Professor Ango Abdullahi, the chairman, Northern Elders’ Forum, (NEF), has said Nigerian prisons ought to be full by now if President Muhammadu Buhari was truly fighting corruption.
Abdullahi stated this in Kaduna State on Tuesday while fielding questions from newsmen shortly after the opening of a public lecture entitled, ‘Education as an Instrument for National Integration: The Northern Nigerian Crisis.’
According to him, President Buhari was not fighting corruption in the country.
He added that, “we have now seen corruption on a massive scale, and nobody is doing anything about it.”
The elder statesman noted that, “if President Buhari was committed to fighting corruption, the nation’s courts and prisons would have been congested with corrupt politicians.”
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He said many corrupt politicians were going about freely because APC has forgiven their sins, pointing out that the case that readily came to mind is that of Senator Danjuma Goje whose ‘sin’ was allegedly forgiven by APC.
His words: “The President said he is fighting corruption, but I don’t believe him because, if he is fighting corruption, our courts and prisons should be full by now. This is because corruption is everywhere.
“You don’t just pick one case and make it a universal example of fighting corruption. We have just seen the conviction of Orji Uzor Kalu and it is becoming something that the world should know when there are so many people with seventy something billion with them. Those people should be in the same prison with Uzor Kalu.
“And in any case, if you want to say that, Uzor Kalu had committed an offence, but here is a national chairman of a party, the President’s party who pronounces that, don’t worry how much you have stolen somewhere else; as long as you come and say you are a member of APC, you are forgiven. A good example of that is former Governor Danjuma Goje. It was the Attorney General of the Federation himself that went to court to say, they were withdrawing the case from the court. And his offences are not different from Orji Uzor Kalu’s and many others that were reported.
“The media is equally guilty in this direction. You journalists are part of the crises that we have because you are not addressing these issues as hard, objectively and fairly.”
The NEF leader, who also spoke on restructuring of Nigeria, said, “If we are going to restructure Nigeria, we must abandon Presidential system of government. If you want Nigeria to function as it used to function in 1960 at the point of independence, we should go and reconsider retention of Presidential system of government, because it is inefficient, it is corrupt and there is no accountability.”
