“You cannot fight corruption with corruption”
– Aribisala says President Buhari gave up the fight against corruption after losing election three times
– Aribisala says there is no mandate against corruption
– The renowned scholar says the current fight against corruption by the President Muhammadu Buhari government is merely a fight against the PDP
Femi Aribisala, scholar and international affairs expert has criticized President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption war.
Giving a ten minute speech at a round table organized by the Department of Jurisprudence and International Law in the University of Lagos on Thursday, March 31, Aribisala says there is no mandate against corruption, Premium Times reports.
Speaking at the event tagged “Winning the War Against Corruption”, an opportunity to launch the book ‘Legal Perspectives to Corruption, Money Laundering, and Assets Recovery in Nigeria,’ Aribisala added that if President Buhari was determined to fight corruption, he gave up after losing election three times.
The occasion began with the keynote speech ‘Rule of Law and Treatment of Politically Exposed Persons in Corruption Cases’ delivered by Femi Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria.
Falana, who was represented by Wahab Shittu, advocated the creation of special courts to handle corruption cases.
However, a verbal battle will erupt after Aribisala, took to the podium to discuss Falana’s speech.
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Aribisala said: “There is no fight against corruption in Nigeria. And if there’s no fight against corruption, you can’t even talk about war.”
Femi Aribisala criticizes President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption war
He then launched an Oby Ezekwesili, a former World Bank vice president who had earlier defined corruption as “the abuse of public space for private gains”.
Aribisala said: “Corruption cannot be narrowly defined the way Dr. Ezekwesili defined it, only relating to public institutions. We are corrupt in Nigeria. The plumber, the tailor, the whole society is corrupt.
“And we have not yet taken a decision, we have not yet gotten to a point where we are fed up. I mean, she (Mrs. Ezekwesili) had given an example of Hong Kong where people became fed up and said enough is enough. We have not reached that situation yet, I don’t know why not, but we certainly have not.
“The 2015 election was not an anti-corruption election. We did not have any political party that presented an anti-corruption mandate to us. The party that won the election was just a makeover of the PDP, I mean the PDP people moved from the PDP to the APC. If they were corrupt when they were in PDP, they became clean when they were in APC.
“So there is no mandate against corruption. If President Buhari was determined to fight against corruption, my feeling is that he gave up after losing election three times.
“Because the fourth time, he formed an alliance with people who he despised before. And they were not necessarily people who had a track record of being (sic) anti-corruption. So today, I don’t know who is anti-corruption.”
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According to Aribisala, the current fight against corruption by the President Muhammadu Buhari government is merely a fight against the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
He said: “We have to make up our minds if we really want to deal with the question of corruption. If we want to deal with the question of corruption, Nigerians themselves must insist on it and we have to deal with it at the institutional level.
“The institutional fight against corruption that has taken place to the extent that it has, took place under PDP. The institutional structures, even the ones that the present government is relying on, are PDP structures. Whether it is EFCC, ICPC, TSA, all these came under PDP.
“In ten months of Buhari’s government, there has been no institutional structure that has been laid against corruption. We have simple had media circuses accusing people of corruption.
“You cannot fight corruption with corruption. And corruption is more than just the stealing of money. If you disobey the rule of law, you have corrupted the system. If you create an avenue where you have a big margin between the official foreign exchange rate and the parallel market rate, there’s going to be corruption. If you have children of the rich getting into the CBN on nepotistic grounds, the corruption is still with you.
“If you have a budget that is padded left right and centre, and after this was revealed you passed it and say only a small amount changed in it, and we do not know what is in the new budget, you can’t say you are against corruption. There is no transparency in any of these things. Because the last 16 years was not just PDP government.
“The legacy parties of the APC were also in power. In fact when the PDP was ostensibly dealing with corruption, it addressed people in its own party. We are not having that now.”
Aribisala’s remarks comes barely a week he noted that Easter is not a Christian celebration.
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