In an interview with ARISE NEWS on Friday, President Bola Tinubu’s Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Ajuri Ngelale, harped on his principal’s capability to fight back against “the elite of the elite” that benefit from the ongoing struggles of the Nigerian economy by establishing “institutional buffers” that prevent the corruption at the start.
According to Ngelale, he president had stated in his national broadcast that, “the defects in our economy immensely profited a tiny elite, the elite of the elite you might call them. As we moved to fight the flaws in the economy, the people who grow rich from them, predictably, will fight back through every means necessary.”
Ngelale said Tinubu is a man who believes that prevention is better than cure and that the days of reactively dealing with corruption where you wait for the person to steal a whole bunch of money and amass that kind of wealth that will enable them to effectively have some influence over the judicial system to free themselves should end.
“What we need to do now, is to, yes, deal with the reactive part of it which is trying to recover assets, and trying to put people in jail even though we know the judicial system is an issue.
“The other part of this is going to be about creating institutional buffers that stop people from doing that in the first place.”
Ngelale also said that in Lagos, people tend to forget that the foundation of infrastructural improvement and increase in revenue is Tinubu’s ability to “shut down all of the loopholes within the system that had created a situation in which by 1999, in the Lagos government, 50% of the entire payroll of the Lagos state civil service was made up of ghost workers.”
He said, “He cut them out, and it was on the basis of those technological innovations that he brought.
“He’s done it before, and he’s going to do it again, but prevention, for us, is the focus more than cure, even though we deal with the cure.”
Frances Ibiefo
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