Secretary to the Government of the Federation, SGF, Engr Babachir David Lawal, has explained why the Federal Government has not gone after members of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, in its fight against corruption.
Since the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration came into power on May 29, 2015, members of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, have majorly been victims of the anti-corruption war.
This has ridiculed the crusade in some quarters as they see it as a ploy to turn the country to one-party state.
In an interview with Vanguard, Lawal, who is the immediate past National Vice-Chairman, Northeast of the APC, explained why APC members have been shield from the crusade despite allegations against them.
Lawal said, “Let us be very sincere and reasonable. Obviously, to my mind, the preponderance of corrupt people would be in the PDP for one reason; they have been in government for 16 years and they were the only ones enjoying the booty, and they were doing it in a flagrant manner.”
He said further that, “Tracing my own (political) genealogy for instance, from ANPP to CPC and now APC, we were not getting anything.
“Nobody was giving us contracts. PDP were the ones in government; they were the ones the president was approving money for sharing; they were the ones that took government money to fund their election.
“This is the truth. APC had no access to government money to fund the president’s election. It got to a stage when PDP saw it clearly on the wall; you remember they even shifted the elections; it was so clear they were going to lose, and so they thought they could buy it.
“Throughout the last tenure of the Goodluck Jonathan campaign, their goodwill among Nigerians was on the decline and they were spending, and it got to a stage that they did not care about following the due process anymore because they thought they were in power and they thought they could buy their way through and remain in perpetuity.
“So, they became even careless about the manner they were taking the money. Remember Nigeria even borrowed $100million from the international market to fund the war on Boko Haram and they simply shared it. APC did not go to borrow anywhere. We were not sharing oil wells. We had no access to NNPC funds.
“So, if these agencies were converted into agencies for looting and pilfering, it is obvious that even if we had corrupt men in the APC, they did not have the opportunity to steal, and that is assuming we had.
“I cannot, in all honesty, say that all of us in APC are saints, but the truth is, we did not have access to funds to steal in the first place, and so we did not have opportunity also to reject the stealing.
So, let them roast in their stew. Let them carry their cross. They can make all the noises and try to deflate APC, but our hands are clean by providence.
“Look, let us face it. If they arrest you, why don’t you say, ‘I shared the money with so and so persons’ and then let him turn out to be in APC?
“Those that they are arresting, it is from the interrogation that the information burst out. Let them leave us alone. This is just the beginning. They will return our money by the time we finish digging their soak-aways and bringing down their (overhead) tanks; we would recover our money.”
