Carnegie Report on APC, PDP Corruption
For those who have not been following the story, a recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on corruption involving actors in our two leading political parties - APC and the PDP - has confirmed that corruption is not just a PDP affair as the ruling party wants us to believe. Many actors in the two parties are corrupt and “inclined to using political power to steal public resources.” The report titled, “A New Taxonomy for Corruption in Nigeria,” said despite President Buhari’s anti-corruption posture, there was little difference between his party, APC, and the PDP.
The report said, “Kleptocratic capture of political party structures is a sine qua non of gaining power and thereby unlocking corruption opportunities across a range of other sectors. Little distinguishes Nigeria’s two main political parties in this regard. Both are constellations of fluid national, state, and local elite networks.
“Both are almost identically structured, non-ideological organisations. Both rely on misappropriated public funds to finance election campaigns. Neither values internal party democracy, allowing money and high-level interference to corrupt candidate selection processes.”
According to the report, top politicians in the two major political parties are always seeking, by hook or by crook, opportunities to secure lucrative public appointments or high-level backing for their ambitions.
It stated further that party officials always sought to monetise their influence over internal party processes by soliciting cash from aspiring politicians or seeking to be co-opted by them.
Well, the US-based international organisation did not say anything new other than to amplify what genuine patriots had been saying all the while about the one-sided anti-corruption war of the Buhari administration. While the EFCC pummels the corrupt elements in the PDP, it simply looks the other way when it comes to corrupt APC elements. Majority of those in the APC government at the federal and state levels are not clean. They are only being shielded by the anti-graft agencies. This is the truth that must be told.