A member of the House of Representatives, Honourable Linus Okorie from Ebonyi State, has allegedly sponsored a bill seeking full amnesty for treasury looters in Nigeria. The bill has reportedly scaled through the first reading within two weeks of its introduction on 14th June and it is scheduled for the second reading this month.
The Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) is flabbergasted by the audacity of members of the House of Representatives in attempting such a headlong collision with the ongoing war against corruption. Nigeria’s lawmakers are venturing where angels fear to tread. It is provocative, shameless and luciferous.
Coming at a time when the country is regaining its glory in the international community as a former most corrupt country in the world, this satanic bill seeks to take Nigeria’s public officials back to the inglorious days of graft with impunity.
It will be recalled that Nigeria was declared the Most Corrupt Country by Transparency International in the year 2001, ranked Second Most Corrupt in 2003 and Third Most Corrupt in 2004. Twelve years later, in May 2016 to be exact, former British prime minister David Cameron still had cause to describe Nigeria as one of the two most ‘fantastically corrupt’ countries in the world.
It is on record that the doggedness of the Buhari administration’s war against corruption has won accolades worldwide. Within just one and a half years of its inception, the same Transparency International which ranked Nigeria as the world’s Most Corrupt Country moved the country to number 136 least corrupt nation out of 175 countries in its Corruption Perception Index of January 2017.
It is most dishonourable that members of the House of Representatives now seek to undo what the Federal Government (FG) has been able to achieve in its current fight against corruption. The bill seeking amnesty for looters is a declaration of war against the Nigerian people.
MURIC calls on the House of Representatives to stop this bill immediately. It must not be allowed to go through the second reading. We remind the Speaker that posterity will not forgive him if he allows this stench to soil his good name. Neither should the House take the docility of Nigerians for granted. National Assembly may be sitting on a keg of gun powder if it goes ahead to pass this obnoxious bill into law.