{OPINION} “If there is Abacha Loot, there’ll be Tinubu Loo!” – By Cham Faliya Sharon
The hypocrisy stinks further when it is the same ruler who also scandalously spent 17.5 trillion Naira purportedly for oil pipeline security in just one year, which surpassed the sum the country spent in subsidising petroleum products for Nigerians in 12 years, coming after he cruelly yanked off the subsidy and threw the entire economy into a tailspin, hence throwing more and more people into unprecedented poverty and hardships.
For a regime’s ruler that shamelessly and scandously awarded the contract for a 700km road to his family at a gluttonous cost of 15 trillion Naira without appropriation by the National Assembly, and without any competitive bidding by any other contractors, and without any known due process taking place to ensure that Nigerians were not grifted of their finances by career grifters in the corridors of power – for that ruler to be harassing and locking up prominent opposition figures like Mallam Abubakar Malami, SAN, the immediate past Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation, in the guise of fighting corruption is blatantly hypocritical and laughable.
The hypocrisy stinks further when it is the same ruler who also scandalously spent 17.5 trillion Naira purportedly for oil pipeline security in just one year, which surpassed the sum the country spent in subsidising petroleum products for Nigerians in 12 years, coming after he cruelly yanked off the subsidy and threw the entire economy into a tailspin, hence throwing more and more people into unprecedented poverty and hardships.
Available data show that before this regime came in on May 29, 2023, the cost of pipeline security was below one trillion Naira per year. How it magically jumped to 17.5 trillion Naira per year may require the services of Egyptian magicians to help us decipher this magical growth. But what may not require magical discernment to decipher is the fact that this 1700% jump smells of hypercorruption; otherwise, how can anyone explain or rationalise such an astronomical jump when the only thing that changed that could impact the oil industry was the change of leadership in the country!
The smell of the hypocrisy of the Tinubu regime in its purported war against corruption also becomes more pungent or fetid when you look at how the regime has failed to give accounts of what it did (or is doing) with the huge sums it has saved (and still saving) from the removal of subsidy on petroleum products. It gets worse when you factor in their stated promise not to borrow funds to fund government projects and services after the removal of subsidy, but which they ended up borrowing more than the administrations that were subsidising petroleum products and other services for Nigerians.
With such a huge deficit in credibility, owing to the fact that they have nothing to show for their wicked removal of subsidy on petroleum products, their arbitrary multiplication of tariffs on electricity and telecommunications, the huge loans that they took, and the other taxes they have imposed on Nigerians, without even mentioning the regular revenues from oil sales, it therefore beggars belief that this regime can claim that it is fighting corruption by clamping down on people like Mallam Abubakar Malami whose only sin is their refusal to be useful idiots to Tinubu’s misrule and open desire for a corrupt one-party state, especially so when we all remember that his FCT Minister, Nyseom Wike, has a corruption file with the EFCC even before Tinubu appointed him as Minister, and neither have we forgotten how a certain former Governor with a fantastic case of the theft of 1.3 trillion Naira is now enjoying his loot and freedom after becoming a nice guy for the regime.
Unable to even implement national budgets that were duly passed into law by the National Assembly for two years now, coupled with all the unexplained missing subsidy savings and loans, it takes an extraordinary level of courage in shamelessness and corruption for the regime to claim to be investigating or prosecuting anyone over the so-called Abacha Loot when the regime has now broken all records of corruption and misrule in Nigeria’s history.
Adding its so-called terrorism financing accusation against Abubakar Malami makes it even more laughable, because it has become so glaringly clear to Nigerians that this very unpopular regime is desperately shopping for any accusation that it can throw at resourceful people who have refused to “defect” and bend their knees to the corrupt emperor whose only idea of leadership is to throw as much people as he can into penury while he basks in the glamour and euphoria of his office even as he enjoys all the perks that the office can provide.
For a regime that swims in corruption and smells corruption, especially after breaking all the records of misappropriation, opaqueness, and dishonesty in public finances, it will be a misnomer if we continue to talk about “Abacha Loot” when we now know that the man was deliberately mischaracterised and defamed in an exaggerated manner by shady characters who owned the press or had opportunistic access to the press.
Now, looking at how Abacha’s main traducers have ruined Nigeria or how they have openly shown their disdain and contempt for integrity, accountability and multi-party democracy, it is easy to figure out that if there is a thing called Abacha Loot, then there will certainly be Tinubu Loot when this nightmare is over.
