The Executive Director of Center for Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Center, CISLAC, Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, has picked holes in the current anti-corruption fight by the President Muhammadu Buhari.
Addressing journalists on the sidelines of the IMF/World Bank Spring meetings in Washington DC, Mr Rafsanjani stressed that Mr Buhari is on the verge of losing the confidence of Nigerians.
He observed that, while the Nigerian government has demonstrated commitment in the fight against corruption, there are a lot of setbacks.
He warned that failure to correct these setbacks can jeopardize the confidence Nigerians have in Buhari.
Mr Rafsanjani made reference to the case of the Acting Director General of the Nigeria Intelligence Agency, NIA, Muhammed Dauda, who exposed the Ikoyi Towers cash saga by his predecessor, Ayodele Oke.
He said that Mr Oke was indicted but was retired and never prosecuted.
The CISLAC boss lamented that rather than being applauded for, “exposing the demand for bribes by top persons in government to facilitate his confirmation,” Mr Dauda was “sacked and his life under threat.”
Rafsanjani insisted that such decision by the government was, “making a mockery of the government’s whistle-blowing policy, which was designed to incentivize the exposure of corrupt public officials.”
He also noted that the recent naming of treasury looters with nobody from the ruling party indicated that the fight against corruption was not sincere.
Rafsanjani called on Buhari, the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo and the National Assembly to investigate the circumstances surrounding the sack of the former Acting DG NIA and the threats to his life.
He said, “The Nigerian government had come up with a policy on whistleblowing that will encourage citizens to expose corruption and then even get rewarded.
“Even though we felt we needed to institutionalize that framework to guarantee the safety and security of whistleblowers, what shocked us is that recently the National Assembly called for a public hearing to investigate the circumstances that surround the NIA scandal that led to the sack of the former Acting Director General.”
“The sacked Acting DG came and gave testimony and exposed how some highly placed people were demanding a bribe for him to be confirmed.
“What shocked us was that instead of him to be actually celebrated as somebody who exposed corruption, he was actually sacked. Not only was he sacked but, from the information that we heard, his life has been threatened. So you just wonder whether the policy on whistleblowing is actually real and operational.
“If it is real and operational, how can somebody who exposed this kind of monumental corruption at the NIA get sacked, [with] even his life being threatened?”
“We are worried for anti-corruption activists that anybody who actually exposes corruption he or she might not be protected by the state because if the policy does not have sincerity in it, it means that people fighting corruption can even get killed, not only sacked.
“So we are calling on the Nigerian government, particularly the President, to investigate the circumstances of the sack of the former Acting DG of the National Intelligence Agency because we believe that what happened is a setback to exposing corruption and the fight against corruption in Nigeria.
“If somebody can be rewarded with sack and threat to life, it means other people in the different ministries and parastatals cannot be able to expose the corruption that is going on in the MDAs”.
