How will Buhari and Atiku debate corruption?

Abimbola Adelakun

By the question of debate, I do not just mean the televised
event where one man stands against his opponent and both make a
pitch for the vote of the audience. The debate between the Peoples
Democratic Party presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, and the
All Progressives Congress candidate and incumbent, Muhammadu
Buhari, that I refer to is one about the power of impression to
contour reality.

The popular myth is that Atiku embodies corruption, but that
Buhari is pure because of some specious morality that demands his
luxuriating in poverty. Going by the frenzied manner Buhari’s media
agents are yelling themselves hoarse since Atiku emerged the PDP
presidential candidate, trying to warn us about corrupt politicians
who could invade the national till if Buhari loses the election, it
is obvious Atiku’s victory rattled their camp. In the next few
weeks, the noise of “corruption” will rend the air, the din
blocking our chances of hearing important issues. Whether his hands
are clean or not, Buhari will appear before equity accompanied by
his devout followers. What needs to be reiterated to them is that
the impelling force of “corruption” has sagged, the message this
time round is capability. And no, it is not a matter of
sloganeering but a demonstration of it.

When Buhari’s supporters say someone is “corrupt,” what they
mean is that unlike Buhari, such a person has money and is not
pretending to be suffering. To them, wealth accumulation process
strips the soul of all decency and that supposition disqualifies
one from any leadership position. They tend towards an extreme
where poverty is treated as an aesthetic; a thing of beauty that
ennobles the soul. They believe money is useful, but only as far as
it services Buhari’s ambitions. That is why no matter how much they
bloviate about corruption, their mouths can be momentarily fastened
with the question of who funded Buhari’s 2015 election. Their
mindset is that the effect of corruption on the polity matters, but
only when it is perpetrated by someone outside the approved circle.
As such, the issue of anti-corruption fight is one of the most
important ones both candidates will face going into 2019, and it is
also tricky because there are many false evidence appearing
real.

In 2015, Buhari’s main selling point was the anti-corruption
agenda, and he was lucky that he had a message that resonated with
Nigerians who found the wanton and brazen misdemeanour of the
Jonathan years frustrating. At the time, people had grown weary of
a government where the nation was getting richer from her
extractive industries while their lives remained perpetually
abject. They had had it with a government where the President
boasted that we are a prosperous nation because we have a political
class that flies in private jets. People were done with an
administration where terrorists sacked military barracks, soldiers
went on strike because they were fighting Boko Haram with empty
arsenals and emptier stomachs, while humongous sums were being
allocated to defence. They would have no more to do with a
government where impunity reigned; where even pastors abandoned
pulpits and used their private jets to courier dollars for ungodly
errands. The sins of Goodluck Jonathan’s government were
overwhelming, and Buhari’s promise of refurbishing our vandalised
polity by ridding us of corruption seemed like a breath of fresh
air. The trouble is, Nigerians were so desperate for a more
competent leader to emerge that they did not ask Buhari to define
his idea of corruption or present his strategy to them for a
critical evaluation.

Corruption is not always reducible to criminal acts, although
Buhari’s idea of it seems unreconstructed from what he thought it
to be in 1985. Corruption is multi-faceted; it ranges from abuse of
political power to administrative waste, and to people exploiting
the loopholes in the system to carry out fraudulent acts with
impunity. Corruption is not all about a few bad men who have access
to public funds abusing the privilege. If it were that simple, the
problem of corruption would have been long solved all over the
world. Even in the highly developed countries, corruption has been,
and is still, a part of their social and collective history. That
should tell us that corruption is a universal human problem and
solutions should be approached from that perspective. To confront
the problem of corruption, we need to borrow best practices from
elsewhere where they have combined technology, the law, and the
efficiency that comes with statistical integrity to fight both
waste and the human tendency to take what belongs to the
collective.

In the coming weeks, particularly when Buhari starts
campaigning, his team will hold up his integrity before us although
they must know that the times have changed. More of the Nigerians
who voted Buhari’s integrity in 2015 now have the hindsight of
experience to see his bad faith. We have seen the supposedly
saintly President act unperturbed when some of his closest aides
were embroiled in corruption scandals. Buhari’s ethos has been
repeatedly dissolved when those his party had previously labelled
the robbers of the Nigerian patrimony now have a seat at the APC
table. When the country slipped on the corruption perceptions index
by Transparency International, Buhari’s aides preferred to blame
Nigerians for this loss of status. No, they refuse to look inwards
and understand that Buhari’s inability to summon the moral courage
to confront his own implication in the problem of corruption is a
betrayal that demoralises through the ranks. Their stance on
anti-corruption barely ever passes the level of
self-righteousness.

As for Atiku, the cards are stacked against him for many
reasons. Some of the beliefs that he is corrupt have a factual
basis, while the others are the fluff generated by the propaganda
machine that Olusegun Obasanjo used against him when both men, as
President and Vice President, locked horns. The best bet for
Nigerians in this knotty situation is not to defend Atiku with the
same blind ferocity Buharists resort to defend their dear leader.
It is to collective interest if Atiku is allowed to clearly define
his understanding of corruption and highlight his strategy for
combating it. One thing I am certain of is this: Atiku cannot
possibly be more corrupt than any of the other politicians in power
today including Buhari himself. The Nigerian political class is
grossly unethical but rather than somebody “outsteal” the other,
they balance one another out; they fund each other’s elections.

From the moment Atiku picked up the PDP candidature, the
campaign started. Corruption and anti-corruption are going to be
one of the biggest issues on which he will be interrogated, and the
problem is that such obsession might clog other issues that need
addressing. Going by how some of Buhari’s media team minders are
pushing the question of Atiku’s “corruption” to the public through
various media, one can tell that the battle for our votes has
already begun. If there is one mistake we should not make, it is
not to get hyper-partisan to the point that the candidates are not
sufficiently questioned on how they understand corruption, and how
they propose to deal with it. They should be able to produce clear
strategies with realistic goals achievable within a defined time
period,

On a final note, the Atiku vs. Buhari contest is going to be an
interesting one for many reasons already elaborated and also for
their histories. Both of them spent years jostling to rule Nigeria
before Buhari achieved his aim in 2015. Atiku’s bid for the
Presidency started as far back as 1992 during the SDP-NRC contests.
One of the factors that favoured Buhari was the build-up of anger
against Jonathan. Today, the same scenario is being repeated. Just
like Jonathan, Buhari got into office accompanied by massive amount
of goodwill but frittered everything. Three years after he was
sworn in, Buhari has lost many of the voters who joyfully voted for
him. It is equally doubtful if he has won over the hearts of others
who did not vote for him. Buhari is now at the place where Jonathan
was in 2014. When Jonathan saw looming defeat, he began taking a
series of missteps that eventually cost him the election. The same
can be said of Buhari. The question is if the build-up of momentum
against the Buhari candidature is strong enough to sweep him out
like it did Jonathan.