TRIBUNE
In a June 23, 2020, article titled “Sabiu Yusuf’s Fat Bank Accounts that Shocked CBN Governor” where I revealed that Muhammadu Buhari’s relative Sabiu “Tunde” Yusuf had salted away so much money in banks that even former CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, was so alarmed that he advised him to divvy up the money into different accounts, I said, “The stench bomb of fetid corruption that will explode after Buhari leaves office would be so unprecedentedly malodorous it would deaden Nigeria’s collective nasal sensibility for a long time.”
At the time, some people thought I was merely being hyperbolic for literary effect. But isn’t that what is happening now? Every day, we are regaled with stories of mindless, freewheeling theft of our public wealth by officials and relatives of Muhammadu Buhari. And what we’ve learned so far is just a tip of the iceberg.
All that happened during Muhammadu Buhari’s eight-year reign was unstrained, stratospheric, eye watering corruption the scale of which Nigeria had never experienced. It was a raucous, brazen, cheerfully irresponsible kleptocratic bazaar. While happened, governance took the backseat, leading me to characterize Buhari’s reign as the era of “ungovernance.”
The Central Bank of Nigeria under Emefiele and the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development under Sadiya Umar Farouq are competing for frontrunner status as outposts of the most decadent kleptocratic predation.
Emefiele, whom I described in a May 14, 2022, column as an “infernally incompetent, exceptionally corrupt, mind-blowingly self-serving, incomprehensibly clueless, overweeningly ambitious, and cruelly insensitive” clown, became the conduit for unmentionable financial crimes against Nigeria involving Buhari’s relatives, close friends, and associates. While feathering his own nest, he was a dutiful poodle of the consciencelessly thieving, ill-famed Aso Rock cabal, which humored him by telling him he would succeed Buhari in 2023.
“If someone wrote a tragicomic drama script about Godwin Emefiele’s scandal-ridden reign as a central bank governor and his ludicrously insane attempts to run for president using the financial and symbolic resources of the central bank while still a central bank governor who hurls consequence-free insults and wishes death upon critics for calling attention to the manifest conflict of interest that his presidential run represents, literary critics would pillory the script for its implausible plot,” I wrote about Emefiele in my May 14, 2022 column titled “Emefiele: A Corrupt, Inept, Heart-Attack-Loving Presidential Wannabe.”
Sadiya Umar Farouq’s Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development has also turned out to be one of the most putrid morasses of venality and fraud during the Buhari years. She is now predictably dodging the EFCC using the favorite tactic of Nigerian elites entwined in the web of accounting for their corruption: pretense of ill health.
When I read that the EFCC was inviting her to account for more than N37 billion that she allegedly laundered, I was shocked by the “smallness” of the amount in light of what I know about the magnitude of pillaging she perpetrated at the ministry. I was relieved when I read a January 4th EFCC statement saying, “We are still tracing all the transactions, hence we cannot put a figure to everything now as the investigation is still ongoing.”
We are talking here of a woman who spent more than N500 million to feed non-existent schoolkids in their homes in Lagos, Ogun, and the FCT while schools were closed during COVID in 2020, a woman under whom, a 2017 Daily Nigerian report said, dabinos worth millions of naira donated to IDPs by Saudi Arabia were stolen during Ramadan (which she hasn’t denied) while she was Federal Commissioner in charge of the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons.
In a June 15, 2023, appearance on the Brekete Family radio show in Abuja, Muhammed Kazaure Gudaji, a member of the House of Representatives representing the Kazaure, Roni, Gwiwa, Yankwashi Constituency of Jigawa State who is famous for his brutal forthrightness, verbal directness, and less than perfect English articulation, said what most of us know.
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