Daily Nigerian
Auwal Musa-Rafsanjani is the chairman of the Transformation Monitoring Group, TMG, and Executive Director of the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre, CISLAC. In this interview with IBRAHIM RAMALAN, Mr Rafsanjani speaks on the state of the nation, including a rebuttal to the State Minister for Labour, Festus Keyamo, who accused him of being sponsored by the opposition party after calling for his resignation as minister.
You have always expressed reservations about President Muhammadu Buhari’s style of fighting corruption, why?
Nigerians and Nigeria are facing serious challenges of increasing public corruption, looting and diversion of public funds. The government has not been able to block the leakages, especially the revenue leakages. There is an outright diversion of public funds and stealing. Government officials are still doing these without modesty and decorum. That is why the country is facing serious economic challenges.
Right now, we are borrowing money to finance even payment of salary, to finance payment of subsidies which many people see as payment of fraud because we cannot be spending N4trillion on the so-called subsidy that Nigerians are not benefitting from. If you go around, you would see that the majority of Nigerians in every local government area are buying fuel at the so-called black markets. So, why are we subsidizing corruption? It is important that the government prioritises its spending because we cannot be borrowing money to finance things that have no economic or human developmental values.
The Nigerian government under President Muhammadu Buhari has continued to experience denial of public looting. Every now and then, when you draw their attention to that there are gaps and leakages, they respond by attacking human rights and anti-corruption activists while official corruption is on the increase. In the past, the Buhari government prioritized asset recovery simply because it was broke and they needed money at the time. So, civil society supported the government in its effort to recover money from yesterday’s looters. As we speak, the government under Muhammadu Buhari cannot account for the recoveries both local and international. In all honesty and sincerity, Nigerians have not seen the impact of these recoveries.
We are hearing allegations from one government official to another that the recovered assets had been re-looted by another official. That does not show a coordinated effort in the fight against corruption. Right now, there are multiple agencies doing asset recovery and there is no central data to show how many of these recoveries each of these agencies undertook and to also show Nigerians how these recoveries were utilized.
The entire anti-corruption of this administration has been watered down. Take for example the public procurement law which was signed by Late President Yar’adua, it has been extremely disregarded by the officials of this regime. The Freedom of Information Bill that was signed under President Goodluck Jonathan is completely disregarded…
