Erudite lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Demi Falana, has declared that the 8th National Assembly were against the Presidential Penal For Recovery of Federal Government Properties headed by the Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Anticorruption, Chief Okoi Obong Obla, “because of its stringent nature and not its validity.”
He also said the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) and the Independent Corrupt Practice and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) have been castrated by the legislators.
Speaking yesterday while chairing the 2nd forum of the Anti-corruption Situation Room with the theme: “Presidential Panel for Recovery of Federal Government Properties: A Review of the Law, It’s Mandate and The Implications for Anticorruption,” organised by the Human Environmental Development Agenda in collaboration with Technical Unit on Governance and Anticorruption Reforms (TUGAR), Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism and supported by MarArthur Foundation, he said the law that “establishes the panel is valid and subsistent and that those opposed to the law should go to court.” He said: “Talking about this law, it is valid and subsistent.
Those who are opposed to the law are advised to go to court to challenge it constitutional validity. You can’t sit down in parliament and say the law is illegal.
You can amend or impede the law, but you can’t say the law is illegal. “The Code of Conduct Bureau and ICPC have been castrated; EFCC is managing to breathe because the names of the chairmen and board members of both Code of Conduct and ICPC have not even been looked at by the legislators, not to talk of consideration. These names have been presented to them since last year, and there are no security reports against any of them, but they simply have no time to allow both agencies to work.
“This panel should be encouraged to do its work and we are only challenging the panel to collaborate and work with other agencies because one of the problems of the fight against corruption is the lack of interagency collaboration by the anti-graft agencies and the Office of the Attorney-General of the Federation.” Continuing, he said: “This regime identified political corruption as very dangerous when they came on board, but between 2015 and now nothing has change rather the political system has become much more corrupt.
Not only do people now buy delegates in party primaries like the one that just happened in my state, Ekiti, where not less than three billion Naira was spent. So, nothing has change, it’s even so bad now.
“We must work to stop this embarrassing situation where by on the day election what is suppose to be secrete affairs, it is so bad that once you cast your vote, you show it to someone standing strategically somewhere before dropping it in.”
The representative of the Chairman of the panel, Chief Obla, Dr. Eugene Iferr, said the panel “has done slots of recovery” and would still continue to do. He also clarified that the panel “is not for public office holders and civil servants alone, but all Nigerians.
