'Anti-corruption fight must continue beyond 2023' - Olawepo-Hashim

For the country to prosper, the fight against corruption must continue beyond 2023, chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and former presidential candidate in 2019, Mr Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim, has said.

He said a good footstep in winning the battle to reduce corruption, if not killed totally, is to ensure that corrupt people with unexplainable wealth do not get elected at any level.

In a statement titled “2023: The fight against corruption must not stop” Olawepo-Hashim recalled that when he was growing up, it was the practice then, that women laid their wares by the roadside and indicated the price of the product by the numbers of stones they kept on the ground.

“No one took the products without dropping the correct sums of money, and no one who passed-by took the money and/or the wares away. I so much long for a return to the country of simple and honest people that Nigeria was, and that is why it was easy for me to connect with the War Against Indiscipline (WAI) message of General Buhari and Idiagbon in 1983.

“In Ilorin, Kwara State, where I schooled, we were the disciples of Idiagbon’s campaign against corruption as President of the Dramatic Society in Cherubim and Seraphim College. I was the lead actor in a drama skit against corruption on the NTA Ilorin Youth scene. Also, I busted a pattern of stealing in the College Kiosk perpetrated by students appointed to supervise the kiosk, which is a story for another day, that readers would find in my coming autobiography 'Sunrise at Midnight' by the of Grace of God. The first volume will be released soon,” he said.

He explained that incidentally, the fight against corruption was a major plank of the Buhari administration, adding that corruption was one of the major reasons Nigeria is backward and the underbelly of some of the security problems of the country such as banditry.

“Nigeria loses a lot to corruption. According to Price Water Cooper (PWC), a global consulting outfit, if not arrested by 2030, corruption will be costing Nigeria 37 per cent of her GDP; i.e $200 billion, a whopping N100 trillion about 10 times our national budget."