Fighting Corruption in a Multicultural Society

In 2016, during an event at Buckingham Palace marking Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th birthday, former British PM David Cameron famously referred to Nigeria as a ‘fantastically corrupt’ country. This occurred just before an anti-corruption summit in London, which Nigeria was scheduled to attend. Paradoxically, the Nigerian leader who attended the summit was the immediate past president, General Muhammadu Buhari, the self-acclaimed anti-graft czar. Though he expressed being “shocked” to hear Mr. Cameron label his country as such, fast forward to 2024 – eight years after the so-called truthful gaffe of the then British premier –  Nigerians are now the ones shocked at the emerging revelations of the unrestrained and audacious sleaze that took place during his time as president.

Let’s begin with the disgraced and embattled former CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele. Appointed by President Goodluck Jonathan in 2014, he served the majority of his first five-year term under the Buhari administration. He was reappointed for a second and final term as the governor of the country’s apex bank in 2019 by Buhari. Emefiele is currently being prosecuted for a variety of financial crimes, including the recent allegation that he printed ₦684.5 million notes with ₦18.9 billion. Two, Hadi Sirika, the immediate past minister for aviation under Buhari, is currently being interrogated (detained) by the same EFCC for allegedly giving contracts worth more than ₦8 billion to his brother Abubakar Ahmad Sirika. The Sirikas are from Katsina State, the home state of Mr. Buhari. Furthermore, the immediate past minister for humanitarian affairs, disaster management, and social development Mrs. Sadiya Umar-Farouq is still being probed by the anti-graft agency over allegations of corruption in the handling of ₦37.1 billion in social intervention funds during her tenure.

Notable among the expanding list of people who are being interrogated for stealing or misappropriating public funds is the immediate past governor of Kogi State, Mr. Yahaya Bello, a staunch ally of Mr. Buhari. Bello was about the only governor who visited Aso Rock regularly when Buhari was president. In fact, in 2018, The Guardian ran a cover page story screaming “Bello and endless solidarity trips to Aso Villa.” It was reported that “almost every other day, Bello is… fielding questions from State House correspondents on situation… in the country.” Today, Bello is in hiding from the EFCC for allegedly looting more than ₦82 billion from the Kogi State Treasury. One of the most galling crimes on his charge sheet is that he reportedly withdrew $720,000 from the state’s coffers during the twilight of his tenure as governor. He allegedly looted this staggering amount of money to make advance payment for his child’s tuition fee – he pilfered this money from a state with the highest under-5 mortality rate in the country, according to Dataphyte. The national average is 132 out of 1000; Kogi’s average is 148 out of 1000. (The under-5 mortality rate is the probability of a child dying between their first and fifth birthdays.)

The rest of Dataphyte’s report that assessed the performance of Bello as the governor of Kogi State between 2015 and 2022 is summarized below:
The IGR plus FAAC revenue in the given period was ₦506.78 billion, out of which ₦114.87 (23%) billion was IGR, while FAAC allocation accounted for the balance of ₦391.91 billion (77%). Unemployment rose from 17.6% in 2017 to 39% in 2020 under Bello’s stewardship. In 2019, he reportedly owed over 32 months in salary arrears.

Kogi, like the rest of Nigeria, is a multicultural state with prominent ethnic groups such as the Igalas, the Okuns, and the Ebiras, from which Bello hails. As expected, there has been an ethnic conspiracy in the state since the EFCC publicly announced that it would be prosecuting Bello. Shortly after the drama that ensued between the former governor and the EFCC at his residence in Abuja became a national sensation, a group called The Ebira Youthland Coalition issued a stern warning to the other ethnic groups in the state. The coordinator of the alliance, Fache Onimisi-Moses, threatened in a strongly worded press release that “the youths of the other ethnic groups in the state to (sic) be mindful of how they use social media to malign Bello and his ethnic group.” He went further to state that their actions are capable of “truncating the peace” currently enjoyed in Kogi. A peacefully poor state, if I may add.

Although not as bellicose and uncivil as former governor Yahaya Bello, Fani Willis played almost the same racial card against Donald Trump and his supporters when she was found out to be sleeping with the now-fired lead prosecutor – Nathan Wade – in the RICO charges she brought against Donald Trump and others over the 2020 US presidential election in Georgia. Willis baselessly and vacuously ranted that she is being hounded for being a black woman after a preponderance of evidence emerged that, prior to appointing an inexperienced Wade to lead the prosecution against Trump and his codefendants, the two had been in a romantic relationship. Wade had since been axed from the prosecution counsel, following judge McAfee’s ruling after the trial of Fani Willis over allegations of corruption and abuse of processes brought against her by a defense counsel. The stench of the lies and melodramas Ms. Willis displayed during the trial are still chocking.

Fighting corruption, or even any form of injustice, in a multicultural society is usually an unnecessary upheaval. The tendency to manipulate and confuse basic conversations is widespread. The case against Yahaya Bello, for example, is so fundamental to the survival of a state that checks all the boxes of poor governance in terms of poverty, illiteracy, underdevelopment, and more. It is therefore pathetic to hear insinuations from his kinsmen that he’s being witch-hunted by the president over some non-issue that came about during the politics that produced the incumbent president as the flagbearer of the ruling party, the APC. In fact, anybody who reduces the mountain of allegations of criminal misrule and voracious stealing of public money by Yahaya Bello to a vendetta should be charged as an accessory with him. For heaven’s sake, this man couldn’t pay the state’s civil servants full salary throughout his tenure as governor, yet he had the balls to steal more than 82 billion naira from the same state! Thankfully, the EFCC chair Ola Olukoyede is not buying the crap and has vowed to prosecute Bello to a logical conclusion. If the former governor is convicted and sent to jail, heaven won’t fall.