“The 20-year-old EFCC has not always covered itself in glory,” I wrote in this space in April 2024.
“In five months, it will owe Nigerians its annual report, featuring an army of APC kleptocrats.”
I was discussing the EFCC travails of one Yahaya Bello, Kogi’s former governor who had flattered himself for eight years as the “white lion.”
He had proved to be more of a scared little mouse upon which someone had suddenly turned on the lights: scurrying into dark little spaces to avoid the law.
Bello was exposed by the anti-corruption commission, as he left the governorship, to a variety of corrupt deals, including a N100bn corruption allegation, an N80.2 billion money-laundering scheme, the upfront payment of $760,910.84 to the American International School in Abuja for four children up to university graduation.
That little mouse fled into hiding in the Kogi State Government House in Lokoja: the place where he had been an emperor for eight years, building for himself exalted mansions wherever he wished, including Abuja’s Wuse Zone 4and Asokoro, as well as in Kogi’s Okene GRA.
The same rat hole where he adamantly refused to pay Kogi’s civil servants or pensioners and where, until the National Judicial Council stopped him, he wanted to appoint friends and members of his family, including his wife, to positions in the Kogi judiciary.
An angry EFCC boss, Ola Olukoyede, demanded that Bello come out of hiding, questioning whether he was superior to so many others the commission was dealing with, and warning Governor Ahmed Usman Ododo about frustrating Bello’s arrest.
When Bello refused to allow the law to take its course, the EFCC declared him wanted.
He was then stripped of police protection and placed on the immigration watchlist.
But no, the EFCC did not issue that 2024 annual report, which would have recorded Bello’s story. That has been the commission’s tragic playbook since 2007.
Eight months after that first article, I wrote again, observing that the former Kogi Governor was about to drag the EFCC into a familiar hole and become another former governor whose court case travels for decades in an ethical and political fog.
That stripping of Bello’s police protection? It has been exposed as misdirection, as he has been observed recently driving in a police-protected convoy.
It is this same ruthless, corrupt former governor that an unscrupulous Nigerian Union of Journalists last week “honoured with a “Lifetime Achievement Award on Media Empowerment.”
It said Bello had “encouraged and trained no fewer than 200 media professionals across Nigeria per edition on developmental journalism and how to sharpen their writing skills.”
“Media empowerment”? Every true journalist who received the story last week responded with a loud gasp and a wink.
Bello received a meaningless “lifetime” award and the NUJ, as an association, attempted suicide.
It was never Bello’s job to train any journalists: his job was to serve the people of Kogi, and every evidence is that for eight years, he helped himself to their resources instead.
The journalists he “empowered” appeared to have been trained specifically not to smell the very scandals that he perpetrated as governor.
The new problem then, is the same as the old: every time a mass media organisation goes into the business of awarding “honours” to the same people it is supposed to be covering professionally, it ends up in an ethical retail market in which objective reporting is damaged and fake heroes are manufactured.
First lady Remi Tinubu last week expressedimpatience at the insulting lack of an annual budget for her “Office of the First Lady,” appealing to the Senate for legislative action for direct funding to that “office” to execute one impactful social projects.
“Most of the resources I used to work are just given to me by well-meaning Nigerians,” she told journalists in Abuja. “It is whatever they give to me that I have to distribute to the First Ladies of various states. It’s difficult.”
First, there is no such thing in the Nigerian constitution as the “Office of the First [Spouse].”
There cannot, therefore, be budgetary allocations for what is only a wishful or imaginary outfit.
Second, people who give money to the first lady, should that even be true, do it for dubious reasons, not because she is starving or so she can undertake a parallel governance of her own definition. These murky waters are the foundation of the filth in which we swim.
Remember: Patience Jonathan claimed to have accumulated over $15m from such “gifts.”
In 2018, Aisha Buhari had her ADC (why in the world does a housewife need an ADC for “ze oza room” work anyway?) arrested, allegedly for failing to turn over some N2.5bn he had collected as gifts for her.
That was less than two years after she had sworn that she “never collected any gift and till now I don’t and will never.”
Nigerians do not give money to the president’s wife to “distribute to the first ladies of the states.” Nor should Nigeria amend the constitution to authorise the government to provide such funding.
Nonetheless, I commend the sentiment of Mrs Tinubu that first spouses should not simply “sit in the villa or in the government residences and be eating.”
Not that there is anything wrong with eating to support your elected spouse: it is over-eating or voracious consumption which attracts health problems, and this is precisely why the founding fathers strategically avoided making the ‘First Spouse’ a political or administrative fixture. It is a role, not an office.
Even then, in Mrs Tinubu’s handbag, that role is already a recklessly expensive one for the so-called Renewed Hope train.
In just five foreign trips between 2023 and 2024, for instance, the records show that First Lady Tinubu collected foreign exchange of $554,064.00.
This is an astonishing haul for something that cannot be located in the constitution or justified in a classroom.
What would happen then, should Senate President Godswill Akpabio, an incorrigible gourmand who is heavily-indebted to President Tinubu, agree to award Mrs Tinubu a direct spending licence?
And let us not forget the serial spending of the presidency on the first family, including on various mansions, and the infamous payment of the private hotel bills of the president’s daughter, Folashade Tinubu-Ojo, in November 2023. Or that in 2023, the presidency budgetedN1.5 billion on SUVs for Mrs Tinubu. The world laughed at us.
No, Mrs Tinubu, to make an impact as the First Spouse, you do not need an office or budgetary allocations or contracts. But you do need commitment, a heart, and a clear vision.
Define that vision. For instance, you can opt to fight greed in Nigeria. Build playgrounds or libraries for children nationwide, change our terrible driving habits, sponsor public toilets, renew elementary schools, make books available to children or hospital patients, and maintain public facilities.
Whatever vision you elaborate, those funds from Nigerians, including your husband, maybe, and appreciative governments and institutions, will multiply. You can even proudly initiate accountability for all the funds.
True leadership comes from the heart, not from the bank. Goodluck ma’am.