Buhari’s anti-graft war: Top 8 quotes of Femi Aribisala

Scholar and international affairs expert, Femi Aribisala, was part of the team that discussed anti-graft war in Nigeria during a Round discussion on “Winning the War Against Corruption” organised by the Department of Jurisprudence and International Law, University of Lagos.

Here are some of the notable quotes from his presentation

“There is no fight against corruption in Nigeria. And if there’s no fight against corruption, you can’t even talk about war”
 

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.

“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. 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.”

“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,”

“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 gonna 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.”

“And that’s why I can’t trust Falana’s prescription that we are going to establish special courts. I don’t trust this government to establish those courts. They will simply establish courts to decimate the opposition. People like Orubebe will be arrested, and they will file cases against him and several months later they will drop the charges against him. And they will have pronounced him guilty in the newspapers on charges that will later on be dropped. That is not a fight against corruption.”