Moro’s sorrows!

Former Minister of Interior Abba Moro is set to be arraigned on charges relating to the 2014 immigration recruitment scandal. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) allege that he and others, together with Drexel Tech Nigeria Ltd, contravened the Public Procurement Act in the award of the contract with no advertisement, needs assessment or […]

Former Minister of Interior Abba Moro is set to be arraigned on charges relating to the 2014 immigration recruitment scandal. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) allege that he and others, together with Drexel Tech Nigeria Ltd, contravened the Public Procurement Act in the award of the contract with no advertisement, needs assessment or procurement plan. The arraignment by EFCC comes as somewhat of a disappointment. If no one had died, there is little chance the scam would have caused an uproar.  The crux of the matter therefore isn’t about public procurement, it’s about causing the avoidable deaths of law abiding citizens. Someone must be held responsible and found guilty of culpable homicide or involuntary manslaughter not public procurement violations.
The anti-corruption war cannot be limited to the EFCC alone. The intended prosecution is analogous to the prosecution of military chiefs who embezzled money meant for arms then sentenced soldiers to death for complaining and refusing to be killed like their poorly armed colleagues. They too should be charged with culpable homicide not public procurement violations.
As an analogy if a bank customer is killed in the process of a bank robbery, the main charge against the robber will be “murder occasioned by robbery” not simply robbery. The poorly organized recruitment scam was daylight robbery which caused the deaths of over 20 Nigerians as well as physical and mental trauma to hundreds of others. The shambolic process, supposedly meant to screen applicants for employment into a highly organized agency, was geared towards making money rather than towards employing the best hands.
Instead of short-listing applicants into manageable numbers based upon criteria entered into the online database, hundreds of thousands were gathered into stadia nationwide and in the ensuing foreseeable melee lives were lost. At no time has anyone concerned expressed regret for what happened. Moro himself claims his “conscience is clear”. This type of clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory. 
Critics who query why N1,000 was charged the first place appear to have forgotten that such extortion was sanctioned at the highest level. Things degenerated to the abysmal level of the immigration recruitment scam because it had become the norm for government agencies to use “consultants” to effect on-line registrations. Practically every government agency – including the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) which is supposedly service to the nation – extorts money from applicants for computer rendered services under the guise of increasing Internally Generated Revenue (IGR).
Database administration is one of the simplest tasks in modern computing which is carried out by retail stores, on-line shopping portals, warehouses, spare parts dealers, etc. Scandalously despite our government offices being littered with computers and budgeting hundreds of millions annually for Information Technology (IT), anytime a Nigerian government agency wishes to manage a database they require the services of a “consultant”. One is left to wonder exactly what the Ministry of Science and Technology is doing when government agencies have not progressed beyond using computers as expensive typewriters.
Nigerians are becoming increasing impatient with the “change agenda” as if they expected overnight miracles. Government spokespersons have failed to articulate the fact that the most important change the nation needs right now is an entrenchment of probity. The anti-corruption war should not be seen as an attempt to end corruption overnight, but as a war against people getting away with criminality.
The biggest single change which President Muhammad Buhari can bring about within a short time is to ensure that people are held responsible for their actions. Corruption exists all over the world, what doesn’t exist elsewhere is that everyone gets away with it. In truth in Nigeria practically every political office holder (especially the former military officers who led the nation to ruin) has gone scot free after defrauding the nation. Bearing in mind that no action was taken against those millionaire military treasury looters it seems unfair to point the finger at politicians. When the debilitating and directionless military rule ended, the political class only wanted to catch up financially with the corrupt military officer class.
The lure of public office when civilian rule returned in 1999 was not to render selfless service, but to dip fingers into the public till. Consequently companies were incorporated overnight and bank accounts opened into which billions flowed within a short period of time.
With the massive de-camping to APC the truth is that even in this dispensation Nigerians believe that only the President and Vice-President are free from corrupt tendencies. Nobody who has passed through the corridors of power has remained poor even if it meant some other people losing their lives or limbs. The irony of the situation is that as the EFCC proceeds with its normal standard of incompetent prosecution the first thing Moro’s defence counsel will insist upon enforcing is human rights that he and his co-conspirators trampled upon and ignored so despicably.