Senate President Bukola Saraki has declared that the reason the anti-corruption fight has not yielded the desired result is because of its focus on sensationalism.
Saraki made the statement in Abuja during the launch of ‘Antidotes for Corruption: The Nigerian Story’, a book written by Dino Melaye, the Senator representing Kogi west. He advised that fight against corruption be tailored on deterrence and rather than punishment.
The Senate President commended the current effort of the government which is reducing the menace. According to him “I am convinced that why our fight against corruption has not yielded much success is that we have favoured punishment over deterrence. We must review our approaches by building our institutions to make it difficult for people to carry out corrupt practices”.
he stated that “It is my view that the key area of prevention, we must work on, is to make it difficult for stolen money to find a home. We must fight corruption with sincerity, and not fight symptoms… unlike the five-minute sensationalism, we have now. It must not be based on individuals but on institutions.
“Let us fight corruption with sincerity. If we fight corruption in a corrupt way, we will not make any headway.” In his address earlier, speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, also called for a preventive approach to fighting corruption. He stated that ”the fight against corruption should be the moral responsibility of all Nigerians because it affects everybody,” he said.
“We ran into a situation where corruption was celebrated. When there are prosecutions of high profile cases, we are only punishing corruption, but we are not dealing with the root cause of it.
We must make the practice of corruption very difficult.”
