Buhari’s corruption drive lays bare Nigeria’s tensions
PRESIDENT PROMISED HIS GOVERNMENT WOULD BE IMPARTIAL IN GRAFT INVESTIGATIONS
When Muhammadu Buhari took over as Nigeria’s president less than a year ago, he vowed to wipe out the corruption he said threatened the very existence of Africa’s largest economy.
But as he investigates former ministers and high-ranking officials, members of the opposition People’s Democratic Party accuse him of carrying out a vendetta against them.
Buhari ousted the PDP following March elections, ending the party’s monopoly on power that it held since the end of military rule in 1999.
The PDP called for Buhari to be impeached last week for “various constitutional” breaches, including the arrest this month of its national spokesman, Olisa Metuh. He was detained as part a probe into whether the previous government stole as much as $5.5 billion (Dh20.2 billion) meant for fighting an Islamist insurgency in the north.
Sambo Dasuki, the national security adviser under the administration of Goodluck Jonathan, was also arrested as part of the same investigation.
“Yes, there is a witch-hunt, because there are witches all over the place,” said Folarin Gbadebo-Smith, head of the Lagosbased Centre for Public Policy Alternatives and a former council leader in the commercial capital. “There are guilty parties out there.”
The arrests have heightened regional and ethnic tensions in Nigeria, a country of 170 million split between a mostly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south.
‘Targeted approach’
Buhari, a 73-year-old northerner and former general, got the bulk of his votes from his home region and the religiously mixed southwest through the coalition of his All Progressives Congress, formed in 2013 by a merger of smaller opposition parties and disgruntled PDP politicians.
Some southern and the bulk of the southeastern states voted overwhelmingly for the PDP’s candidate, then President Jonathan, a Christian who hails from the oil-producing Niger River delta region.
“It’s not rocket science for anybody to assume it is a targeted approach,” Annkio Briggs, a human rights activist focused on the Niger delta, said in an interview in the southern oil industry hub of Port Harcourt. “It is being done as if only members of the PDP are corrupt.”
Corruption has long blighted Nigeria since independence in 1960. Africa’s largest oil producer came 136th out of 175 countries in Transparency International’s latest global ranking, the same level as Russia. Buhari has blamed graft for keeping most Nigerians in poverty.