Former chairman of the Subsidy Re-investment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P), Christopher Kolade, has revealed that the initiative under former president, Goodluck Jonathan, was clouded by “politics and eventual lack of credibility”.
Speaking on View from the Top, aired by Channels Television, Kolade said he resigned his position in 2013 because its operations were becoming tainted with corruption and politics, thereby losing its credibility.
He said some officials of the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan were practising “something that was lower than the transparency”, expected of an interventionist agency like SURE-P?.
He said he met resistance when he raised the issues as he was overruled by some powerful forces within the administration.
“The government realized people would not believe what they were saying,” Mr. Kolade said.
“And the President said ‘we need to gain credibility with the people in this programme. So we believe that if you and your committee can manage this thing transparently in accordance with what we agreed, then that credibility will be there’.
“Now that’s fine. But when I discovered that there were individuals in the system that were practicing something that was lower than the transparency that we went in with, I raised the issues. And I discovered that political affiliations and things made this difficult.”
The former Nigerian high commissioner to the United Kingdom also lauded President Muhammadu Buhari’s leadership over the last 100 days, saying he has done well in office, but he alone cannot fight corruption.
“If you destroy the foundation on which you’re setting up something like that (SURE-P), if you say that credibility is the key to success in this thing and then you undermine credibility, by politicizing the issues, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot and I am not very good at shooting myself in the foot.”
Assessing the president’s 100 days in office, Kolade said that Nigerians must support the president if his war against corruption must succeed.
“Part of the handicaps that we have embraced is that we build on expectations. If expectations are going to be fulfilled, then all of the parameters for building up the expectations must be in place,” he said.
“In other words, if the president says he is going to fight corruption, then the necessary weapons to do this must be in place. How is he going to do this? He has at his beck and call. A civil service which has been in existence for some time, when the corruption that he is going to fight was taking place, that public service was there. Is he going to use the same public service to fight the corruption? Something has to change.
“He also has us, the people on the outside. We are not in government, we are not in public service, but many of us are participants of corruptions. If we didn’t make demands on leaders that are outside on what they should do, they probably wouldn’t do them.
”He added that Nigerians themselves must change the way things are done, for the country to experience the change the country voted for.
“Fighting corruption is not a one-man battle. It first has to make sure that we ourselves are willing to make the change. So these days, when people talk to me about President Buhari’s first 100 days, I ask myself, we prayed for change, change was a platform, we thought change meant the leaders must change, public service must change, how about ourselves, have we changed?
“In assessing a hundred days, I would do so not just on what the president has done but also on what we have willingly done to support the change we were willing for. I don’t think we’ve done enough. Many of us are still doing exactly what we did before.
“He has the responsibility of leading, articulating where he wants us to go, and I think he has done well on that. He has told us what he wants us to do.”
