Nigerian lawyer and human rights activist, Mr Femi Falana SAN, is sceptical about the Muhammadu Buhari administration’s fight against corruption, insisting that it is not holistic in nature.
Mr Falana told Channels Television’s legal correspondent, Shola Soyele, that in a new colonial environment, the war against corruption could not be holistic.
“The capitalist countries are the most corrupt persons on the earth but their system is so organised that whoever you are, when you are caught, the law deals with you.
“There is a limit to how much you can fight corruption under a capitalist system because capitalism is built on fraud and corruption, maintained and sustained by fraud.
“Corruption is part of the system that we practice.”
On the nature of the fight against corruption, Mr Falana questioned why the nation was only looking at persons that had looted the nation’s money, leaving persons that have manipulated other sectors for their gains.
He cited incidents in the foreign exchange management, requesting that persons who engage in sharp practices in the sector should be made to face the law.
“We leave the multinational corporations that involve in different scandals.
“Those who bribed Nigerians have been jailed in the US and the United States government has made not less than $1.7 billion as fines imposed on those who were convicted.
“Take the Abacha loot for instance, if our government is determined, we can make money by suing the banks that allowed a military officer to remove and keep five billion dollars from his country because those banks failed to do due diligence.
“If you want to fight corruption, apart from trying to institutionalise and empower agencies, you must mobilise critical segments of the country to fight corruption,” the lawyer insisted.
He further advised the government to carry local communities along when giving allocations to local councils.
“If you are sending money to the local government, you must mobilise the local communities to know how much you have given to their local government so that people will not sit down and feast on the money
“I think we are not fighting corruption here. We are attempting to fight corruption.” (Channelstv)