The senator representing Borno South Senatorial District, Ali Ndume, has said Nigeria is the only country where politicians who steal public funds walk freely and are celebrated.
Speaking in Kaduna on Sunday, a day after the Senate concluded its two-day retreat on the amendments to the 1999 Constitution organised by the Senate Committee on Constitution Review, Ndume bemoaned endemic corruption and the lack of laws to punish corrupt public office holders.
Nigeria ranks 145 out of 180 in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) according to the 2024 report by Transparency International (TI).
The CPI, the most widely used global corruption ranking in the world, measures how corrupt each country’s public sector is perceived and Nigeria has, over the years, been adjudged to be one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
The police, immigration, customs, the Judiciary, and the military are ranked as the most corrupt institutions in the country.
As a whole, the three arms of government have been labelled to be mutually corrupt thus imperilling any prospect of proper and transparent use of public resources.
This is against the fact that Nigeria is blessed with enviable human and natural resources like oil, which has been the mainstay of its economy.
As corruption denies the country the resources for development, the country accounts for one of the top three countries with worst health facilities, unemployment, and for three years running has been regarded as the worst country affected by hunger according to Global Hunger Index.
Ndume agreed that corruption has imperilled the prospect of development, stating, “Our major challenge in this country is corruption. Up till now, we have no law that can proactively or even reactively address the issue of corruption in the country,” he said.
There have been calls for the enactment of the unexplained wealth act in the country. In 2023, the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the agency set up to fight corruption, Ola Olukoyede, stressed that “the issue of unexplained wealth is not a local issue,” the absence of which he said “had forced the anti-graft agency to rely on the provisions of Section 7 of its Establishment Act to investigate assets with corruption linkage.”
Ndume explained that, “If you see somebody in our system, especially in politics or government, and he is not corrupt, then he is lucky that he is God-fearing.
“Otherwise, it is only in Nigeria that you steal money and you walk freely, and then you are celebrated.
“If you come into an area like this, people would start lobbying you and do ‘dobale’ (genuflecting) for you and he knows that the money was stolen.
“It is only in this country that somebody had no money yesterday or last week, but the following week he buys 10 cars, buys jets and his brothers would fly with him, his mother would fly with him, his uncle would fly with him, and they would say Allah has blessed our son.”
The senator said he has made several attempts to pass a law on unexplained wealth in Nigeria, but that his efforts “never saw the light of the day”.
According to him, he approached a former head of state for help but no success.
He pointed out that, “Up till now, there is no law on Unexplained Wealth Act in Nigeria and there is no Executive Order on Unexplained Wealth in Nigeria.”
Corruption, he said , has led to hunger in the land, emphasising that, “There is hunger in the land and up till now we have not cultivated up to five per cent of our land… blessed land in Nigeria.”
