The dishonest integrity of President Muhammadu Buhari, a politician commonly mistaken for a statesman is in full but discrete display in the Ibrahim Magu affair. For the second time, the Nigerian senate has rejected the nomination of Magu, the acting chairman of EFCC by refusing to confirm him as the substantive head of Nigeria’s foremost anti-corruption agency. On each occasion, the senate cited a damning report by DSS summarily declaring Magu as failing in integrity and hence a liability on the war on corruption as reasons.
The reaction to Magu’s rejection by a broad section of the public has been near hysteric in unanimously condemning the Senate for being a cog in the wheel of the progress in the fight against corruption. Some have alleged that corruption is fighting back through the Senate. In all these reactions, it is clear that some few hidden facts must have escaped public notice.
The administration of Muhammadu Buhari has as its cardinal objective, the war on corruption. In the last eighteen months of this administration, massive arrests, asset seizures and court ordered forfeitures have been recorded; a feat which has been amplified as unprecedented by the ruling APC’s well-oiled and efficient propaganda machinery. The propagation of the war on corruption with fascist precision has convinced many on the sincerity of the anti-corruption crusade thereby conferring on the Buhari administration a high moral garb.
Therefore, Nigerians who believed so much in Buhari’s anti-corruption war were shocked if not disappointed about the fact that Magu the poster boy of the war on corruption was roundly rejected by the Senate twice citing among other things the DSS report, which condemned him as deficient in integrity. Magu, a police officer with an eventful if not a controversial career in the force, is quite popular among many Nigerians. The media conferred on him the appellation of anti-corruption’’ Czar’’ an honorific title held by Nuhu Ribadu, the pioneer chairman of EFCC.
Interestingly, angry reactions to Magu’s rejection have been predictably directed towards the wrong direction, in this case the senate, while leaving out the major culprit, the presidency. Many failed to observe that Magu who was appointed in December 2015 as acting chairman remained in that capacity for about ten months with growing speculation in the public space about a determination to prevent his confirmation and engineer his replacement by a powerful cabal operating from inside the kitchen cabinet of the Buhari administration.
It is believed that this powerful clique of top members of the inner chamber of the kitchen cabinet wield enormous influence over the president. However, those who understand power and how it is deployed will know that a cabal is only powerful within the presidency when they act on behalf of the president by initiating policies and implementing actions that are in line with his understanding, perception, biases, preferences, ideologies and idiosyncrasies.
The cabal understands the president’s body language and acts appropriately without a single word from the president and this makes him pretty comfortable and grants access to the clique without exposing his flanks. This access makes the cabal powerful and they use this advantage to present their own friends or foes in the proper image by exploiting all they know about the president’s idiosyncrasies.
If they bless you, you are blessed but if they curse you, you are cursed. The president and the cabal enjoy a complex symbiotic relationship that is mutually beneficial to both sides. The actions of the cabal can never be divorced from that of the president because they are one and the same. When actions go right, the president takes the credit, but when it goes wrong the cabal takes the blame, just to protect the president’s image.
From the foregoing, it is clear that the president is understandably in a dilemma over the Magu affair. How do you drop a man who has been the face of an anti-corruption war that has received applause from many Nigerians most of whom are the president’s diehard supporters? Having supported both the fight on corruption and Magu’s efforts with a massive propaganda blitzkrieg carried out with fascist precision, which has created a mass of devout Buharideeens and Hailing Hailers among a large section of the populace, it becomes awkward to drop such an individual without a backlash.
Therefore, would it not be public opinion suicide, for the president to go against the expectations of the monstrous mass of robotic devotees he has created? To achieve the twin objectives of remaining infallible, incorruptible and squeaky clean in the eyes of his devotees but also getting Magu rejected by the Senate concurrently, President Buhari, cleared Magu of all wrong doings and re-nominated him on one hand while the DSS, operating from inside the presidency and headed by the president’s kinsman, Lawal Daura, sent a guilty-as-accused security report to the Senate a few hours to the confirmation hearing.
Once again, President Muhammadu Buhari, the underrated political tactician, has set the Senate, which already has a battered image of institutional corruption against the Nigerian people. It is the Senate and not Buhari who is being blamed for sabotaging the war against corruption, with the DSS as the fall guy.
The strategic act of re-nominating Magu as EFCC chairman has exonerated the president and he has come out clean as usual from his dirty war on corruption. President Buhari and not the Senate is the one who does not want Magu as EFCC chairman. The reason behind Magu’s fall from favour is not contained in the DSS report. Such reasons are in the closets, only known to a few.
The war on corruption was tainted right from the start with the obvious selective approach of only going after political opponents both within and outside the ruling APC. The anti-corruption crusade has been more of naming and shaming of members of the immediate past administration of Goodluck Jonathan while leaving out the friends and sponsors of the president’s election who were mostly former members of the PDP.
This approach has kept the president’s supporters, who are mostly poor and struggling and who have suffered the consequences of maladministration of past administrations, entertained and the appetite of those among them baying for the blood of past corrupt leaders satiated. Selective war on corruption is a worse form of corruption and unfortunately, the Buhari administration has followed the footsteps of the very previous administrations he loves to hate.
Magu fought the dirty war relentlessly by going after political opponents of the president while ignoring the corrupt cases of friends and members of the current administration. Selective war on corruption perpetuates the cycle of corruption; the very reason the previous efforts like the current one are ineffectual in tackling corruption.
