurance I have is that with the sterling personage of President Mu­hammadu Buhari, Nigeria is on a re­demptive thrust, by the grace of God. It can no longer be business as usual. Ev­eryone has to sit up. It was God’s inter­vention that threw up Buhari.

I do not agree that his emergence was a function of pressure on the electoral pro­cess that foreclosed anything contrary, as declared by President Buhari in Wash­ington DC, USA, last week. I cannot imagine what this country would have become if Dr. Jonathan had returned.

Last Wednesday during his visit to the USA, President Buhari declared to the world that ministers and other govern­ment officials in the immdiate-past ad­ministration stole one million barrels of oil daily! You wonder how much is left for the nation in the sordid circumstance. The situation is so bad that a national newspaper in reporting the magnitude of the matter emotively used “loot­ing” and “stealing” contemporaneously without caring a hoot about etymologi­cal abuse! The thievishness is better captured in President Buhari’s words: “We are now looking for evidences of shipping some of our crude, their des­tination and where and which accounts where the monies are being kept.

“When we get as much as we can get as soon as possible, we would approach those countries to freeze those accounts and go to court, prosecute those people and let the accounts be taken to Nigeria.

“250,000 barrels per day of Nigerian crude are being stolen and people sell and put the money into individual ac­counts.

The amount of money is mind-boggling but we have started getting documents.“We have started getting documents where some of the senior people in government, former minis­ters, some of them had as much as five accounts and were moving about one million barrel per day on their own.

“We have started getting those docu­ments. Whichever documents we are able to get and subsequently trace the sale of the crude or transfer of money from ministries, departments and the Central Bank, we will ask for the co­operation of those countries to return those monies to the federation accounts and we will use those documents to ar­rest those people and prosecute them. This, I promise Nigerians.

“A lot of damage has been done to the integrity of Nigeria with individu­als and institutions already and institu­tions already compromised”.I am sure that the intractable challenge of man­aging the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), which is the bed­rock and engine room of corruption in the sector, will soon be sanitised with the second coming of President Buhari. It is unfortunate that past governments skirted around it and allegedly benefit­ted from the looting spree hence their in­capacitation. With the man in the saddle now, that is unthinkable.

The corporation unwittingly has be­come a parallel government with so much crude money that its management has no regard for due process, the coun­try’s laws and peculiarities. Over the years, so much had been expected of the NNPC with nothing to cheer about.

The time has come for the Econom­ic and Financial Cimes Commission (EFCC) and other anti-graft agencies to close in on the NNPC and other federal institutions neck-deep in sharp practices of monumental proportions. Nigerians must synergize on the hot chase after oil thieves and other scammers.

They have collectively pauperized those of us outside the corridors of pow­er. The Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) must discover its groove as the EFCC has just begun to rediscover its own even if sluggishly.

Cleansing of the Augean stables should be extended to the national legis­lature where some immediate-past gov­ernors who could not pay workers’ sala­ries are now positioning themselves for the leadership of the National Assembly.

I plead with President Buhari to expe­dite action on apprehending the thievish ex-ministers and to extend his search­light to other institutions and democratic organs, particularly state independent electoral commissions where imme­diate-past governors made a bazaar of polls that culminated in the enthrone­ment of their puppets. With President Buhari, all forms of official roguishness have ended!

http://sunnewsonline.com/new/nigerias-thievish-ex-ministers/

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Well captured. Nigeria is on the rise to greatness.
No thief shall go unpunished.
PMB to the rescue

The TI rating for Nigeria was rigged throughout . The resident representative should be sent packing .

Nice one.

Cc: lalasticlala Ishilove