Convicts To Lose Properties – BuhariPresident Muhammadu Buhari has spoken over the $2.1billion Dasuki arms scandal over the weekend as he said anyone found guilty will lose all his or her property to the Federal Government.
President Buhari made this known when he spoke about the falling economy of the country. He said inspite of the dwindling prices of oil, certain precautions taken by the government will prevent revenue leakages.
Buhari said these measures in turn will help provide sufficient cash to finance the 2016 N6 trillion budget.
Buhari said Nigeria is a rich country. He however observed that the challenges the country had been facing was that of leadership which never did the required things to reduce corrupt practices in the land.
The president explained this during an interview he had on the Hausa service of the BBC on Thursday, December 24, stating that after his administration blocks all loopholes for siphoning the nation’s wealth, there will be sufficient money to run the affairs of the country regardless of low oil price.
The president who spoke extensively said:
“Remember during the campaigns, we said Nigeria is facing three things and nobody disputed that assertion. Firstly; there was widespread insecurity, war in the North- East, while the country’s oil was being stolen at random in the South. Secondly, there is massive unemployment, 62 per cent of the nation’s population are youth from the age of 35 years downward; most of them are unemployed, including those who went to school and those who did not, that is a serious problem.
“Therefore, it has become necessary to restore peace and create employment. That is why we are returning to agriculture and mineral resources. Thirdly, bribery and corruption are basically suffocating the country. If we don’t kill these monsters, this country would go down.
“That is why those who stole monies meant for arms procurement and shared the fund among themselves are being arrested and are being shown documents, so that they would be asked to refund the money or face prosecution; we would use those documents to prove what they stole, collect all the assets acquired from the proceeds and then jail them.”
Buhari who lamented the fact that his government inherited over two trillion naira debt from the previous administration stated further that:
“It is generally believed that a fish begins to rot from the head; once the head is rotten, the whole body is also rotten. We have tried to remove all the heads of the organisations, and most of the lieutenants have been changed.
“A lot is happening in this government that people do not appear to understand; many permanent secretaries of ministries have been changed; we used to have 42 ministers, now we have 36 because the Constitution requires that each state of the federation must have a minister; we used to have 42 ministries, now we have 24.
“Everybody knows Nigeria is not a poor country, we are rich, and we have human resources, the problem had been that leadership did not take seriously, curbing corrupt tendencies,” he said.
“At the local government level, almost everyone knows each other. It would be easy to identify those to give who would go into trading and how to get it back. It would be like a cooperative and we all know how it operates.
“Also, state governments would identify those who have capacity to employ more people and all we need to do is to empower them. Our people already know how to go about implementing these modalities to create employment for the citizens.”
The efforts of the Buhari-led administration to fight corruption in all facets received another boost when the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) clamped down on drug traffickers who drove a truck full of Cannabis sativa (Indian Hemp) among cartons of biscuits and cheese balls in Ogun state.
