As President Muhammadu Buhari launches his crackdown on corruption with multiple probes of the last administration, the National Peace Committee for the 2015 General Election led by former Head of State, Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, saw the need to meet with the President on the matter. Speaking with the media after the closed-door meeting, a member of the committee and Catholic Bishop of Sokoto State, Bishop Matthew Kukah, said the committee urged the Federal Government to be guided by the rule of law in its fight against corruption.
Bishop Kukah was quoted to have added: “I don’t think any Nigerian is in favour of corruption or is against the President’s commitment to ensuring that we turn a new leaf. I think what we are concerned about is the process. It is no longer a military regime and under our existing laws, everybody is innocent until proven guilty.”
While President Buhari reportedly appreciated the committee’s visit and supported its transformation into a National Peace Council, members of the committee, especially Bishop Kukah, have been attacked in the traditional media and online over the visit, which, according to the panel’s critics, was solely sought to seek soft landing for the corrupt who served in the last federal cabinet.
However, we commend the National Peace Committee for its concern and words of caution over the process adopted to fight the war on corruption by the current administration. Eternal vigilance, they say, is the price of liberty. Against the backdrop of recent incidents involving some federal security agencies and former officials who served in the last administration, we share the peace committee’s concern and call on President Buhari to prosecute his war on corruption within the ambit of the rule of law.
While it might seem that the President enjoys widespread support for his probe agenda, he needs to be cautious about the modus operandi and must not give in to the hawks in the corridors of power today seeking what could only amount to mob justice or judicial lynching of their enemies in the last administration under the guise of the anti-corruption campaign.
Also, the President must not allow the intemperate histrionics in public debates on the on-going anti-corruption war to sway him into embracing fascist tendencies, like suspending sections of the Constitution to give him sweeping emergency powers in order to fight corruption or denying the accused of raising preliminary objections in court during corruption trial, which some prominent Nigerians have openly canvassed in the media.
Apart from exercising the mandate of the millions Nigerians who cast their votes for him in the 2015 Presidential Poll, it appears to us that, like the late South African President, Dr. Nelson Mandela, in the celebrated standoff between him and the Apartheid regime, the public support President Buhari enjoys in the anti-corruption campaign flows from the elevated moral podium upon which he is currently installed in the psyche of the citizenry. However, the moral plain, as the end of many great historical figures has shown, could be treacherously slippery, hence the venerated must beware, always. Therefore, no matter how fervent he wants to recover the country’s stolen patrimony and bring the accused to book as he continues to pledge, President Buhari must beware of losing the moral grounds against the corrupt of society via a resort to extra-judicial processes. Those who shout “hosanna” today are not immune from a vociferous “crucify him” tomorrow.
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