There was drama at the University of Lagos yesterday, after a former Education minister, Oby Ezekwesili accused many students of the ivory tower of exam malpractice.
Ezekwesili was at the University as part of a panel that included Prof. Itse Sagay, chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Anti-corruption, Mr. Femi Falana (SAN) and Femi Aribisala. The panelists were part of a seminar organised by the Department of Jurisprudence and International Law, entitled “Winning the War Against Corruption”.
The drama started when Mr. Aribisala disagreed with the position stated earlier by Mr. Falana and Mrs. Ezekwesili concerning their perspectives on corruption.
Aribisala said, “There is no fight against corruption in Nigeria. And if there’s no fight against corruption, you can’t even talk about war.
“Corruption cannot be narrowly defined the way Dr. Ezekwesili defined it, only relating to public institutions. We are corrupt in Nigeria. The plumber, the tailor, the whole society is corrupt.
“And we have not yet taken a decision, we have not yet gotten to a point where we are fed up. I mean, she (Mrs. Ezekwesili) had given an example of Hong Kong where people became fed up and said enough is enough. We have not reached that situation yet, I don’t know why not, but we certainly have not.
“The 2015 election was not an anti-corruption election. We did not have any political party that presented an anti-corruption mandate to us. The party that won the election was just a makeover of the PDP, I mean the PDP people moved from the PDP to the APC. If they were corrupt when they were in PDP, they became clean when they were in APC.
“So there is no mandate against corruption. If President Buhari was determined to fight against corruption, my feeling is that he gave up after losing election three times.
“Because the fourth time, he formed an alliance with people who he despised before. And they were not necessarily people who had a track record of being (sic) anti-corruption. So today, I don’t know who is anti-corruption.”
“We have to make up our minds if we really want to deal with the question of corruption. If we want to deal with the question of corruption, Nigerians themselves must insist on it and we have to deal with it at the institutional level.
“The institutional fight against corruption that has taken place to the extent that it has, took place under PDP. The institutional structures, even the ones that the present government is relying on, are PDP structures. Whether it is EFCC, ICPC, TSA, all these came under PDP.
“In ten months of Buhari’s government, there has been no institutional structure that has been laid against corruption. We have simple had media circuses accusing people of corruption.
“You cannot fight corruption with corruption. And corruption is more than just the stealing of money. If you disobey the rule of law, you have corrupted the system. If you create an avenue where you have a big margin between the official foreign exchange rate and the parallel market rate, there’s gonna be corruption. If you have children of the rich getting into the CBN on nepotistic grounds, the corruption is still with you.
“If you have a budget that is padded left right and centre, and after this was revealed you passed it and say only a small amount changed in it, and we do not know what is in the new budget, you can’t say you are against corruption. There is no transparency in any of these things.”
“Because the last 16 years was not just PDP government.
“And that’s why I can’t trust Falana’s prescription that we are going to establish special courts. I don’t trust this government to establish those courts. They will simply establish courts to decimate the opposition.
“People like Orubebe will be arrested, and they will file cases against him and several months later they will drop the charges against him. And they will have pronounced him guilty in the newspapers on charges that will later on be dropped. That is not a fight against corruption.”
“The legacy parties of the APC were also in power. In fact when the PDP was ostensibly dealing with corruption, it addressed people in its own party. We are not having that now.
UNILAG students in response to Mr. Aribisala’s statements as recorded by Premium Times, began to clap and cheer wildly drawing the ire of Sagay and Ezekwesili.
In her rebuttal, Ezekwesili then chastized the students for clapping for Aribisala’s remarks.
She said, “The systemic nature of corruption as a cancer against a system of governance is demonstrated in the fact that the activity of corruption begins to happen at their different levels.
“So for example, I wasn’t surprised that some of you were clapping. The reason you were clapping is that you are a page in your own level of corruption.
“There are many whose exam malpractice is the basis upon which they have come to school. So when you are talking about the need to wage a war against corruption, they are completely disconnected from it. There is a complete dissonance from it.”
“You need to be driven by the evidence of the damage and the destruction that corruption is doing to you, at the unit level. If you think you are doing well now, you will do exceedingly better if corruption is effectively tackled in this society.
“There is no comedy session going on here. We are talking about something that can be destructive. You should be holding the gun to fight against corruption. The gun has to be intellectual, so I need you to intelligently process everything that is said.”