Insecticide and deodorant

This Republic has been bereft of memorable phrases until last Tuesday when Senator Shehu Sani [APC, Kaduna Central] said the Buhari administration sprays insecticide on suspected corrupt elements outside its ranks but its sprays deodorant on its own officials who are accused of misdeeds. Sani’s coinage threatens to become the most memorable political phrase in […]

This Republic has been bereft of memorable phrases until last Tuesday when Senator Shehu Sani [APC, Kaduna Central] said the Buhari administration sprays insecticide on suspected corrupt elements outside its ranks but its sprays deodorant on its own officials who are accused of misdeeds. Sani’s coinage threatens to become the most memorable political phrase in Nigeria since Chief Bola Ige described the Abacha era’s five registered political parties as “the five fingers of a leprous hand.”

The remark was so damaging that, according to This Day, APC national chairman Chief John Oyegun fired off a letter inviting Senator Sani to appear at the APC secretariat and answer some questions. One can only imagine what those questions will be. He will probably be asked to explain why he invoked such a memorable phrase against his own party’s President. By so doing, Sani could be accused of anti-party activity and of bringing the image of his party to disrepute, odium and public ridicule. Trouble is, Chief Oyegun has not always policed memorable phrases used by APC members against fellow party members. Only last year, party men loyal to Kaduna State Governor Nasiru el-Rufa’i said Senator Sani thinks governance is all about having an Afro hair style. That was a damaging remark against a fellow party member but Oyegun did not summon anyone to account for it.

From Oyegun’s point of view, the most troubling aspect of Sani’s phrase is that many Nigerians believe it is true. General Buhari was known throughout his career to give no quarter to suspected corrupt elements. As military ruler in 1983-85, he constituted Special Military Investigation Panels [SIPs] which turned suspects over to the Special Military Tribunals [SMTs] for trial. Both of them operated on the same principle: a suspect is presumed guilty until he could prove his innocence. For example, SIPs made a tally of a former state governor’s assets and the balance in his bank accounts. It then deducted the total salary he earned during his tenure in office and asked him to explain where he got the rest. During a visit to Kenya last year, President Buhari cheerfully referred to that era and kind of regretted that he cannot do the same now.

The vigorous pursuit of suspected corrupt former Jonathan administration officials and PDP chieftains since 2015 once in a while crossed the boundaries of law and sometimes of reason as well. When former National Security Adviser Colonel Sambo Dasuki was first charged to court by the Department of State Services [DSS] because it found five guns in his house, I personally thought that was unreasonable. A man who directed the war against Boko Haram for three years, however incompetently, sure needs firearms in his house. It turned out that the gun rap was meant to get a court to detain Dasuki while the government built up its case on the squander of funds meant for wartime weapons purchases. That was wise.

By the time revelations cascaded out about how the arms money was used to fund Jonathan’s election campaign, we were all horrified. It was the worst abuse of public funds in Nigeria’s history. However, I think some distinction ought to be made between officials that misappropriated public funds and some of those who received the funds. Some of the people who collected the Dasuki money could not possibly know where it emanated from, especially since it often passed through other officials’ hands. Besides, there was an election campaign to fight and in Nigeria, incumbents are known to splash money all around. Rounding up and charging to court everyone who collected these monies was a bit of a stretch, in my opinion, but since Nigerians overwhelmingly backed it, the Buhari regime rode high on the popularity.

Of course PDP men were saying that APC also spent a lot of money during the 2015 election and some of it might have come from state governments it controlled, but no APC chieftain was ever charged. The Presidency also sprayed Saraki with insecticide. It was overzealous to charge the Senate President to court for alleged forgery of Senate standing rules when he was not a principal officer at the time and Deputy Police Inspector General Dan’Azumi Doma who probed the matter did not so much as question him. That it was done for political reasons was fairly obvious.

Scaling over the fence at midnight in order to gather evidence against Supreme Court judges was also overzealous, to say the least. These days when all bank accounts are linked by BVN, EFCC can easily trace it if a man is shuffling huge amounts of money in his accounts. When I first heard of the invasion of judges’ houses by DSS agents, I thought it was a national security operation, not an anti-corruption one. The summary of all these incidents is that the Buhari administration gave no quarter to many people in its fight against corruption, to the admiration of most Nigerians. Regime supporters also kept saying that corruption was fighting back. They probably did not foresee it but the deadliest way in which corruption can fight back against an anti-corruption regime is to rope in some of its high officials on corruption allegations. Senators soon came up with these allegations against two top regime officials.

From the beginning, many people were sceptical when Buhari asked the Attorney General and Minister of Justice to probe allegations made against Secretary to the Government of the Federation [SGF] Babachir David Lawal by a Senate ad hoc committee and ones made against Acting EFCC Chairman Ibrahim Magu by the DSS. The appearance of transparency would have been better served if a more neutral party was asked to do the investigation. I don’t know who that should be, but Prof Itse Sagay’s anti-corruption advisory committee or an independent lawyer could have been better, from the point of view of sincerity and transparency.

Part of the prevailing mystery is that President Buhari’s letter to Senate which cleared both Lawal and Magu made no reference to the probe that AGF conducted. The impression conveyed by this omission is either that what was conveyed to Senate was not the AGF’s finding, or that his finding was being hushed up for unknown reasons. On top of that mystery came another puzzle, when several newspapers quoted a top administration official as having told them, anonymously, that Buhari’s letter to Senate did not clear Babachir. He hinted that probe into the substance of the allegations is still going on. Why then did he write the letter?

This unnamed top official said other things that further damaged the case. He reportedly said, “The president wants to be able to handle the matter on his own terms, based purely on proper adherence to extant public service rules and procedures relating to abuse of office by public officers. If he is going to discipline his own appointee, he would rather do it properly, not railroaded. No one should be in doubt of the resolve of Mr. President to sustain his long-held reputation for integrity and his zero-level tolerance for corruption. But things must be done properly and seen to be so.”

If he is going to discipline his own appointee, he would rather do it properly, not railroaded. Is that to say if the president is going to discipline a non-appointee of his, he does not mind doing it improperly and does not mind being railroaded? This top official’s comment suggests there is a distinction between how the president handles charges against his appointees [“doing things properly”] as against his non-appointees. It lends added credence to what Shehu Sani said about using insecticide in one case and using deodorant in the other.