Corruption Remains Nigeria’s Major Headache – Osinbajo

Mon, Feb 22, 2016
By publisher
2 MIN READ

BREAKING NEWS, Politics

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VICE-President Yemi Osinbajo has said that because of the level of corruption in Nigeria, he and President Muhammadu Buhari have been finding it extremely difficult to get right persons that could handle nation-building tasks for the present administration.

Osinbajo said getting upright persons had remained a tough task for them in what he described as a corrupt system.

According to a statement on Sunday, February 21, by Laolu Akande, his senior special assistant on media and publicity, the vice-president was quoted as describing the present administration’s ongoing anti-corruption war as a fight against the system.

Osinbajo who spoke on the theme, “Change agents in nation-building,” at the annual dinner of the Apostles In The Market Place on Saturday, February 20, in Lagos, said it was regrettable that the administration was operating in a system “where the norm is corrupt behaviour across all arms of government.”

He said: “This is a system where the norm is corrupt behaviour across all arms of formal systems of governance. In such a system, the private sector is a strong collaborator. The fight against corruption is then a fight against the system.”

Osinbajo said a critical assessment of the list of corrupt persons would show that they cut across tribal, ethnic and religious lines.

Besides, he said such corrupt persons and their collaborators were enshrined in the legislature, the judiciary and even in the press.

He said those who belonged to the group of corrupt persons always “protect one another’s interest and are ready to go down with any of their own.”

According to him, he said: “Such perpetrators and conspirators are in governments, the legislature, the judiciary and the press. They are united, they protect one another, they fight for one another and they are prepared to go down together.

“They are one tribe and indivisible, regardless of diversity. It is this tribe that confuses the arguments for change in society.”

Osinbajo said that such a corrupt system can hardly deliver public goods.

—  Feb 22, 2016 @ 12:10 GMT

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