Vunderkind
Social Member
Aminu Tambuwal
A few hours ago, the Speaker of the House of Representatives finally put to bed some of our suspicions about President Goodluck Jonathan. Aminu Tambuwal has unequivocally stated that the president’s way of handling corruption cases encourages further corruption, and several people would be inclined to agree with this statement.
In Tambuwal’s creatively strung words: “the President’s body language seems to be encouraging corrupt practices in the country.”
This is no empty statement, as Tambuwal reeled a number of corruption cases that the executive arm (headed by the president himself) should have dealt with long ago. Unfortunately, the cases have been drawn-out, trivialized and in some cases ignored entirely.
The Speaker for the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal made his not-so-shocking revelation after his paper presentation in Abuja. The paper, by the way, is titled “Role of the Legislature in the Fight Against Corruption in Nigeria.”
He urged us – the press – to consider the subsidy probe, the pension issue, the SEC probe and the recently infamous Stella Oduah saga. Tambuwal is pretty much aggrieved that the House of Reps does a good job of probing and revealing what needs to be revealed in the cases and what happens afterwards? Prosecution does a shoddy job and the culprits are on another private-jet-trip to Honolulu or wherever it is corrupt government officials like to relax after a nice week of siphoning public funds.
Well, Tambuwal is not pleased, apparently. He lamented that there have been cases where the government sets up a fresh committee to duplicate the job already finished by the parliament. He said that in the Stella Oduah bullet-proof car case, the NSA shouldn’t have been dragged into a case that could easily have been handled by anti-corruption agencies. In his words, the NSA is already preoccupied with “all the security challenges confronting the country.”
Still on the fascinating drama that was the Stella-Oduah bullet-proof car case, Tambuwal noted that the government really had no business setting up any administrative committee for a corruption case that was already clear to all Nigerians. Of course, as we know, the three-man presidential committee has long submitted its report to the president, and the president has taken no action.
Tambuwal isn’t trying to teach the president his job, but he believes that “What the President should have done was to explicitly direct the EFCC to probe the matter. With such directives coming from the President, I am sure we still have good people in EFCC who can do a good job. By the action of setting up different committees for straightforward cases, the president’s body language doesn’t tend to support the fight against corruption.”
Tambuwal also noted that Nigeria’s anti-corruption agencies had selective tendencies when it came to prosecuting cases. He called on the National Assembly to join in on this fight against corruption.