We Found Corruption Everywhere, Says Ahmed Joda

Malam Ahmed Joda chaired President Muhammadu Buhari’s Transition Committee, which interfaced with former President Goodluck Jonathan’s team. In an exclusive interview, the ‘super permsec’ of the 1970s and 1980s, would not reveal any of the recommendations his committee made to President Buhari. But he was forthcoming on the state of the nation and the challenges the new government will face in the next four years. Malam Joda was frank and witty in this explosive interaction.

Specifically, what were the major terms of reference given to your committee?

Broadly speaking, we were to receive the handover notes from the outgoing government, study the notes, analyze them and make recommendations to the government on the economy specifically, on governance, security, corruption, on ministries and departments of government and agencies, defence; nearly everything you can think about. Specifically, we had to look into revenue streams from NNPC, from Federal Inland Revenue Service, Customs and other big corporations of government.

In the course of your assignment were you under some kind of pressure from people coming to lobby for one favour or the other?

There was a lot of that from people who wanted contract, who wanted to be given special favours. They were coming to me day and night and I said to them these are my terms of reference; they didn’t include things like award of contracts or recovery of bad debts from government or for employment of any group of people or individuals. I told them these were not part of our terms of reference. But we continued to receive them and nobody believed me when I said I could not appoint them ministers or chairmen or whatever; they said look you have influence on Buhari and I said I don’t have and even if I had I didn’t think he would respect me if all I did was go to him with piles papers and saying he should do this favour to this or that man or this or that woman. Also, I was inundated with telephone calls. For example, somebody telephoned and after introduction said he wanted to vie for the position of minister of sports. I said well I don’t know the address to which you would send it to.

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