Abimbola Adelakun
On Friday, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s lawyers, wrote to the Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, to investigate an allegation that he collected N4bn slush funds from embattled acting Chair of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Ibrahim Magu. A presidential panel is currently quizzing Magu over serious corruption allegations. According to media reports, Osinbajo wants the IG to investigate the allegations —made by a blogger who once worked with the Goodluck Jonathan administration— and if found untrue, the blogger should be slammed with criminal charges to forestall future false publications.
To digress a bit, I am genuinely curious how exactly Osinbajo’s counsel expected the issues would be resolved when they sent out that petition. If the IG truly investigates and it turns out that the allegations are true, what will happen? Arrest Osinbajo? Call a press conference and give an honest report of his findings to the public? Can the police boss in this present Nigeria turn against those at the higher echelons of power that Osinbajo presently occupies? Does that IG have two heads?
It is worth recalling that this is not the first time Osinbajo will have to put up a legal fight over corruption allegations. In September, in the heat of Tunde Fowler’s exit from the Federal Inland Revenue Service, there was a similar allegation that Osinbajo was given N90bn to spend on the 2019 general election. At that time too, Osinbajo asked for a legal action. He also threatened to waive his constitutional immunity “to enable the most robust adjudication of these claims of libel and malicious falsehood.” Even though he vigorously denies the allegations, he was equally dragged into the issue of the N5.8bn National Emergency Management Agency scandal. If his persistent threats to sue his traducers have not deterred malicious claims, maybe he should start looking beyond that nostrum.
But I honestly sympathise with Osinbajo that his name keeps popping up at these sites of serious corruption allegations. It cannot be comfortable dealing with the embarrassment of being called a thief. On the other hand, his defence pattern —deny, threaten to resign, and threaten to sue— will not stop future claims. If he goes through that standard defence a few more times, it will look like he is merely throwing tantrums rather than someone who is legitimately aggrieved. It is far more productive to reflect on these allegations’ broader implications. It is not enough to chalk down the stories to mischief by certain aggrieved persons— who could very well be— but to consider them within the wider context of the Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) regime and its egregious failings.
It is possible that those accusations were not meant for Osinbajo personally. However, they targeted him particularly because what he emblematised —a professor of law and a pastor of a well-known church who would deputise the “Spartan” Buhari in rebuilding Nigeria’s crumbling moral order— has diminished in the eyes of the public. That story about Magu allegedly giving Osinbajo N4bn out of N39bn does not seem credible; its lack of substance made it look more like gossip. I am not sure that even the writer/blogger meant those allegations to be believed. Rather, the mischief is to relate how much Osinbajo has shrunk in the Buhari regime. Mind you, it was not that the VP landed N39bn and gave the anti-corruption chief N4bn to shut him up; it was the other way around. Such stories are pushed out to search for resonance among those in whose minds Osinbajo’s place in government has already been reduced to “VP Academics.”
Given the high expectations people had of Buhari/Osinbajo in 2015, how did things get so bad that someone as high-ranking as Osinbajo became a cheap target for the accusers of their government’s integrity? When Buhari first came into power in 2015, the All Progressives Congress could not tell us enough of the financial crimes committed by their predecessor. We were suffocated with stories of who had stolen what. They whipped up frenzy against their already defeated opponents to the point some naïve people even began to advocate extrajudicial means of prosecuting crimes. What happened to all of those cases they were unearthing then? Many of those that the APC said ruined Nigeria are now in that same party, and some are even close associates of the President. We have moved from the threat of an unsparing anti-corruption fight; one that would be so serious that many corrupt people would go on exile to watching the President cavort with those same accused.
Osinbajo might want to recall that he was the one who told us that Nigeria lost about $15bn to fraud in the procurement of security equipment during the Goodluck Jonathan administration. He informed us that just three people stole $3bn during the Jonathan era, and that $289 million and N100bn were variously drawn by officials of the Jonathan administration a few weeks to the 2015 elections. Unfortunately, none of the allegations Osinbajo made against Jonathan’s administration told us anything new. Even a child born the minute you started reading this article has already felt the pernicious effects of his government’s ineptitude. What the stories did, instead, was to point back at the Buhari regime and indict them. When you tell us how officials in the Jonathan administration used public funds for their campaign, we are also hearing your plans for funding your own 2019 campaign. That is why no one expected them to account for their campaign funding since 2015. Like an executioner who suffers a trauma whenever he sees someone with a sword, Osinbajo cannot stand someone accusing him of corruption the same way he did with Jonathan’s government. He keeps deploying high-level human resources to push back against a technique that worked for him until it worked against him.
When he used the gravitas of his office to lend weight to unsubstantiated stories of corruption, he should have known that he was contributing to a social ecology that would make trafficking in those stories acceptable. I am not against such accusations, but they are only worth telling if those involved had been thoroughly investigated, their speedy and efficient trials were starting, and you could reassure the public that you have put safeguards in place to prevent such from recurring. In this case, all the razzle-dazzle was all just to permanently delegitimise the previous administration and establish your government’s legitimacy. To an extent, even that approach would have been a tolerable political tactic if the Buhari regime had not turned out to be a letdown. From the people who promised discipline and a revamp of collective morals, we are stuck with the most disorganised and raucous government since 1999.
For a regime that once told us about how corrupt people feared Buhari so much that they were stashing away money in forests and in cemeteries, the scale of corruption that has unfolded under them is mind-boggling. Looking at the accusations against Magu and the present Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, alone, one wonders why anyone accused of corruption in that government should ever bother to ask the IG to investigate and exonerate him. What will that prove? That while he might be surrounded by people with soiled hands, that somehow his virtues are still intact? That effort is futile.
Nigeria is now an Orwellian world where the visage of a man is no longer separable from that of pigs. That should be food for thought for someone like Osinbajo that once embodied the promises of a new moral order. That calls for a deep introspection, the one investigation that no IG can help him conduct.
aadelakun@punchng.com
