"Jonathan Encouraging Corruption" - Tambuwal

Speaker of the House of Representatives Hon. Aminu Waziri Tambuwal yesterday declared that President Goodluck Jonathan is encouraging corruption in Nigeria by failing to act on corruption cases that the National Assembly has probed and found to be true.

The speaker, who also took a swipe at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) as also being a corrupt institution, stated this in a paper on the role of the legislature as the vanguard for anti-corruption crusade in Nigeria, which he delivered at a lecture organised by the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in Abuja to mark the International Anti-Corruption Day.

Citing the recent corruption case involving the minister of aviation, Princess Stella Oduah, over the purchase of two BMW armoured cars for N255m, Tambuwal said the president's setting up of a committee and burdening the national security adviser (NSA) to investigate the allegations rather than delegate the EFCC to take charge sends a signal that he is not sincere with his fight against corruption.

"By the action of setting up different committees for straightforward cases, the president's body language doesn't tend to support the fight against corruption," he said. "Take the subsidy probe, the pension, the SEC probe and recently the bulletproof car cases. After the House of Representatives did a diligent job by probing and exposing the cases, you now see something else when it comes to prosecution.

"In some cases, you have the government setting up new committees to duplicate the job already done by the parliament. Take the bulletproof cars case: what we have is that the NSA, who should have not been bothered, is being given assignment to investigate what is obvious."

The speaker continued: "What the President should have done was to explicitly direct the EFCC to probe the matter. With such directives coming from the president, I am sure we still have good people in EFCC who can do a good job."

Speaking on the EFCC, the speaker said the commission receives but does not account for grants it gets from donors to aid its anti-corruption activities: "We know as a fact that the grants you receive from donor agencies have never been budgeted for. That is corruption."

He also said the anti-graft institution is also guilty of disrespecting resolutions of the House while noting that it had chosen to implement the subsidy report of the presidential panel led by AIG Imuokhede over the one passed by the House.

"The report you have been implementing is the Aig-Imokhuede report, not that of the House of Representatives. The last the House heard from you on the subsidy report was when you requested me, the speaker, to request some of my members to come and help you do your work… Of course, the pension scam is there; the scam in the aviation sector, the most recent one, is there. There is also that of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where trillions of naira from private citizens was suspected to have been mismanaged and is being mismanaged. When we commissioned an enquiry into it, what interested you more particularly was the allegation that our members refused to travel after taking $4,000 estacode, and they are still facing trial."

Tambuwal also disclosed that the House is investigating to know if the federal government is funding the SEC from service-wide vote, voted after the National Assembly jointly passed an appropriation law denying that agency funding.

"I cannot recall reading anywhere or hearing from any commentary that she (DG, SEC, Arunmah Oteh) was ever invited by the EFCC or that any officer of SEC was ever invited by the EFCC. Still on this matter, we received a report from the Public Account Committee of the House that it is like the finance ministry, the Budget Office and the Accountant General of the Federation's office found a leeway of funding SEC through Service-wide Vote. We are quietly investigating that and we will get to the root of that matter."

Earlier in his speech, the speaker informed the audience that a bill was on the way that would provide independence for security agencies in the country to aid their fight against corruption.

"I'm pleased to report that the House of Representatives is currently working on some proposals for the reform of these laws with a view to reinforcing the independence of the agencies administering these laws, including their mode of constitution and disbandment. I wish therefore to call on members of the NBA and indeed all Nigerians to prepare to buy into these reforms by making their inputs now or when the time comes for public hearings", he said, adding that "one other area which has been of great concern is the culture of undue secrecy that surrounded the operation of government".

"Whereas our constitution enjoins in its section 14 (2) (c) that 'the participation of the people in their government shall be ensured in accordance with the provisions of this Constitution' government business tended to be run like secret societies, to the exclusion of the citizenry. It was clear that this tended and was indeed intended to aid the concealment of corruption, such that, even in times of suspicion, members of the public including gentlemen of the fourth estate of the realm could not access public information."

(Leadership)