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Enough of
this Ribadu Blackmail!
By Peter
Claver Oparah
Nigerians are strange
breeds of people. The present needless altercation for and against the posting
of Nuhu Ribadu, the erstwhile chairman of EFCC proves that nothing would
eventually change in the country because her citizens reserve tremendous
capacity to allow themselves to be robbed, duped and fooled and combines this
with a matchless capacity to take up their oppressors battles. Make no mistake
about it, the battle to spin so much horrible propaganda so that Ribadu would
retain his job is Olusegun Obasanjo’s job and Ribadu’s triumph through the
determined and orchestrated propaganda of his organized spin doctors will only
benefit Obasanjo and the colony of economic predators with whom he wrecked this
country for eight years and for whom Ribadu has undisguisedly owed his job. To
start with, I had never for one day, especially as the dirty and reckless
political manipulations that tailspinned into the political charade of April
2007 was bizarrely executed, believed that the select-and-kill and pejorative
acts Ribadu is doing amounts to any anti-corruption war. The pervasive nature
of corruption in the entire country presently bails me out in this entrenched
skepticism. I never believed in the antics of the self-celebrated do-gooders
that ringed the Obasanjo misrule and the unmanageable wrecks they left in their
bloody trail and the monumental wealth they lifted from that business while we
had mere propaganda and placebos as results bear me out. I had never believed
that any worthy impression could be made from the loud, noisy and warped
self-glorifications that marked Ribadu’s sojourn in EFCC. I never believe that
anything could be achieved from a dictated onslaught against political
opponents of the very well head of corruption and which leaves out his choice
cronies, lap dogs, sires, bed mates, commissioned pastors and subalterns even
with overwhelming cases of corruption stalking them like malignant shadows.
But in the midst of these
doubts, I would not fail to doff my hat for the dexterity of Ribadu and his
well-fed circuit of blackmailers to manipulate the sentiments of Nigerians to
give him favorable ratings and build in him the hope that someday, very soon,
corruption would cease to happen in Nigeria in the most classical case
of constructing a fool’s paradise that has so far failed to trap me. Ribadu has
been able to do this with his profound passion for publicity, rabid deployment
of blackmail and his maniacal cavorting of the limelight in ways that have
never been seen in Nigeria
and in the history of anti-corruption crusades anywhere in the world. The
impression is that blackmail and a self-fending acumen can suffice for a war on
graft and we are obliging Ribadu to the extent that we are donning him in a
toga of indispensability. Again, he drew generously from the average Nigerian’s
frustration with the unabating nature of corruption and faint hope that
something must be done. In this, Nigerians scanned desperately for mere
pittance to celebrate and Ribadu generously tapped into this to transmute into
a frankesitan, an un-tame able monster that was far weighted above the law! He
knew what he wanted so he stole in so many subjective and value-laden
definitions of anti-corruption that one would be tempted to define corruption
as an act committed by any other person than Olusegun Obasanjo and his
menservants.
This fooled him and his
well-recruited propagandists to believe he was the measuring rod to what is
right and wrong and for him was sewn a robe large enough to contain the
country’s choice institutions and laws; a robe broad enough to contain a thick
poach of somersaults, double-talk, grandstanding, reversals and tolerance to
indiscretions that suited his warped mindset. A robe wide enough to tolerate
his putative insouciance to anything or anybody Obasanjo does not like, to
trample on the laws and pre-ordinances with impetuous impunity and mask such
brazen recklessness as a fight against corruption- fight against corruption
indeed. This robe is being even widened to include the many acts of corruption
that are now trailing him as he prepares for life in sheol after gloriously
serving Obasanjo and his co-raiders. Armed with this borderless fiat, Ribadu
treated the anti-corruption war to the most horrible, unseemly and abhorrent
manipulations. He swerved from double speak to equivocation. He thrived in
boundless illegality and outlawry and deigned himself a god that came in the
likeness of man. A confounded nation watched the countless somersaults,
self-reversals, cancellations and wavering pronouncements that attended his
anti-corruption battles. He employed brazen illegal means and blackmail to get
governors that refuse to dance to Obasanjo’s wild political music out of
office. Adopting a standard format that Olusegun Obasanjo was spotless, he went
about foraging for his enemies to kill and desperately shoveling his many sins
in a grave of dubiety and fraud that will certainly be exhumed once this choice
attack dog is eased out of the way. As the worst pests recklessly ravaged this
country under Obasanjo, Ribadu went on an invention spree to explain away their
untouchability. When Obasanjo was buying shares in companies, he said that
amounted to conflict of interest. When Obasanjo’s yet-unexplained stupendous
wealth was assaulting the sensibilities of Nigerians and when his corruptive
tendencies swarmed all sectors of the country’s life, Ribadu proclaimed him a
saint that was incapable of sinning.
He never stopped there as
he exported his hocus pocus to international spheres when he made a very
embarrassing case for the retention of a World Bank President, caught in an act
of corruption on the reasoning that he was favorably disposed to the political
hatchet job he was doing for Obasanjo in Nigeria. When Obasanjo’s many
hirelings were caught dipping their hands in the cookies’ jar, Ribadu would
quickly rush in with exoneration, even when such was unsolicited. Thus, Andy
Uba, Bode George, the South West PDP governors, Anenih, Mantu, Nasir El Rufai,
and the closet fawners and courtiers that made a great feast of the Obasanjo
presidency became untouchable czars of a new order that lacked definition and
standard. Today, so many scandals dog Obasanjo, his immediate family members,
Femi Fani Kayode, El Rufai, and so many attack dogs of that era yet not a
whimpering had been heard from Ribadu except occasionally mouthing platitudes
against former governors, as a way of remaining relevant after failing woefully
to prosecute them several months after they left power.
