Against popular view to the contrary, President Goodluck Jonathan claimed on his re-election campaign trail that he has been fighting corruption to some effectiveness. Certain realities and unimpeachable facts validate the assertion of the President on his anti-corruption efforts and their said outcomes.
To dismiss his avowed anticorruption credentials as political gimmick without having scrutinised them is to not understand that the fight against corruption requires the knowledge of what had worked and what had not.
Since 2011, results of governorship elections and by-elections to fill vacant seats in the National Assembly have been upheld by public judgment of their credibility and overwhelmingly by the election petition tribunals, in a reversal of past trends. Introduction of computerised registration of voters has meant that election results can easily be squared with actual number of registered voters.
Thus, age-long fraudulent electoral practices, like ballot stuffing and brazen falsification of results, are becoming a thing of the past. Actual votes now count. As a result, the key candidates for the 2015 general elections are wooing the voters as opposed to just scheming to win unfounded votes. This is the validation of President Jonathan’s claim that electoral corruption has been curtailed by his Administration.
The President also points to the elimination of fraud in accessing federal subsidy on fertilizer. Through the use of an electronic wallet system, farmers directly access the subsidy when they show up at the depots to purchase the vital agricultural input. This pin-point direct targeting of the fertiliser subsidy has cushioned the potential negative effects of the sharp cutback on the amount past governments allocated to fertiliser subsidy – much of which was routinely diverted through corrupt practices.
The e-Wallet system is part and parcel of the roundly astounding successes of the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) of the Administration of President Jonathan, which include marked increase in food production, import substitution and stable outlook of food price inflation.
More recently, we heard of the reform of the federal payroll and payment system through the use of bio-metric and e-payment solutions. As a result, over 60,000 ghost workers have been rooted out of the federal payroll and, so far, cumulative N185 billion has been saved, according to the Minister of Finance Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in her 2015 Budget Speech. Payroll fraud has been one of the more intractable corrupt practices in government establishments. But the ongoing digitization programme by the Administration is putting a dent on it.
That there remains some grounds to be covered by the anticorruption efforts of President Jonathan does not mean he has done nothing to fight corruption. Instead, they point to areas new efforts should address and how to consolidate achievements. In this context of making incremental gains in the fight against corruption, China’s President Xi Jinping recently announced wider coverage of the anti-corruption efforts, from concentration on individuals to investigation of the large state-owned enterprises.
Recent knowledge on anticorruption prescribes that anti-graft policies should address identified corruption-prone areas. If reelected, the anticorruption strategy of President Jonathan can leverage the anti-corruption policy of Romania – which is considered as a model document for developing countries and countries in transition – because it takes into consideration lessons learned and failures from previous anti-corruption strategies. It also emphasises coordinated implementation as well as monitoring and evaluation.
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