Indeed, if there is anything which has two devastating and sharp edges, it is corruption. Experience shows that not only the corruption is widespread, across to those people we think are clean, but is also multi dimensional when it wants to fight back.
Many analysts sometimes innocently appear simplistic in their postulations about corruption fight back. What they mostly concentrate on is that corrupt people would use the huge funds they corruptly accumulated to buy gullible youths and willing media practitioners to fight back the government.
But, the recent happenings have added a fresh dimension to the huge capacity of corruption not only to fight back but to confuse and embarrass the government and to throw it into disarray.
First, strange and unbelievable as it sounded, was the missing from the Senate, of the budget proposal which President Buhari presented to the joint session of the National Assembly late last year.
Just as the dust raised by such strange occurrence was settling down, another situation arose which portrays the budget as a fraudulent document, having been injected and poisoned with “errors, ambiguities and rampant cases of padding” by yet-to-be-identified smart Nigerians who are adept in such things in the past.
For the first time in the history of this country, ministers who came to defend their budgets were disowning figures read out by the lawmakers from the document submitted by the President.
The first shock came from the Minister of Health, Professor Isaac Adewole, who declared to the Senate Committee on Health that the ministry’s budget read by the committee was not the one drafted by him.
According to Professor Adewole, the provision of the budget before the National Assembly was in contrast with the priorities of the health sector as contained in the original budget it prepared, adding that some of the votes earmarked by the ministry for some activities had been re-distributed while some important fields had been excluded.
He declared: “In the revised budget as re-submitted, N15.7 billion for capital allocation had been moved to other areas. Some allocations made are not in keeping with our priorities. There is nothing allocated to public health and family health. Over the last two years, nothing has been done on HIV. We have to look into the details of the budget and re-submit it to the committee. “This was not what we submitted. We’ll submit another one. We don’t want anything foreign to creep into that budget. What we submitted is not there. We have not reached that stage and we find the money there.”
Even the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed openly disowned the N398 million voted for the purchase of computers for the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) and the Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB).
He told the Senate Committee on Information that the N398 million was strange to him, saying: “No, that is not possible. That was definitely not what was proposed. This cannot be.”
This was even as an official of the ministry said that only N5 million was proposed for the item in the original budget of the NFVCB.
Beyond the ministries which had denied knowledge of the new figures inserted or deleted from their original budgetary allocations, the N6.08 trillion indicated as the total figure in the entire budget did not tally with the actual figure after auditing. The figures just didn’t add up.
This led the lawmakers to insist that they would require more time to clear the budget proposal of all its ambiguities, errors and false figures smuggled into it.
Yes, under normal disciplinary circumstance, those who were involved in the preparation of the 2016 budget would have resigned by now or get sacked, but the circumstances are clouded in mystery so much that no one can accurately point out who is or are responsible for the embarrassing situation.
We in Greenbarge Reporters believe that some saboteurs from within the system are seriously at work to embarrass the government, but we hasten to caution against looking in the wrong direction for the culprits. As a matter of fact, people in the National Assembly, either as civil servants or lawmakers, cannot be ruled out of this national shame to which Buhari government is being associated.
We suggest that the government should not treat this matter with kid’s glove and, whoever is, or are found to be behind it should be summarily dealt with, as a way of sounding a huge warning that Buhari’s government is fully prepared to fight corruption from all angles and with all the powers at its disposal.
The searchlight should be beamed at elites who Vice President Yemi Osinbajo complained the other day, of asking the government to go slowly with the fight against corruption.
Buhari and his team should be proactive to show that the war against corruption is not the usual rhetoric that had defined similar efforts in the long past. The government should show clearly that this war in the Change environment we now operating, is deadlier than the conventional one. That is what it really required to fight corruption to the ground. [myad]
