Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, has admitted that looting is still going on in the President Muhammadu Buhari administration.
However, he was quick to compare it with the previous governnment of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, saying looting was done on a higher scale then.
Amaechi said in an interview with Daily Trust the looters under the then Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) administration “had nothing to do to show for it.
“They did not have a carpentry shop, but they were billionaires. They did not hide it. But here, if you are stealing, it is done quietly.
“I want Nigerians to be honest. Can you openly take money from this government? I am not saying whether we are corrupt or not.”
According to Amaechi, under Jonathan, looters made open show of their loot without fear of consequences unlike now.
“Let us assume we are corrupt: Can you openly take money in this government? In the past governments, what happened? You can take money in the streets. Corruption was so pervasive that nobody was talking about it,” he posited.
The minister admitted that the present administration of the All Progressives Congress, APC, is also corrupt, adding: “But here it is done quietly. I am not saying it is good. It is a sin punishable.
“In the previous government, you could steal, and you won’t be caught. If you were caught, there wouldn’t be consequences. But in this government, if you steal, there are consequences.”
President Buhari rode to power in 2015 on the back of his anti-corruption posturing and campaign promises to rid the country of the monster.
Nigerians are, however, unimpressed by Amaechi’s rating and are least bothered about whether or not Jonathan’s government was more corrupt. They have consistently voiced out their disappointment that corruption has remained endemic, placing Nigeria on the unenviable rank of 149 out of the 180 countries captured in the 2020 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) of Transparency International.
