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By Rotimi Fasan

MANY had probably anticipated that the last National Council of State meeting would have a lot to proffer by way of remedies to the breakdown in the country’s security arrangement. Sadly, that was not to be.

Rather than meeting will now be long remembered, not for finally finding a way out of our security conundrum or telling President Muhammadu Buhari in plain terms that he has failed to live up to the demands of his office not to say his electoral promises to secure Nigerians.

No, that conclave of Nigerian leaders, elders and, hopefully, statesmen across the three arms of government will be the talking point of many discussions in the months and possibly years ahead for the manner it deepened citizens’ distrust of the country’s political leadership whose implication in corruption can be directly linked to the civic alienation that has led many of the fringe elements, terrorists, insurgents and so-called bandits, into criminal activities that have transformed many parts of Nigeria into ungovernable wastelands where human life is worth less than a bandit’s dagger.

Instead of the Council addressing the elephant in the room by providing a concrete way out of the present security quagmire, members emerged from this latest meeting of the august body currently chaired by the President only to hand Nigerians a long roll of convicts, many of them proven offenders against the state, that have been granted state pardon by the president in the exercise of his prerogative of mercy powers.

Two names on that list, Joshua Dariye and Jolly Nyame, stood out like sore thumbs whose pain Nigerians would for long carry in their heart for the manner it reminds them that the unhappy days are far from over and that Nigerians are being taken on a rollercoaster ride of musical chairs in which the same set of people will continue to rule the country in perpetuity, only changing name tags and associations as time and season will permit.

The political names on that roll are another version of the names on the consensus lists that had been lately drawn up and are being hawked across the political spectrum in intra-and inter-party arrangements to (s)elect the next crop of Nigerian leaders post-2023. The only difference here, if any, is that on the list of reprieved convicts belong political leaders that temporarily fell out of favour and were punished by their own peers who have now, by consensus, chosen to bring them out of the ‘outer darkness’ of political oblivion into rehabilitation.

They would be expected to have learned their lesson and should henceforth commit to the code that binds the political class as birds of the same feathers scattered across diverse political nests called parties from where they derive nourishment.

Although virtually all elected governors that were in office between 1999 and 2007 through to 2019 have one corruption case or another hanging on their necks and are being investigated/prosecuted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, only a handful of them have been prosecuted with any modicum of seriousness and of these, fewer still that can be counted off a finger, were convicted and sent to jail.

Similarly, two former governors who were convicted and actually landed in jail were reprieved within months/days of their conviction via some technical legerdemain that left hardly any doubt that they were never expected to go to jail.

Joshua Dariye is a two-term governor of Plateau State and his time in office was one of the most restive in the history of the state. At some point, a state of emergency was imposed by President Olusegun Obasanjo who made no bones of the fact that he had a thing or two against Dariye being governor of Plateau State. He pursued Dariye, as he did a few other governors from that time to no end, and it was basically on his dogged pursuit right from his second term in office that Dariye was eventually found guilty and jailed in 2018 under the Buhari administration.

Others who also could not be convicted during the Obasanjo era found themselves in the EFCC dragnet thereafter, again due in part to the prosecution efforts initiated during the Obasanjo years.

But Buhari who prided himself on fighting corruption and projected himself as a man of integrity is the same Buhari that has spent almost the entire years of his presidency blaming his inability to make good his electoral promises on corruption from previous administrations. It is that same Buhari that has found it convenient to grant state pardon to the two people, governors, successfully prosecuted and found guilty of corruption to the tune of over N2 billion, among scores of tainted politicians that could not be brought to book.

This after years of tortuous prosecution processes and hundreds of millions of naira wasted. Buhari has set the duo free without either man giving back to the state what they were found guilty of stealing. We are talking here of billions of naira that could have gone into providing many of the critical infrastructure, services or employment that are lacking in the states in which these persons had been governors.

What is this if not another piece of evidence that Buhari’s anti-corruption war is a sham merry-go-round that is headed for nowhere?

I remarked here in a piece titled ‘Birds of the same feather and a unity list of corruption’, just a couple of weeks back, that the All Progressives Congress has become a haven of corruption and that all that a corrupt official need to do is to switch allegiance to the party and their sins (read crimes/guilt) will be forgiven. Garba Shehu has told us in a direct echo of an infamous statement of Adams Oshiomhole, a former chair of the APC, that new members with corruption charges on them are repentant sinners- just for switching allegiance.

This was when Nigerians worried that Adamu Abdullahi, a man still on trial for corruption, had been elected chairman of the party. It didn’t take long for President Buhari to offer him remission. Adamu Abdullahi was his personal choice as chair and is expected to midwife the process that will produce their party’s candidate for next year’s presidential election.

Now President Buhari, the incorruptible man of integrity that belongs to no one and everyone, has pardoned Dariye and Nyame even as each keeps back the proceeds of their crime, I guess we can still expect him to hold his predecessors responsible for corruption in the land? He could yet mount the rostrum during the imminent elections to rhapsodise about integrity and fighting corruption and his supporters would sing and dance to the insensate rhythm of their own anti-corruption lamba.

Vanguard News Nigeria