Babafemi Ojudu, a former senator of Ekiti Central, has asserted that bribery for lucrative appointments and budget inflation are commonplace in Nigeria and have remained prevalent across administrations, amid accusations that President Bola Tinubu’s chief of staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, received a N400 million bribe to appoint a council chief.
“I always knew that one day the truth about bribery for public appointments would begin to surface,” said Mr Ojudu, who was a senator between 2011 and 2015. “It has survived across administrations. People have reportedly paid staggering sums to secure appointments. Others have paid simply to gain access to the corridors of power.”
Mr Ojudu’s statement comes amid a bribery claim by Adeniyi Adeyemi, director-general of the controversial Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, that Mr Gbajabiamila demanded a N600 million bribe, with N400 million paid through a proxy.
“Agencies and ministries have, in some cases, allegedly had to make payments to secure inflated budgetary allocations,” added the former lawmaker in a LinkedIn post last week.
Mr Ojudu, 65, held that an independent probe of the Appropriations and Public Accounts Committees in the National Assembly would open a can of worms and unearth “revelations that would shake even a people who now seem almost impossible to shock.”
As a former senator, Mr Ojudu was familiar with the inner workings of government, and his statement appears to lend credence to long-held concerns about bribery and budget racketeering, depriving the nation of the services of brilliant individuals employed on merit.
According to him, the majority of persons deemed patriots and messiahs are beneficiaries of a corrupt system who have, in some cases, become political celebrities and highly respected members of society.
“The tragedy is that many of those who profit from this broken system walk among us as respected figures—celebrated for their wealth, courted for higher office, and praised as patriots and messiahs,” Mr Ojudu explained. “No amount of influence can permanently bury the truth. No office is high enough to escape accountability forever.”