Nigeria is an intriguingly bizarre place. It is a country where absurdities have obtained legitimacy and are oftentimes dismissed with flimsy excuses. It is a place where leaders detest accountability and often make blank statements that they don’t intend to remember. Little wonder why politicians in Nigeria make weird promises, before, during, and after elections that they do not even intend to remember.
A few days ago, Nigeria’s ‘President-select’, Bola Ahmed Tinubu gave Nigerians a reason to laugh again after a long season of gloom and pain. His sense of humour was topnotch in Port Harcourt, Rivers State when he informed Nigerians about his plans to fight corruption. It was really amusing because when the deity of corruption becomes an anti-corruption champion in a country, it only says so much about how low the bars have dropped.
Not too long ago, many Nigerians watched as Tinubu uttered his long lists of incomprehensible gibberish during the campaign season. In the midst of the confusion, he couldn’t find a place to squeeze anti-corruption fight rhetorics into his campaigns like his partner in failure, President Muhammadu Buhari did when he ran for office. Fighting corruption could not even get a proper mention in the well-packaged 80-page campaign manifesto which was tagged ‘Renewed Hope 2023 – Action Plan for a Better Nigeria’ by his handlers. It was obvious to many that the self-styled Jagaban was not sold to fighting corruption.
Some have rightly suggested that there was an unwritten agreement between Tinubu and his fellow gerontocrat and top challenger of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar not to campaign against corruption openly as that will imply nailing themselves to the cross with their own hands. They kept to this agreement to the best of their abilities and only mentioned corruption in hushed tones using innuendos and dry humour. All that is now are old tales because, as anticipated, the self-styled Jagaban got the better of the system and secured for himself the Nigerian Presidency.
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What has now left many Nigerians amused is how Tinubu has now suddenly found his lost voice against corruption, a vice he swims in. While commissioning projects for Governor Nyesome Wike who shares so much affinity with corruption, he announced to Nigerians that corruption will soon be a thing of the past the moment he takes the oath of office. Such an irony!
Tinubu should be more bothered that the global perception held by many is that a Tinubu presidency would battle everything but corruption. He already has a pedigree of an insider-outsider in the sewage of corruption. Just a few days ago, the internet was awash with a report that linked him with twenty high net-worth properties in the United Kingdom, which allegedly belong to him and his close associates and which were mostly acquired when Tinubu was the governor of Lagos State.
The President-elect, while inaugurating the Magistrate Courts Complex in Port Harcourt, he promised to make corruption unattractive to judges and other judicial officials. By his calculations, with the right incentives that guarantee a conducive working atmosphere and policies that make it easy for workers to acquire credit facilities for essential needs, the temptation for corruption would reduce. He certainly forgot that with highly corrupt politicians like him still running Nigeria, corruption was only going to continue to multiply and become more entrenched in the system.
To combat this pandemic of corruption in the judiciary, Tinubu’s submission to tackle the epidemic is through what he described as ‘the right incentives’ clearly shows that he either does not understand judicial corruption or is just being too simplistic. It is laughable that his proffer to deal with the octopodal dragons of judicial corruption is merely to throw money and comfort at judicial officers. This definitely cannot work. First is that, corrupt Nigerians today have not succeeded in drawing a line on when enough is actually enough. They amass sickening wealth that fails logic and common sense. To be clear, Tinubu was either uttering things he didn’t understand or apparently seeking judicial officers who live in a sequestered world, pampered so well that they are insulated from the vermin of corruption, away from the rest of the country.
For a man that promoted and institutionalised corruption in his private estate called Lagos State, saying he was going to fight corruption as President was not only sacrilegious, it was indeed an assault on the sensibility of Nigerians. For an embodiment of corruption whose life has been built around state capture and the control of how public funds are distributed among stooges, Tinubu was most likely hallucinating when he made that pledge.
Given that Tinubu is in search of corruption to frontally confront and eliminate, one will have expected to begin the ‘war’ by purging himself of graft and illicit practices. How can a man who allegedly owns Alpha Beta Consulting Limited and Alpha Beta LLP through which Lagos State is raped every day without condoms be spewing garbage about the corruption fight? How can a man whose election was funded with stolen public wealth be talking about fighting corruption? How can a man who blatantly rigged an election where he was roundly rejected by the new anti-corruption crusader in town? It beggars belief and defeats every logic because there is no record anywhere to show that there has ever been a time when corruption fought corruption and succeded.
Tinubu’s commitment to corruption is no longer news to most Nigerians. If there was a title as the ambassador of corruption, it will have been most deserving for the man from Irabiji. Through his stint as Governor of Lagos State and subsequent elevation to the godfather role he now occupies, his brain has always been busy with producing menacing ideas filled with deplorable wisdom and economic practices that were geared towards converting Lagos State to his personal property. He supervised the decay of ethics in the state, coordinated the dearth of accountability, and encouraged cronyism which has ensured that despite the humongous resources available to Lagos State, it is one of the worst cities in the world to live in.
Just to oil Tinubu’s political machines in Lagos State, billions of Naira which are generated from markets and businesses in Lagos are rechanneled into thousands of private pockets in such a manner that will leave anyone with a conscience dumbfounded and enraged. Unfortunately, Tinubu has mastered the art of using propaganda to hoodwink the gullible masses coupled with an unrestrained ability to deploy thugs to quell any form of dissent.
To his credit, Tinubu knows the power of money and equally understands human frailty. In the last 24 years, he has managed to amass prodigious wealth. He has continued to control the levers of power in Lagos State despite being out of office since 2007. Many Nigerians are yet to come to terms with the fact that he decides who gets what in Lagos State. He is rich, very wealthy without any known or quoted businesses. On several occasions, he has even come out to publicity boast of his massive wealth and how he owns two private jets and pours millions of dollars into the governorship aspirations of candidates running for elections around Nigeria.
How can a man like Tinubu fight corruption? Where will the moral latitude come from? A man who didn’t run a state through impersonal administration, but rather through, patronage and kinship. Bribery and abuses always occurred in governments, of course. But under Bola Tinubu’s reign in Lagos, they became the norm: no longer abuses of a system, but an alternative system in itself. Everything was bought and sold: Speaker of the State House, judges’ verdicts, and tax assessments. Appointments to the lucrative Council Areas across Lagos became a supermarket of power.
If there is any iota of sincerity or seriousness in Tinubu to fight corruption, he should start by publicly and personally addressing Nigerians on the uncountable allegations of corruption, including the Alpha Beta cases and alleged improper acquisition and conversion of Lagos State Government landed properties worth billions of naira to himself, family, associates, and cronies which he has continued to subtly deny or totally ignore.
In conclusion, Nigerians must brace themselves for the coming years. If corruption could fertilize, grow, and germinate under President Buhari who was sold as a corrupt-free old general, then the ugly pandemic will certainly get worse under a Tinubu whose history simply indicates that he will make the atmosphere free for corruption to luxuriate, flower, and flourish. Tinubu’s anti-corruption call is simply ludicrous at best.
