Looking inwards.

              Darkness reigns at the foot of the lighthouse. Japanese proverb.

Reports that President Muhammadu Buhari has directed Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) to investigate allegations of corruption against top government officials are likely to generate widely divergent reactions. There will be people who will celebrate signals that the President's resolve to fight corruption is genuinely blind to partisan, political or personal interests. PDP bigwigs and retired military officers who have borne the brunt of the anti-corruption onslaught largely because their hands still show fresh signs of raiding the till will hope that the investigations will throw in new inmates from the accusing side. Federal legislators who have battled numerous attempts to rope their leaders and their conduct into anti-corruption dragnets will chalk-up this development as a victory of sorts, to the degree that the President is even willing to contemplate investigating corruption charges among officials close to him. Then there are those whose hard-earned cynicism over the administration's willingness to tolerate questions around its integrity and competence will advise against raising expectations that any new grounds will be broken by this order. Nonetheless, the President's order represents an encouraging step towards responding to public opinion regarding his commitment to the fight against corruption as a national, rather than a partisan problem.

The directive that key officials suspected of corruption should be investigated could be the call to battle stations, the order signaling a readiness to engage the enemy, will be followed very closely by Nigerians and the international community. Until now, the focus of the fight against corruption has been the leading lights of the previous administration and the military, as well as the odd high profile APC politicians who appear to have committed political crimes that remind the administration that they have questions around corruption they should have answered a long time ago. Record offices of anti-corruption and investigating agencies are brimming with  case files of many prominent APC politicians, yet new files are daily being opened  for new suspects with different partisan tags. Between the courts and the anti-corruption agencies, the fate of many former governors now Senators of APC and PDP as well as many others who were being investigated or prosecuted appears sealed in favour of their perpetual freedom from being conclusively processed. A few of the recent high profile defections from PDP to APC have been attributed in some quarters  to the search for political immunity against investigation and prosecution, a charge that should hurt the president very deeply. The president himself has said on numerous occasions that corruption is fighting back, giving a rather simplistic impression that he expected that the culture that breeds corruption and the act itself will simply roll over. The appearance of evidence that far from running away, corruption is finding a breeding ground in intimate circles around him may have finally pushed the president to salvage his administration's key undertaking to Nigerians.

The allegations that people close to President Buhari are engaged in corrupt practices have been around for a while. It will be uncharitable to assume that the president did not investigate these allegations. Given the pervasive tendency of Nigerians to suspect every one in authority, no one should blame the president for not throwing them under the bus at the first whisper of corruption. If the president has decided to be loyal to the intimate circle around him, ignoring calls for replacing some of them to improve standards of transparency and competence, it is his right to do so. But he knows that he will be responsible for their actions and performance, and Nigerians will judge him over his choices of aides, confidants and other officials .So far, you could count the number of senior officials the president has fired for any reason on your fingers. This suggests either of two things: the president is happy with his choices to date, or he does not monitor performance and integrity levels. If your loyalty to the leadership capacities of the president is very high, you could also grant him the ability to establish facts around allegations that just won't go away, and keep the outcome to himself. Judgment over his tendency to remain silent over persistent allegations against senior aides, officials and ministers will be divided. Some will say he does not have to tell Nigerians that every allegation that comes his way is investigated and found wanting. Others will say Nigerians are an intensely suspicious people who look up to him to improve transparency in governance, and he must constantly assure them that he and everyone around him are squeaky clean.

Now it appears the president is outsourcing the responsibility to establish the integrity of key officials to other public officials with requisite statutory responsibilities. It will be comforting to believe that the impetus behind this decision is not primarily the fact that the federal legislature whose leadership the president has been at loggerheads with over corruption has raised serious issues around the integrity of two of his key officials. If the fiasco over the screening of the president's nominee for chair of EFCC and the allegations of corruption against the Secretary to Government of the Federation (SGF) have triggered a wider and deeper search for evidence of corruption beyond these two persons, the nation will be better assured that the real battle against corruption, which is to uproot it from within the deep recesses of power, could be won.

 President Buhari has just raised the stakes in the war against corruption, and may just have triggered a scramble for many battle stations. The enemy may not be as far away as it is convenient to assume. His own side is a key player that could determine the outcome of this decisive battle. He only needs to interrogate the events and circumstances around the rejection of his nominee for chair of EFCC, a nomination that had been with the Senate for months, waiting to be torpedoed by a security report written against the nominee by a security agency that reports to the president. How tight are his ranks? Could the president have tolerated a nomination to a very sensitive position that had been mortally wounded? Did he believe he can win another battle against the National Assembly with his troops shooting at each other? Was Magu set up to be embarrassed and to embarrass the president and the anti-corruption war? Could Magu move from crack investigator and prosecutor to being an accused in one fell swoop? Could someone have handed the Senate a battle in this war on a platter? Are all eyes on the ball?

Even more questions will be asked if the circle to be investigated by the office of the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) is widened by the president. The allegations against the SGF which he dismissed as balderdash, for instance, ought to have been available to more than just a Senate Committee. Long before this Committee laid its hands on these damaging allegations, the battery of control mechanisms in the Presidential Initiative in the North East and the many federal and security agencies in and around it ought to have raised alarms that should reach the president directly. Certainly, many aid and humanitarian agencies have drawn attention to rampant corruption and abuse around victims' support in the northeast. Without a doubt, the SGF is entitled to defend himself against the Senate's allegations, and the Senate itself ought to have afforded him the opportunity to defend himself before it. The Senate knows better than to demand that the SGF is sacked only on the basis of its findings against him. The devil now is in the questions around the integrity of the investigations to be conducted by the AGF which Nigerians will raise. How much credibility should be given to investigations by EFCC, ICPC, Police, AGF, DSS against powerful public officials in an administration with pronounced cleavages? Will the AGF also investigate officials who are infinitely more powerful than the SGF?

Still, it is the prerogative of the president to device who, how and why he wants his officials to be investigated. Nor should his decision be dismissed as cosmetic or public relations. President Buhari's commitment to fight corruption is being questioned, and some of those questions deserve answers. The AGF should be encouraged to be loyal to president Buhari's anti-corruption stand do justice to the mandate to thoroughly investigate those referred to him. The entire credibility of the war against corruption may very well depend on the outcome of these investigations.