Treasury looters’ travails, Buhari’s dilemma

SIR: One has to be in President Muhammadu Buhari’s shoes to understand his dilemma. If you don’t harass these high profile ‘suspected’ treasury looters and make them vomit the loot they’d deploy this same ill-gotten wealth as a veritable armour to torpedo the system and drive it aground, so things can continue the way they have always been.

And if we say, as some have been advocating, that the President should stop arresting past government officials who are deemed to have looted the treasury, and instead allow the unfettered hands of the law to take care of them, two years, four years, even 10 years from now, no one single case involving these people would be decided. If we are going to rein in corruption or have it totally crushed in this country, we need a no nonsense iron-willed personality like Buhari on the driver’s seat; a man who’d not allow himself to be encumbered with the niceties of the law, undemocratic as it may sound.

With the damage that several past administrations had inflicted on the nation, all that should concern us now shouldn’t be the method adopted by Mr. President to get those who had cornered the wealth of this nation to return them. If in the process of looking for our stolen money Buhari declares anyone guilty even before they are tried in the law court, good and fair. Let him go ahead, so long as he can retrieve this money from the looters.

It is evident the type of people who are currently not having it easy with Buhari even without waiting for the law court to tell us so. Buhari was elected solely to help the country clean the Augean stables. To do so requires toughness, stepping on toes and, this is where some people are not comfortable with the president, breaching some so called legal niceties. Instead of calling the president names or trying to demonize him, the best we should do is pray for him that God will guide him in the onerous task of giving us a changed country.

•Sly Edaghese,
Lagos.