Human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, SAN, has advised President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to lead anti-corruption crusade, saying there have been several high-profile politicians with looting cases in court who have been visiting the Presidential Villa.
Falana while speaking as a guest at the 60th anniversary of the call to bar of Aare Afe Babalola in Ekiti State on Monday said in order to promote public accountability, the Office of the Accountant-General should resume the publication of the monthly statutory allocations to the federal, state, and local governments.
TheNewsGuru.com reports that Falana also decried the level of corruption in the country, urging the president to take action.
He said, “The level of corruption in Nigeria has assumed a very dangerous dimension. We have a situation whereby highly placed public officers steal money meant for building hospitals, people are dying on our roads.
“They steal money meant for ecology, to fight erosion, to [re]forest certain parts of the country. So, when a country gets to that stage, corruption is now a crime against humanity.
“President Bola Tinubu must show leadership and lead an anti- corruption crusade. Wrong signal must not be sent to the people and the international community”.
Appealing to the President and his government to “show leadership”, Falana declared that “right now, we’re in trouble as a people”.
“There is somebody here who was our president,” Falana said, “If you were accused of corruption and your case was before the EFCC or the ICPC, you would not be appointed to a position of authority. We must go back to that era.”
Citing First-lady Oluremi Tinubu’s remarks at the 2023 Presidential Inauguration Interdenominational Church Service in May, the senior advocate of Nigeria urged the President to lead an anti-corruption crusade.
“God has blessed my family,” Mrs Tinubu had said. “We don’t need the wealth of Nigeria to survive but to do the right thing.”
Falana argued that with the President at the forefront of an anti-corruption agenda, Nigeria could “take its rightful place in the comity of nations”, as the largest concentration of black people on earth.
He condemned the level of corruption in the country which he described as having assumed a “very dangerous dimension.”