A legal practitioner, Ikechukwu Ikeji, on Monday said that it was wrong of former president, Olusegun Obasanjo to hold President Goodluck Jonathan’s promise not to run for a second term, as the provisions of the 1999 constitution renders such a promise null and void.
Speaking on Sunrise Daily, he stressed that any promise made by the President is null and void as long as it is not consistent with the provisions in the constitution which permits him to run for a second term if he so wishes.
“It is wrong to hold Jonathan to a promise that he shouldn’t run for a second term,” he added.
He questioned the intention of former president, Olusegun Obasanjo in writing the 18 page letter to President Jonathan, and said that there are inconsistencies between the messenger and the message.
“On what basis should an Obasanjo query the corruption level that exists today in Nigeria?” he asked.
According to Transparency International’s global corruption perception index, Nigeria was the 6th most corrupt country on Earth, as at 2005.
“As at the time Yar’adua took over in 2008, we rose to about 42. We became the 42nd most corrupt country on Earth. That was an improvement,” Ikeji said.
“During Obasanjo’s era, corruption was like oxygen in Nigeria. It was like the air that we breathed and the entire world knew about it.”
He countered that argument that the EFCC worked hard to tackle corruption within those years and said the “EFCC was not actually directly directing the fight of corruption to the appropriate quarters” during Obasanjo’s era.
According to him, EFCC’s fight was ‘selective’ in nature.
