It's like Buhari doesn't know that electoral fraud is part of corruption — Rafsanjani

Representative of Transparency International (TI) in Nigeria, Auwal Rafsanjani, has rated President Muhammadu Buhari’s government just 35 percent in its anti-corruption war since coming to power in 2015.

Buhari has been the only Nigerian president since 1999 to have remained consistent in his anti-corruption stance, and has made it his strong talking point during campaigns since 2003. In fact, Buhari's distaste for corruption can be traced back to his military regime where he toppled the government of late Shehu Shagari over corruption.


At a time Nigeria is said to have been enmeshed in corruption at an unprecedented scale under the leadership of Goodluck Jonathan, Buhari who promised change was seen as the messiah capable of fixing a country he said was under life-support due to 16 years of corruption under the PDP.

Now, 5 years since election into office, Nigerians believed he's had sufficient time to make an impact, but were left disappointed.



Rafsanjani who among others commended the Buhari administration for adopting and implementing policies like the Treasury Single Account (TSA), the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), the Bank Verification Number (BVN) and other sector-specific ones like Know-Your-Customer policy and the Beneficial Ownership Database in the financial and oil and gas sectors respectively, all in a bid to fight off corruption in the country, also felt little was achieved in the past 5 years, especially in the aspect of electoral corruption.


Rafsanjani said Buhari has failed woefully particularly in the areas of electoral corruption, the Freedom of Information Act and corruption in the public procurement process; which he claimed accounted for 70 per cent of corruption in Nigeria.



Rafsanjani also called for the strengthening of the anti-corruption agencies and demarcation of their roles to prevent a situation where “the police would not be doing the work of ICPC, ICPC would be doing the work of EFCC and EFCC would not be doing the work of Code of Conduct Bureau.

“The boards of anti-corruption agencies are not functional. The ICPC board is not complete. There is no way you can run an agency as a one-man show. If you don’t have the board that can regulate the conduct of even the chairman himself, you would, instead of curing the problem, create more.”