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Twice the presidency’s request in this respect has met a brick wall at the upper legislative chamber and the senate is now pushing an even harder line of refusing to confirm President Muhammadu Buhari’s nominees to fill vacant positions of Resident Electoral Commissioners (REC) for two weeks in the first instance until Magu ceases to act as the commission’s in line with the legislators’ demand.
The 8th senate has confoundingly grown in confidence and arrogance despite its low esteem in the eyes of the discerning public and the questionable moral integrity of a number of its members that taints the body as a collective.
Most amazingly, though standing on a higher ethical pedestal largely because of Buhari’s own untainted personal anti-corruption credentials, it is the executive that is bending over backwards to seek a truce with a legislature widely perceived as morally crippled and that from what is obviously a position of weakness.
It is difficult in the first place to understand why Magu had to act for so long before his name was forwarded to the senate for confirmation. He had proven his bona fides as head of the EFCC operations under the chairmanship of Mallam Nuhu Ribadu.
Magu was reputedly responsible for some of the high profile investigations that exposed the vulnerable underbelly of many otherwise untouchable political big wigs including the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki when he was governor of Kwara State (2003-2011).
It was because some of these politicians had come to acquire considerable influence during the Umaru Yar’Adua presidency that Magu was hounded out of the EFCC, persecuted and punished unjustly by the police authorities, detained briefly and even had to flee the country at a time.
Yet, the Department of State Services (DSS) cites the allegations against him by his traducers as one of the reasons why Magu failed its ‘integrity test’.
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Given his diligent and dogged prosecution of the anti-corruption war as Acting Chairman of the EFCC, Magu had made many enemies for himself among the decadent political elite.
There is no way he could have had a smooth sail through the Senate, for example with not only the head of the upper chamber but no less than a dozen other senators being under the rigorous and uncompromising searchlight of the EFCC under Magu’s supervision.
There are also reports that a number of governors worked against his confirmation particularly because of the EFCC’s ongoing investigations into alleged illegal diversion of Paris Club bailout funds by some states.
It would surely have been a completely different scenario if his name had been sent earlier to the senate and he had resumed office as substantive chairman of the agency ab initio.
But then this kind of lethargy and systemic immobility on the part of the Buhari presidency is not exclusive to the Magu case.
Nearly two years into this administration, ambassadors are yet to be posted to several countries including those very critical not just to the country’s foreign policy but also her domestic economic policies particularly in these recessionary times.
In the same vein, boards of most federal parastatals are yet to be either constituted or reconstituted. Those appointed in the preceding dispensation are still sitting pretty on the boards even as the presidency continues to exhibit a paralysis of the will that is simply inexplicable.
Part of the problems with the administration’s anti-graft war despite Buhari’s undeniably honest intentions is the President’s apparent disdain for partisan politics.
This is not necessarily a bad thing especially as we have had cause to condemn his predecessors who cheapened and devalued the exalted office by descending without caution into the partisan arena.
However, if the President is averse to politics, he must have a competent and skilled team with the network and diplomatic astuteness to manage this critical area for him.
This is especially so because the signature policy of his administration, which is the anti-corruption war, is being fought within the context of politics.
Thus, the President’s anti -corruption war is being hobbled, for example, partly by lack of cooperation from the legislature, an arm of government indispensable to the fight against graft, largely because of Buhari’s initial indifference to the character of those who emerged as leaders of the National Assembly.
It is not enough for the administration’s functionaries to complain at every turn that corruption is fighting back. That refrain can be very annoying. Of course, corruption is not expected to sit back and fold its arms while it is clubbed to death.
It will necessarily fight back and it is doing so effectively under the current headship of the senate, whose political dexterity one cannot but respect despite the huge moral albatross under which he labours.
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His ability to command the support and allegiance of majority of the senators across the board despite his immense vulnerabilities is truly remarkable.
The management of the President’s politics has not been helped by the sheer complacency as well as lack of purpose or focus of his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) under the chairmanship of Chief John Odigie Oyegun.
Is it not astonishing that it was only this week that the National Working Committee (NEC) of the APC met formally with the senate caucus of the party nearly two years after the inauguration of the 8th Senate? Such complacency and incompetence is inexcusable.
Oyegun may have been an outstanding federal Permanent Secretary and performed creditably as Edo State governor on the platform of the defunct Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the aborted Third Republic. However, the blunt truth is that he seems out of his depths in his current assignment.
The Buhari presidency is in dire need of a party that is more dynamically, vibrantly and proactively led if it is to make more meaningful progress with its anti-corruption war and other key planks of its policy platform.
Equally uninspiring is the administration’s handling of the intra-organizational politics of its own presidency. This is why it is so difficult to blame the senate for stone walling on Magu when another agency under the presidency, the Department of State Services (DSS), provided it with a damning security report to nail the embattled Acting EFCC Chairman.
To be sure, President Buhari must be commended for giving the DSS a free hand to do its job. As far as I know this is the first time in this dispensation that the secret service is being given the organizational autonomy to do its work professionally without undue presidential interference.
Even then, this statement must be qualified when due note is taken of the DSS’s continued illegal indefinite detention of former National Security Adviser (NSA) to President Goodluck Jonathan, Colonel Sambo Dasuki (retd) and spiritual head of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), Mallam El Zak Zaky in defiance of court orders that they should be released. It is difficult to believe that the motive here is genuinely that of protecting the national interest.
Nobody says that the DSS should automatically clear any nominee for public office simply because the President desires it. What appears incongruous is that the secret service apparently gave Magu a clean bill of health with the presidency before the latter forwarded his name to the senate only for the same DSS to ambush him at the latter end.
The greater embarrassment is not for Magu but the presidency which comes out of it all looking amateurish, unsure and uncoordinated. It would have been tidier for the DSS to make its report on Magu available to the presidency so that his name would not have been forwarded for confirmation at all.
Some of the allegations against Magu by the DSS cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand. Perhaps the most serious is his reported fraternization with an allegedly shady businessman under investigation by the DSS. Yet, no business links have been established between Magu and the said businessman.
Magu’s vehement denial of the allegation that the businessman paid for his official accommodation has not been disproved either by the DSS or the Federal Capital Development Authority (FCDA) responsible for securing and paying for the residence.
No nexus has been established between EFCC official documents reportedly found in the businessman’s residence and Magu. No conflict of interest against Magu has been established. He has not been found culpable of any corrupt practices.
At best he can be blamed for some degree of indiscretion. But compared to the moral putrescence of some of the senators who gleefully adjudged him as failing some nebulous ‘integrity test’, Magu is a veritable saint.
Buhari may be tempted to offer Magu as the sacrificial lamb whose blood will be shed to propitiate the senate gods with feet of clay in the purported interest of more harmonious legislative-executive relations.
But if the capacious corruption whale succeeds in swallowing Magu and mortally decapitating his EFCC career, will the next Chairman of the agency who receives the senate’s approbation, not tread ever so cautiously and timidly so that he or she does not ultimately end up in the Leviathan’s belly? Will this not signal ominous portents for Buhari’s anti-corruption war?
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