Don't use Anti Corruption Crusade to persecute Opponents - Gani Adams warns PMB

The Anti-Corruption crusade of the President Mohammadu Buhari administration is a welcome development, but can only be meaningful only if it follows the rule of law and not as a system of persecuting imaginary opponents of the government.

This view was expressed last Wednesday by the National Co-coordinator of ‎the Oodu'a Peoples Congress (OPC), Otunba Gani Adams in Abeokuta during an Interactive session with members of the organisation. 

According to him, the anti corruption war will loose its steam once it has become tools deployed by the ruling party ‎to cripple activities of the opposition and all dissenting voice. His words: "The issue of anti corruption is being highly politicised, I am giving my 100% support to president Buhari to make sure that the system is sanitised, to put an end to corruption in our country or bring to the barest minimum. But I am not in agreement with doing so on the basis of selection; we have about three ministers in president Buhari’s cabinet that has been alleged and indicted of corruption and they are still in his cabinet. There are lots of people that were strong supporters of president Buhari during the elections that have not been probed."

He further gave reasons why the OPC supported President Goodluck Jonathan‎ during the 2015 general elections. According to him "When you are a leader of a group, they look up to you for direction and they followed the direction given to them during the last election based on the fact that I was part of the delegate that attended the national conference; former president Jonathan gave the opportunity for the nation to organise the conference and gave me the privileged to be a part of the conference with a promise to implement the outcome. If you noticed, we didn’t campaign for any governor during the campaign because; we were campaigning solely for Jonathan and we don’t have any apology for that"

Otunba Gani Adams however expressed disappointment at the drift the nation's politics is headed which is assuming a politics of vendetta. His words: "it is a norm for a candidate to either win or lose; in America, we have the democrats and republican, if one looses, automatically, campaign mockery and attacks ends because it is politics, a game of numbers, if you lose today, you might be a winner tomorrow and being a winner is not the criteria for demonising the loser"

He therefore affirmed that‎ the second face of their agitation will focus on the implementation of the report of the constitutional conference convoke by the Jonathan's administration. "we knew that the implementation will not be easy because, even in the national assembly, there are lots of impediments against Jonathan while he was in power but we have decided that for us to have struggled to get the CONFAB done, we need to agitate for the implementation too and we are prepared to fight for it to be implemented. There were lots of hurdles before the CONFAB was organised and it will surprise you to know that most of our people that we believed were progressives in the west were actually antagonists of the CONFAB. And for a nation to be restructured it won’t come easy and so we must be ready to fight for it. Many people do not even know the content of the conference" he added.