A former deputy national publicity secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Comrade Timi Frank, has advised President Bola Ahmed Tinubu not to entertain, harbour or negotiate soft-landing deals with ex-government officials known to have abused their offices by looting the nation’s treasury.
Frank gave the admonition in a personally signed press statement he released to journalists in Abuja on Friday.
He noted that the president’s zeal in going after corrupt elements during his early days in office “seems to have waned or completely died.”
He urged the president to rev up his drive to make corrupt officials account for their stewardships in order not to make the arrest and on-going investigations of the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, and the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, AbdulRasheed Bawa, to appear as being vendetta-driven.
He also called on the president not to reward ex-governors and ex-ministers with corruption cases or criminal allegations against them by the anti-graft agencies with fresh appointments, “as doing so, would make his anti-corruption drive a mere child’s play.”
Frank urged the security agencies executing the anti-corruption battle under Tinubu to extend their probes to the oil and gas sector by ensuring that “those who fraudulently benefitted from fuel subsidy regime and bogus daily PMS consumptions in the country are made to refund the people’s money that they looted in the process.”
He said, “From all indications, your (Tinubu’s) government is negotiating with looters and that is the reason up till now we have not seen any new action against looters after the arrest and detention of Emefiele and Bawa.
“Many Nigerians were happy and commended the actions you took on these arrests, but at this time we think a lot of the people who looted the country under ex-President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration would have been arrested and prosecuted in court.
“Unfortunately, further actions have not been taken to bring them to justice and information at our disposal shows that a lot of these looters are negotiating with your government for soft-landing.
“Most importantly, the zeal with which you started the fight against corruption which Nigerians applauded with the hope that you have come to surprise the country by genuinely fighting corruption has clearly died down and probably may not happen again.”
Continuing, he said, “If care is not taken, it might turn out that Emefiele and Bawa were just victims. In other words, from your body language so far, we don’t think you are ready to genuinely continue the fight against corrupt government officials, but only after those perceived not to have supported your bid to emerge as President.
“Otherwise there are a lot of looters out there which despite the plethora of evidence of corrupt tendencies against them are going around freely and it is very likely that nothing will happen to them anymore.”