Ezekwesili speaks on campaigning for President Buhari

Former Minister of Education, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili has debunked the claim that her advocacy for the release of the abducted school girls in Chibok community was a ploy to support the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration in 2015.

Ezekwesili, speaking on achievements of the current administration in an interview with AIT on Monday, explained that there was no linkage between her advocacy and the 2015 election.

She said, “The first mistake you made was for you to say that I was at the front burner campaigning for this administration.

“A campaign for a government with a constitutional mandate for security and welfare to bring children of the poor who have been taken from their school cannot be equated for a campaign of an administration.

“You are so wrong to even, in anyway, equate advocacy for a campaign for this administration.

“You are wrong and you ought to apologise for that, and say I probably framed my question wrongly,” she stated .

Further speaking, Ezekwesili also faulted Buhari’s government over its fight against corruption.

According to her, “The fight against corruption has not started because it has to be much more comprehensive.

“It has to be analytically grounded in a kind of way that you can measure. If you ask this government to do a rate of change in terms of what has really change I am not sure that it would be able to.

“The biggest thing hanging over the administration is that what they are doing is so loud that they can’t hear what they are saying.

“It is a good thing to recover looted resources and it is a good development. However, if you reduce your anti corruption effort to reducing money that has been stolen then you don’t have a sustainable system for reducing corruption in your society.

“Some of this whole that we are recovering money is a pervasive incentive for people who are watching and simply say ‘we can repeat bad behaviour and the consequences of bad behaviour is not that high’.

“You can’t have a society that pervades its incentive sanction system by simply saying when we loot they will recover some.

“So, let not use that as a basis to judge the efficacy or efficient of our anti corruption effort,” she stressed.