The Coalition for Good Governance and Economic Justice in Africa, a non-profit and non-governmental organisation, has expressed displeasure over the fight against corruption in the country saying it’s glaring the anti-corruption agencies may have been overwhelmed by the deluge of the scourge in the country.
The NGO said that it is interesting to note that non of the ex-Governors, who recently completed their tenures of eight years in office nor Ministers, who served under former President Muhammadu Buhari, have been invited or arrested for one financial infraction or the other.
The Country Director of the NGO, Mr. John Mayaki, who raised the alarm that the scourge of corruption may have overwhelmed security agencies established to fight the vice in the society, called on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to improve the operational strength of the agencies through laws and the provision of human and material resources.
Mayaki said, “The institutions entrusted with the war against corruption might have been overwhelmed or withdrawn from their mandate to fight corruption in the country. The transition to a new government at the federal and state level ought to be followed by a searchlight beamed on those leaving office with the aim of ensuring that they held public trust with probity. But this has not been the case”.
“The country is losing the campaign against corruption, which remained the single factor impeding the desired economic development and growth.”
He pointed out that corruption, which had destroyed all aspects of the nation’s life, had become a threat to even the government.
He urged the Nigerian citizenry to show the requisite zeal to reject corruption as a national identity and to uproot the scourge in order to have a beautiful country of pride to all citizens.
He said, “We are losing the battle against corruption. The scourge has become so endemic that it has constituted the single most important factor in our failure to develop appreciably”.
“We expect the Tinubu administration to tackle corruption frontally because as it stands, the level of corruption has increased so much that people have lost hope in the anti-corruption agencies.”
On the effectiveness of the fight against corruption, Mayaki said, “You cannot blame me or Nigerians if at this stage we are doubting the anti-graft war or its effectiveness. And the reason for this cannot be far-fetched – it’s in this country fuel was adulterated and nobody was arrested or made to face the music. We saw the corruption around fuel subsidy and the huge sums of money spent on our refineries without result but nobody is made to account for the failures. We are all witnesses to the forensic audit carried out at the NDDC and the heist perpetuated there but what has become of that? Even the recent one around Nigerian Air is fresh in our memories among several others – it’s disheartening”.
“Nigerians now expect to see a situation where President Bola Tinubu would hold people to account in his administration otherwise, whatever efforts and achievements in other sectors would be meaningless and this has to be holistic. We expect more firm actions from the president especially the need to check kind of persons and characters that we are thrown up for appointments and national assignments” Mayaki concluded.