My Takeaway From Fayose’s Charge To Buhari To Probe Sponsors Of His Election Campaign

Fayose

Love him or hate him, the governor of Ekiti State, Ayo Fayose has a canny way of bringing to the fore those issues that some people especially in the mainstream media have deliberately swept under the carpet but needed thorough interrogation by all Nigerians.

President Muhammadu Buhari anchored his whole campaign on his personal integrity. Only recently even the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) admitted that the president is the only man of honour and integrity in the APC, asserting that the rest are wolfs in sheep’s clothings. Now Governor Fayose is throwing challenge to the president as a man of integrity to start the probe from his election campaign sponsors.

Fayose’s intervention is coming at a time when one of the president’s alleged sponsors, whom the governor of Zamfara State claimed brought over 80 per cent of the funds used to run Buhari’s presidential campaign, and former governor of Rivers State, Mr Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi,  has been pencilled down for the position of the very strategic post of secretary to the federal government of Nigeria.

Amaechi that the Rivers State government has levelled several allegations of corruption against him is hobnobbing with the president in the presidential villa and diverting corruption allegations elsewhere. This has called to question the president’s choice of friends and his famed integrity.

Nothing will cast dark shadows over Buhari’s integrity like making Amaechi the secretary to the federal government. Perhaps Fayose’s intervention will help the president save himself from the embarrassment that are abound to follow if Amaechi becomes one the major faces of his government, while he claimed to be fighting corruption against others who did not sponsor his campaign.

There is no doubt that Nigerians elected Buhari president on the strength of his incorruptible nature. While it is obvious that he could not have won the election without funding from questionable sources at a time that the PDP was in government and were also getting funds from equally questionable sources to run its campaign, it is however, expected that now that he has gotten the power, to distance himself from his alleged corrupt sponsors.

As expected the president’s actions since taking office on May 29, have been concentrated more than 80 per cent on the war against corruption. In the course of the war against corruption, the president has gone to the United States, where the government claimed that administration of President Barack Obama has availed him of the list of former ministers who stole oil money and the foreign banks where the funds are domiciled. Nigerians are inundated daily of billions of naira the government claims are in Nigerian banks from proceed of stolen oil.

However, the Ekiti governor considers the whole claims by the present government as motion without movement. He insisted that if the president has all these information he ought to swing into action even as he challenged Buhari to start from his sponsor who he rightly pointed out has never done anything in the past 16 years except that they had been former elected officials and that the monies they used to sponsor Buhari could not have come from their legitimate earnings.

Fayose, who spoke through his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, said, “Some of those who sponsored the President’s election have not done any other jobs apart from holding public offices. Yet, they provided private jets and funds with which the President campaigned across the length and breadth of Nigeria. He should let Nigerians know where they got money to buy private jets and the several billions of naira spent on his election.

“No one sits with corruption to fight corruption because as it is today, President Buhari is sitting among corrupt people and he must first extricate himself from the comity of corruption”.

The governor said, “If President Mohammadu Buhari knows exactly where the stolen funds are kept and who looted the funds, he does not need all these public announcements. Rather, he should make public names of the looters and bring back the purported stolen funds, location of which he has identified. It is when he is able to bring back the money that he should make announcements of recovered funds.

 “You don’t announce a process to the public; rather, you announce the results because that is what is of interest to the people. It is like you are announcing that you know where armed robbers reside, won’t they change their location?

“What the All Progressives Congress spin-doctors and their collaborators in the Presidency are doing is simple. It is such that when there is nothing to tell the people as per the rising Boko Haram attacks, dollar and other foreign currencies exchange rates, petrol pump price and other seeming failed promises of the APC Federal Government, they will accuse former President Goodluck Jonathan and his men of corruption, insult Peoples Democratic Party and make noise about fighting corruption.

“Mr. President and his men should know that these planned efforts to brand PDP as a party of corrupt people and suppress the giant strides of the Jonathan administration won’t work because Nigerians know that APC is peopled with more corrupt people and the President must treat the issue of corruption without looking at political parties.”