SONALA OLUMHENSE FROM PUNCH
On May 29, 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari and his wife, Aisha, arrived at the Abuja venue of his second term inauguration in luxury and style: a customised 2019 Mercedes-Maybach S-Class S 560.
Value: over N61m.
President Buhari, in his decades-long self-advertisement, was not a corrupt man. Which was probably why a car, which inflicted such an egregious assault on the Nigerian taxpayers would have made no impact on his conscience. N61m!!
And that was just the lead car for the event. The inauguration photographs show part of the large convoy of glittering cars that accompanied him to the event which guaranteed him another four years. Nigerians never learned how much was squandered on the inauguration and allied activities by those who know how to manipulate power.
Have you ever wondered, for instance, what became of the Buhari Mercedes Maybach of May 2019? Such vehicles invariably arrive with their odometers only a few ticks away from zero.
In other words, by the time the Buharis returned to the presidential palace after the inauguration (a round trip of some six or seven kilometres), the car probably still had less than 20 kilometres on it.
Now, if he rode in it to the airport – less than 50 kilometres away –50 times on his many travels, it might still have had considerably less than 1000 kilometres when his second term ended last year. That is such a barely-used car it could pass for new.
So where was it at the end of May 29, 2023, and who owns it now? Indeed, where are the cars the Buhari presidency bought every year in its eight years, and for that matter, the cars the Presidency has budgeted for every year since 1999?
These questions are at the heart of the broiling hunger and social turmoil that is Nigeria in February 2023. Nigerians –even mainstream supporters of the ruling APC –are demanding that President Bola Tinubu take measures to arrest the drift in Nigeria’s economic fortunes.
Staying on the theme of official cars, let us remember that in December 2016, the federal government announced that it had recovered from one Permanent Secretary, 40 brand-new SUVs that he had taken with him as he left office.
That was just one civil servant, and it is doubtful that he was the only one in Buhari’s first year who had taken advantage of his position. The Buhari administration did not honour its promise to identify such people from whom various assets were recovered, and in the end it simply claimed that it was selling off everything recovered.
Secretly.
I repeatedly challenged that administration to remember that ambition must be made of sterner stuff, citing the fact that Buhari accepted gifts despite the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution (Code of Conduct for Public Officers) prohibiting him from doing so.
Aisha Buhari, no government official, demonstrated the excesses of the then-first family when she openly admitted in 2018 that she had been collecting gifts as well. It seemed to have been a tradition passed on from her predecessor, Patience Jonathan, whom the EFCC first separated from two amounts of $13.5m and N104m she had tried to launder in September 2007.
In 2016, following the introduction of the Biometric Verification Number system in the banking sector, a further discovery of over $31.5m in her accounts resulting in their being frozen. She claimed that they had come from many contributors.
