Former President Goodluck Jonathan’s advice last week to President Muhammadu Buhari not to limit any intended probe to his administration generated an interesting buzz in the polity.
Jonathan told his ministers at the valedictory session of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) which he presided over at the Villa, Abuja on Wednesday, May 27 that those advising Buhari to probe his administration must also advise him to extend the probe beyond his regime or else it will be seen as a witch-hunt.
Jonathan said his comment followed calls from different quarters for his administration to be investigated.
He listed some of the issues that should be investigated, including debts and the oil industry.
“In Nigeria, there are a lot of things that will be probed, very many things, even debts owed by states and debts owed by this country from 1960 up to this time,” Jonathan said.
“They say it is Jonathan’s administration that is owing these debts. I believe that anybody that is calling for probe must also ensure that this probe is extended beyond the Jonathan administration.
“Otherwise, to me, it will be witch-hunt. If we are very sincere, it is not only the Jonathan administration that should be probed.
“The attorney general is aware of massive judgment debts. If you aggregate all the judgment debts, the recent ones that we discovered are going into $1 billion.
“These issues should be probed. How did we allocate our oil fields, oil wells, marginal fields, and so on.”
Some people have scoffed at Jonathan’s stance, calling it the last theatrics of a regime on the throes of death. To some others, it was an indication that the guilty are afraid.
To that extent, many have advised Buhari to ignore the unsolicited advice from Jonathan and ensure that those who helped in bringing the country to its knees are brought to book.
But there is some merit to Jonathan’s position.
This newspaper agrees that there is an urgent need to find out what went wrong in the past 16 years of the Fourth Republic. A lot actually went wrong.
But a lot of people are behaving as if this journey started in the past five years of the Jonathan presidency. Even those who accuse the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) of running the country aground pretend not to know that the years the PDP locusts ate included the eight years that former President Olusegun Obasanjo was in power.
How can anybody probe the rot in the oil industry without looking into the eight years that Obasanjo was not only the president but was also the de facto oil minister? Or can we claim to have investigated the power sector and not talk about the Obasanjo era?
Too many things have gone wrong which need to be corrected if Nigeria must move forward. It is only a probe that will enable us to ascertain where the rain started drenching us. But to limit it to the five years of the Jonathan presidency will be so perfunctory that it will be counterproductive.
Yet, for any probe to be meaningful in our circumstance, and given the fact that this country should be in a hurry to catch up with the rest of the civilised world, it must not be an unwieldy, wholesale probe that distracts the government from its programmes and projects.
Rather, it must be a targeted probe of sectors whose failings spread their devastating consequences throughout the nation.
Nigeria seriously needs such a corrective mechanism to ensure its leaders do not deviate from the charted course.
It is good that while Buhari has promised to find out why and where the rain started drenching us, he has also assured that it will not be vendetta.
Probe, we must. But to limit it to the Jonathan years is the easiest way to discredit the process.