Even when Saminu Turaki
recently confessed that Obasanjo and his cronies like Andy Uba made him to
devote N10billion of his state fund to the third term, Ribadu never allowed him
to finish before he dismissed the allegation even without a minimum scrutiny.
When the nation rose up to protest the last gale of asset stripping that saw
our refineries and choice national assets handed over to Obasanjo’s cahoots,
Ribadu stuck out his neck, in deference to his cultic service to Obasanjo, to
tell a distraught nation that there was nothing wrong with such corrupt sale of
our national patrimonies to favoured cronies. We are today witnessing the
monumental financial scandals that made Obasanjo’s regime, where Ribadu was a
choice knight, the most reckless and most corrupt in the history of the
country, yet we had a saint that came from the world yonder to save us from
ourselves presiding over an anti-corruption war. Can we go on with the
whimsical donation of oil blocs to presidential courtiers, the forcing of
political opponents to give up their equity to choice hirelings, the bizarre
Iyabo-Obasanjo 419 case that cost the country its power plants? It would be
interesting to know what the thinking of the only man that can fight corruption
in Nigeria,
a great friend and companion to the perpetrators of these hefty crimes, under
whose nose these unseemly deals were brokered, was on these. On governors that
sing Obasanjo’s chorus, Ribadu waxed deaf and dumb to their indiscretions and
waited in tow to rebuff any allegation against Obasanjo, even when the later
had vacated Aso Rock. When the PTDF scandal broke, Ribadu did everything to
screen off Obasanjo, who was found to have engaged in the most deadly raid of
that fund and presented a wishy washy report that was aimed at arriving at a
pre-determined result of Atiku’s culpability. With Obasanjo, Ribadu excelled in
covering the many malfeasance and putrid mess the man committed so much so that
most Nigerians doubted where his loyalty was located; between Nigeria and
Obasanjo. He left no one in doubt where it was when the then Ken Nnamani-led
Senate wanted to extricate him from the obnoxious apron string of Obasanjo. In
his characteristic brash manner, he told the National Assembly that he is only
answerable to the President and not the National Assembly. It is strange that
he is anchoring his present blackmail, in an effort to retain his job, on the
illegality of the President to remove him from a job that was created solely
for him. What a crime fighter!
Because Obasanjo and
cronies presided over the sordid mess the oil ministry, NEPA, NPA, the Railway,
NITEL, the ministries and other federal parastatals became; the very
institutions the World Bank identified as perpetrating over 85 per cent of the
nation’s entire corruption index, Ribadu never deigned it appropriate to
subject these to the barest scrutiny except where they point to the indictment
of Obasanjo’s political enemies. In this quaint fight against corruption, the
scourge mutated into an octopus that today ravages all sectors of the country’s
polity. Caught in the vortex of his double-facedness, Ribadu now located
corruption in the activities of the state governments as this affords him the
leverage to pick all those governors that expressed their manhood as the
disguised dictatorship of Obasanjo lasted. The federal government under
Obasanjo, which appropriated over 53 per cent of all federal allocations and
totally controlled a much larger unaccounted revenue from sundry sources,
became a saintly enclave that was incapable of sinning.
Then, his decision to
become the hunting dog to the PDP en route the macabre charade of April
provided a horrible topping that would have earned Ribadu the boot. He worked
to the satisfaction of his master who primed him for higher roles and to
prepare him for that, he was rewarded with unearned promotions. Like Nasir El
Rufai, Dora Akunyili, Femi Fani Kayode, Akin Osuntokun, and the many other
courtiers who were employed for mean roles during this era, he was urged to
prepare himself for loftier roles. The rest is now history and the failure of
that dream meant that Ribadu must do so much to retain his job, which he had
been doing by recruiting a retinue of press hands, contractors and lawyers to
fight his battle on the jejune and watery propaganda that he is welded to the
EFCC and that he is the only Nigerian that can fight corruption, even with the
sordid warts that he drags around! He used this tactics any time his many
scruples were called to question. We were almost being goaded to accept the
farce that if Ribadu ceases to be, Nigeria will cease to be. The most
damning of blackmails was employed to achieve this end and the Nigerian crisis
Obasanjo created came in handy to drive this fallacy home. Employing very
contradictory logics and countless illogic, Ribadu made himself Nigeria and
caused his many propagandists to threaten fire and brimstone anytime he was
demanded to reign in his many scruples.
This made Ribadu to loose
the opportunity to avoid being thrown out the way he was even when it was
obvious that pouring new wine in old wineskin, which his retention would have
amounted to, is not the best way to advance a fight. As his end at EFCC dawned,
he became more desperate to blackmail and please at the same time but his
tactics failed him at the very last moment. Methinks that even if Ribadu was
sincere in what he did under Obasanjo, he needs to leave for someone else to
try. Now that tales of sudden house gifts in Dubai and buying up of government
houses in Abuja is spewing out, we need to examine the corruption fighter to
know we have not handed the destiny of our country to a besotted hatchet dog
that cannot resist the urge to dip his hands into the till. We need to open up
the EFCC under Ribadu to ensure that crooks have not taken us for a ride while
some people that should know, try to make him a tin god. Alozie Ogugbuaja is
there if we need an incorruptible police officer to bank on. We certainly don’t
need anything near Ribadu because he had succeeded in compromising our fight
against corruption and our perception of what is right or wrong.
Peter Claver Oparah.
Ikeja, Lagos
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Posted by Robot| 09.01.2008 10:59