If perception were the sole yardstick for measuring performance in office, President Muhammadu Buhari, candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), would perhaps easily coast to victory at the February 16 presidential poll on the back of his much-publicised anti-corruption war.
While Buhari is seen as an incorruptible leader capable of giving corruption a bloody nose, his main challenger, major opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Atiku Abubakar, seems to carry a burden from his past as vice president.
Atiku, a businessman, has promised to get the economy working again by cutting corporate taxes and, in turn, creating jobs and delivering a $900 billion economy by 2030. Yet, his pledge to privatise the largely opaque state-owned oil firm NNPC is seen in many quarters as an attempt to sell the country’s patrimony and enrich his cronies.
“A win for the challenger, Atiku, would create a brief, superficial boost to the country’s image – largely because of his better health and keener intellect. But it would also pose the risk of a return to an even more rent-seeking governing style,” said Eurasia Group, a Washington-based political risk consultancy firm, in a recent report.
Many poor Nigerians believe their poverty persists because wealthy politicians and their cronies have helped themselves, unfettered, to the public till since the country’s return to civil rule in 1999. They, therefore, wish the sledgehammer of justice would descend on these wealthy individuals.
But Buhari’s anti-corruption war has faltered. In his first coming as military head of state, Buhari had said he took over power in order to fight corruption which, he said, had “become so pervasive and intractable that a whole ministry has been created to stem it”. By the time he was ousted from office in 1985, however, corruption remained entrenched in the Nigerian system, putting a question mark on his ability to tackle the scourge headlong.
When he was voted in as a democratic president in 2015, Buhari said, “If we don’t kill corruption, this corruption will kill us.” The fight against corruption was one leg of a tripod that formed the major policy thrust of his administration – the others being security and economy.
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To match words with action, the Buhari administration embarked on full implementation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) test-run by the Goodluck Jonathan administration. The TSA consolidated multiple government accounts into one and helped plug financial loopholes, resulting “in greater transparency and accountability in the public financial system”, according to Grant Walton, a Fellow at the Development Policy Centre who is actively involved in the Transnational Research Institute on Corruption.
The anti-corruption agencies, lukewarm until then, took a cue from Buhari’s so-called “body language” and woke from their slumber, undertaking a series of investigations resulting in arrests, prosecutions and recovered loot.
Yet, not many today are enamoured of Buhari’s fight against corruption. For while the anti-corruption crusade seems to have produced positive results, it has left the citizens poorer, with money apparently circulating only among the president’s family and cronies.
While the questionable subsidy payments for petroleum products have remained under Buhari, a BusinessDay report on Monday uncovered the sleaze in the Central Bank’s longstanding N306/$ exchange rate, seen as the biggest FX racket since the dark days of maximum military dictator Sani Abacha.
In their desperation, many Nigerians have yearned for a return to the pre-Buhari era encapsulated in the chant “Bring Back Our Corruption”, which, in the words of Moses Ochonu, professor of African History at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, illustrates “the primacy of economic survival and wellbeing above all else, including the fight against corruption” and a yearning for a return to an era when “corruption was rampant but life was easier, cheaper, more livable”.
“Nigeria is gripped by the familiar anxieties of an economy in distress. This escalating crisis has demystified a president once thought capable of astute, if not magical, economic management. In their desperation for respite, many Nigerians are now paradoxically yearning for the corruption that they and their leaders blame for their economic woes, but theirs is not a nostalgia for corruption per se but for a period in which, despite or because of corruption, the flow of illicit government funds created a sense of economic opportunity and prosperity,” Ochonu said in a 2016 article.
Opposition politicians have alleged Buhari’s anti-corruption fight is only a tool to witch-hunt opponents. They point out that many politicians in Buhari’s party, the APC, were in the top echelon of PDP yesterday and so partook in whatever corrupt practices PDP is being accused of. Yet, no charges have been brought against these politicians, some of who allegedly funded Buhari’s campaign in 2015 and are today in his cabinet. And even those with corruption charges hanging on their necks walk free in the corridors of power.
Even Buhari’s promises on the economy and security haven’t fully materialised. While Buhari purportedly focused on the fight against corruption, however wishy-washy, the economy slid into recession, its first in over two decades, leaving many citizens wallowing in abject poverty.
Jobs have been lost, with unemployment figures climbing to 23.1 percent in the third quarter of 2018, from 8.2 percent when Buhari took over in 2015.
The last four years have witnessed unprecedented killings across the country, partly from Boko Haram which the government claims to have decimated, but mostly from herdsmen attacks in the country’s north-central region.
Poverty rates have increased, with about 87 million Nigerians in extreme poverty as at the end of May 2018, and six Nigerians sliding into extreme poverty every minute, according to a June 2018 Brookings Institution report.
Peter Obi, vice presidential candidate of the PDP, last December took a swipe at Buhari’s anti-corruption war, insisting fighting corruption was not an economic policy but only a means to an end.
“It is not that you cannot fight corruption but you can fight it more aggressively while addressing economic issues,” Obi said at the vice presidential debate, reeling out figures to show how Buhari’s fight against corruption without commensurate effort in economic management led to loss of jobs, decline in FDI and bearish trends at the stock market.
“You’re just fighting corruption, you are not creating jobs. You cannot shut down your shop and be chasing criminals,” Obi said.
As the clock ticks on the presidential poll, Buhari and his acolytes continue to croon the vibes of anti-corruption and promise to jail more looters. On the other hand, Atiku, readily accepted within the business community because of his pro-business disposition, says he will institutionalise anti-corruption by introducing technology to eliminate interface.
International research agencies see a tight race between the duo, predicting a narrow-margin win for Atiku.
But if Buhari wins on February 16, it would not be because he has wrestled corruption to a standstill in the last four years.
