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When the then President Obasanjo appointed Mr. Nuhu Ribadu as the pioneer chairman of EFCC in 2003, he was an unknown quantity. Some of us saw his appointment as a sick and cynical joke in the so-called war against corruption that has generated intense heat since 1966 but no fire.
There was a good reason for our cynicism. It had to do with Ribadu’s primary constituency, the Nigeria Police Force. The force has been nobody’s idea of a knight in shiny armour capable of rescuing our distressed country from the iron grips of corruption. It was too much to expect Ribadu to fight corruption when many of his colleagues in the force were proud of the palm oil on their fingers. As we say, where would he start from?
Ribadu proved us all wrong. Within a few months of taking up his appointment and despite the initial lack of logistical support from the president himself, he showed that he did not see his appointment as part of the cosmetics of the war against corruption. His passion was proof of his commitment; his commitment was proof of his determination to help clean up our country and gain it some respect in the international community. He was the real fresh breath of air in a stuffy country that had lost its way trying to fight corruption in a dark tunnel.
Ribadu became a known and dreaded quantity. The world took due note of his zeal and passion. His single-minded pursuit of the corrupt had no room for prisoners of war. He cared less for the rule of law and more for the ends of the rule law. He was a man on a mission. Young and brash, big men cowered and small men wet their pants at the mentioning of his name. He arrested and handcuffed his own boss, Tafa Balogun, the inspector-general of police, on charges of corruption. He sent him to jail. Shivers coursed down the spine of many a big man. And Ribadu was a marked man.
Ribadu soon became the victim of his zeal and passion – and yes, success. His star tumbled from the sky when a new president and new big men became the new big men in town. The new government and the new big men refused to see things his way. In their view, Ribadu had become a rogue cop riding roughshod over the niceties of the laws of the land and had become the law unto himself. The president’s men accused him of running a parallel government. They provided no shred of evidence for this weighty allegation but it perked up the late President Umaru Yar’Adua’s ears. Ribadu’s days at the commission were not just numbered; they ended before he knew it.
Ribadu had his faults and his excesses. Driven by his zeal and passion, he created the unfortunate impression that some lawlessness on his part was excusable in caging the corrupt. I disagreed with this approach and said so several times in another forum, particularly my columns in Newswatch magazine. I think the problem was that he believed corruption was a desperate disease that required a desperate cure. He applied the law as he saw fit primarily to achieve results. He offended the canons of our culture by exposing our big men as common thieves.
Corruption and the corrupt fought back. Ribadu was removed from the commission in shabby circumstances. He was kicked out of the police force in even shabbier circumstances. He was thrown out on the streets. He has not yet quite got his groove back.
His next option was to truck with the politicians as he sought accommodation in politics. Ribadu believed he could parley his achievements in the commission and his image as one incorruptible cop in the country into a political capital. Given his radical bent, he joined ACN. In 2011, the party moguls persuaded him to run for president. They gave him the party’s presidential ticket. He had his first political baptism. His party went into an agreement with the PDP and ditched him. In the South-West, the home of ACN, only Osun State governor, Rauf Aregbesola, stood by him and gave him the vote of his state.
Ribadu has since roamed around quite a bit on the political turf – going from one party to another and back again. He was in APC but was lured by the president back into PDP and was made the governorship candidate of the party in his state, Adamawa, in the governorship and house of assembly elections on April 11. He lost the election badly, coming in a distant third. I fear that the colour of his political sun has turned golden.
I have gone to this length to discuss Ribadu because I believe he is a good man – courageous, competent and committed. You give him an assignment and you can depend on him to carry it out. That is his forte. He does not understand politics and the politicians. He must be pulled away from politics and given the job he knows best – fighting corruption with zeal and passion and rare honesty.
Corruption is much worse now than any at other time in our national history. The anti-graft agencies are comatose, starved of funds by the Jonathan administration. They are all contending with low morale among their staff. EFCC barks occasionally but the crooks know it cannot bite.
The burden of tackling this monster as a matter of urgency now rests on the shoulders of Muhammadu. I am persuaded that given the president-elect’s well known tough stance against corruption, his best partner in this war would be Nuhu Ribadu. His return to EFCC is, in my humble view, imperative. With the two tough men leading the anti-graft war corruption will be caged and the corrupt who have been laughing in our faces will see that they laughed only to cry. The change we voted for on March 28 and April 11 is a declaration of war on everything that has gone wrong with our country.
