2019 elections: APC charges Nigerians to continue challenging corruption

THE All Progressives Congress (APC) has charged Nigerians to continue to challenge corruption and its related vices, and not to allow politicians who institutionalised it to take over governance again.

Mr Yekini Nabena, the APC acting National Publicity Secretary gave the charge in a statement on Sunday in Abuja.

“We must continue to challenge corruption and its related vices, this is in line with the change agenda the APC promised Nigerians, this is a promise we are committed to keeping.

“While we alert Nigerians to the plot of some politicians to buy votes and deploy other illegal means to subvert the people’s will during coming elections, we urge relevant agencies to be proactively involved in tracking of election financing.

“The same people who criminally diverted public monies to fund their political activities as brazenly displayed during past administrations must be prevented from doing same in coming elections,” he said.

Nabena noted that under the President Muhammadu Buhari-led APC administration, the scale of recoveries from corrupt elements in the past three years by the country’s anti-graft agencies was testament that the administration’s extensive anti-corruption drive was yielding results.

He added that compared to the past, the successful prosecution of many corrupt persons, the hugely successful whistleblowing policy and voluntary return of corruptly acquired funds and assets had shown that it was no longer business as usual.

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The APC spokesman further said that it also showed that corruption was increasingly becoming unacceptable in the country.

“Corruption can no longer define how we do things as a country, there is a new realisation among well-meaning Nigerians that if we do not kill corruption it will kill us.

“We share the submission of a former United States Vice President, Joe Biden; corruption is cancer; cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity.

“It wastes the talent of entire generations, it scares away investments and jobs,” the APC spokesman said.

He noted that the media space had recently been awash with a campaign of calumny against Federal Government’s anti-corruption efforts by the same opposition partisans and their proxies that ruined the country with their institutionalised corruption.

He added that this, was, however, expected as corruption would naturally fight back.

Nabena said that sadly, ahead of 2019 elections, those that institutionalised corrupt in the country had resurfaced to canvass votes of Nigerians for various elective positions, ostensibly to resume “their stealing”.

He stressed that Nigerians were neither gullible nor stupid, adding that they had not forgotten the yoke they bore under the corrupt Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), regimes and deserve no more of it.

He recalled that under the PDP administration, public funds that could have improved the education, healthcare sectors and provided infrastructure to develop the economic and social life of Nigerians were sadly in the pockets of “thieves”.