Ezekwesili speaks on campaigning for President Buhari, anti-corruption war

Former Minister of Education, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili has debunked the
claim that her advocacy for the release of the abducted school girls
in Chibok community was a ploy to support the President Muhammadu
Buhari-led administration in 2015.

Ezekwesili, speaking on achievements of the current administration in
an interview with AIT on Monday, explained that there was no linkage
between her advocacy and the 2015 election.

She said, "The first mistake you made was for you to say that I was at
the front burner campaigning for this administration.

"A campaign for a government with a constitutional mandate for
security and welfare to bring children of the poor who have been taken
from their school cannot be equated for a campaign of an
administration.

"You are so wrong to even, in anyway, equate advocacy for a campaign
for this administration.

"You are wrong and you ought to apologise for that, and say I probably
framed my question wrongly," she stated .

Further speaking, Ezekwesili also faulted Buhari's government over its
fight against corruption.

According to her, "The fight against corruption has not started
because it has to be much more comprehensive.

"It has to be analytically grounded in a kind of way that you can
measure. If you ask this government to do a rate of change in terms of
what has really change I am not sure that it would be able to.

"The biggest thing hanging over the administration is that what they
are doing is so loud that they can't hear what they are saying.

"It is a good thing to recover looted resources and it is a good
development. However, if you reduce your anti corruption effort to
reducing money that has been stolen then you don't have a sustainable
system for reducing corruption in your society.

"Some of this whole that we are recovering money is a pervasive
incentive for people who are watching and simply say 'we can repeat
bad behaviour and the consequences of bad behaviour is not that high'.

"You can't have a society that pervades its incentive sanction system
by simply saying when we loot they will recover some.

"So, let not use that as a basis to judge the efficacy or efficient of
our anti corruption effort," she stressed.