Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal has said that President Jonathan is encouraging corruption in Nigeria by soft pedaling on investigations conducted by the House of Representatives.
The Speaker whilst addressing a round table organized by the Nigerian Bar Association to mark the International Anti-corruption Day pointed to subsidy fraud, bullet proof car scandal, SEC and Pension probes to buttress his point.
He said, “The President’s body language’ seems to be encouraging corrupt practices in the country. Take the subsidy probe, the pension, the SEC probe and recently the bullet proof car cases. After the House of Representatives did a diligent job by probing and exposing the cases, you now see something else when it comes to prosecution.
“In some cases, you have the government setting up new committees to duplicate the job already done by the parliament. Take the bullet proof cars case, the NSA, with all the security challenges confronting the country, should not be burdened with a job that can best be handled by the anti-corruption agencies,”
He said the President did not need to set up committees to probe corruption cases that were evident to all Nigerians, in reference to Stella Oduah, the Aviation minister’s probe.
His words: “What the President should have done was to explicitly direct the EFCC to probe the matter. With such directives coming from the President, I am sure we still have good people in EFCC who can do a good job,” Mr. Tambuwal said.
“By the action of setting up different committees for straightforward cases, the president’s body language doesn’t tend to support the fight against corruption.”