Read The Anti-Corruption Fight Starring Bola Tinubu And Governor Ganduje By Abimbola Adelakun

 

On Sunday, the All Progressives Congress National Leader, Bola Tinubu, commended Kano State governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, for his efforts in strengthening anti-corruption institutions. The efforts, of course, were tied to the office building of the Kano State Public Complaints and Anti-Corruption Commission Ganduje renovated.

Tinubu went on to state that “in ensuring Nigeria becomes a member of a committed international community that frees us from the burden of corruption, this and similar edifices could play an important role in that.” This comment was repeated across several publications, so it was no misquote that he tied “edifices” like a renovated building to measures of anti-corruption.

First, Tinubu and Ganduje fronting any anti-corruption occasion is complicated in lots of ways. Ganduje isn't code-named “GanDollar” because he runs a Bureau de Change. In 2018, a video of Ganduje pocketing wads of america dollars, bribes he allegedly demanded, turned into leaked. In a sane u . S . A ., such evidenced crookedness is enough grounds for fast impeachment and prosecution. Unfortunately, Nigeria is a country wherein the lunatics run the asylum.

Ganduje no longer most effective hung on to his role as governor, he additionally gained a re-election. Ironically, he is governor within the equal country in which spiritual zealots smash beer bottles but whose material of morality come what may by no means stretches to the point in which they call for that a leader under a cloud of gross malfeasance step apart. In a latest interview, Ganduje claimed that the well-known video of him pocketing greenbacks become deepfake. He said his picture turned into cloned and that he's getting ready to disprove it. Come to think of it, almost 3 years after that video turned into released, he is simplest still “getting ready” to prove his innocence?

As for Tinubu, the allegations of corruption in opposition to him are now not rousing news. A man who might not solution what bullion vehicles have been doing in his house has not anything to inform us about anti-corruption. The work that anti-corruption demands is not about placing up “edifices” or duplicating bureaucracies. Anti-corruption is ready developing independent and effective establishments which could dare scrutinise even the high and robust, and cause them to responsible to the public. You can put up fancy multi-billion naira buildings, pursue political warring parties and expired politicians to jail, ransack judges’ domestic, sack the Chief Justice, serially discover coins in office buildings, and even accuse every body who nonetheless manages to eat thrice each day of being corrupt, however you'll get nowhere until you get the fundamentals of public accountability proper.

When public officers who lack the ethics of public duty grandstand anti-corruption, they do unquantifiable damage because what they talk to the general public is the futility of all organization-constructing efforts. Their duplicity does now not reassure the general public; it simply makes them more cynical and distrustful.

Over time, humans lose religion inside the very infrastructure of democracy that is meant to redress certain moral imbalances in society.

Eventually, they'll lose endurance in the power of democracy and its institutions to transform their lives and start to clamour for an authoritarian pressure that will override democratic strategies and simply take direct movements. In doing so, they open themselves up to manipulative populist politics and attendant abuse of electricity. Since 2015, we've got seen that scenario play out in Nigeria. By ignoring all of that to showboat on anti-corruption, they further consign the us of a into a remorseless rotation of ridiculousness and despondency. If they sincerely believe in the ethic of anti-corruption, they understand wherein to start.

One of the various motives we infrequently development is that we outline matters wrongly and then continue to use chemotherapeutic measures on the misdiagnosis. Instead of the improvement of a strong system that has enough integrity and independence to invite strongmen leaders to make themselves accountable, they take anti-corruption as putting up “edifices” after which invest in ostentatious offices and picture-ops. During Tinubu’s birthday colloquium, the same party that took him to Kano within the first location, you see humans showing the equal addiction of throwing round thoughts that because they're poorly defined, successes are measured with the aid of vain metrics.

They relentlessly hammered on “unity” as if it is a really perfect this is realised handiest while a gaggle of politicians sits at a desk to determine the sharing formula to the state’s resources. Why ought to the hordes of Nigerians presently imperilled with the aid of the rising degree of poverty and speedy-disintegrating exceptional of lifestyles care about the state’s team spirit? For whom has team spirit been beneficial outdoor the cabal of people who income off the lopsided association? Our leaders’ abject loss of reflexivity was obvious in how they fetishised cohesion whilst ignoring the premise of the disillusionment riding those Nigerians that insist the united states of america need to be fractured.

At the event, the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), brought out the same old tale of the way he fought for Nigeria’s cohesion throughout the civil battle. It has been 50 plus years because the battle officially ended. The reality that we are nevertheless circling the identical issue of whether to interrupt up the united states of america or no longer should supply him pause. He wishes to reflect more deeply on whether or not the struggle genuinely ended, and whether or not his so-known as combat for harmony become well worth the rate of lives taken and the damage incurred. Beyond peddling the tale of his function as a salaried soldier throughout the conflict, he wishes to mirror greater at the recurring clamour for secession.

Then, the Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen Ibrahim Attahiru, reportedly vowed that the Nigerian Army beneath his watch might cope with every person who threatens the united states’s solidarity. Again, if they need to punish human beings to make Nigeria continue to be an indivisible united states of america, is that clearly team spirit or people are simply in detention? By the time Vice President Yemi Osinbajo told us that inside the occasion of a Nigerian breakup, we would want a visa to Kano, you can inform that despite the fact that those human beings are desperate to preserve the country collectively, they lack compelling ideas on why it ought to be.

Nigeria is in one of these tough scenario, and our leaders have nothing to offer us other than this repeated name for harmony and cohesion. The fact is, the ones that are bored with Nigeria do now not have troubles with their neighbours from different ethnic businesses. They get by with themselves of their day by day contacts and social relationships. The frustration causing the clamour for a breakup is the abject loss of leadership bedevilling the us of a and the resolute blindness to the strangulating phrases of collective lifestyles. An effete and thieving leadership magnificence that insists on preaching unity to human beings uninterested with their situation does now not inspire confidence; it best aggravates their desires for a balkanised usa.

That brings me to the factor approximately leadership itself. Throughout the week, we have been fed a couple of speeches approximately Tinubu being a pacesetter of leaders due to the fact he has raised the human beings who've occupied one political role or the alternative. One simplest needs to take a look at the degree of the disintegration of social life in Nigeria to question the really worth of a political apprenticeship system that produced such management. What the reward singers and hagiographers called “leaders” are mere expert politicians whose bottom line is to occupy juicy political positions. Where are the defining values that distinguished this crop of leaders —both in their method to Nigeria’s issues or the execution of their public workplace duties— from their opposite numbers who did no longer bypass thru the equal faculty of governance? True management creates value, not drains it.

Each time they arrive out to the public to backslap one another over their achievements both in anti-corruption, harmony, or leadership, they gift themselves as a tribe of mediocre administrators that isn't always handiest disconnected from collective reality but whose lack of information is, in truth, inimical to the future of the country. They make people restless, disillusioned, and worst of all, psychically disconnect from the Nigerian task itself.