President Muhammadu Buhari has revealed that some treasury looters in the immediate past administration of President Goodluck Jonathan have begun to return stolen funds to his government. Speaking at an interactive forum with the Nigerian community in Tehran, Iran, President Buhari said that the necessity for compliance with due process of the law was responsible for the delay in the prosecution of the looters of the country’s economy. The president had since returned to Nigeria yesterday.
He also revealed that a number of past officials had begun the voluntary return of stolen funds but said that his government was not satisfied with tokens. “We want to have everything back – all that they took by force in 16 years,” he said.
He stated that it was easy for him during his tenure as a military head of state to arrest and put those alleged corrupt individuals in protective custody for them to prove their innocence but the dictates of the rule of law and due process had slowed him down in prosecuting corrupt people in this dispensation.
He said,
“On corruption; yes, they are still innocent. But, we are collecting documents and some of them have started voluntarily returning something. But we want all”.“When we get those documents, we will formally charge them to court and then we will tell Nigerians to know those who abused their trust when they were entrusted with public funds. So, the day of reckoning is gradually approaching.”
The president also pledged to deal with saboteurs in the nation’s power sector in order to bring back sanity and service delivery to the populace.
Buhari, who confessed that he was yet to give any direct policy directive on the power sector before the improvement in service experienced in the country in the past few months, said his government would ensure that the needful, especially improvement of security, was done to ensure regular power supply.
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