Former President Olusegun Obasanjo expressed his dismay on Thursday over the rampant corruption among Nigerian politicians, urging that they should face imprisonment.

Obasanjo, Nigeria’s first democratically elected Head of State, who served for eight years from 1999 to 2007, decried the criminal behaviour among certain political officeholders.

“If you examine the people in government today at both executive and legislative levels, some of them should be permanently behind bars for their past misdemeanours and criminal misconduct.

“You cannot expect thieves to deliver fair judgement in favour of the rightful owner of the property,” the ex-military leader said virtually during the memorial lecture of the late cleric Denis Slattery, held in Lagos State, titled, ‘The Imperative for Moral Rectitude in Governance.’

The Abeokuta-born elder statesman recalled an instance where he challenged a politician (name undisclosed) who had made a false statement, but instead of correcting it, the politician simply attributed his statement to the nature of “politics.”

He said, “The first thing that shocked me when I entered politics was the level of corruption among election officials, which was considered normal.
“The second was the extent of general and criminal misbehaviour, which was treated with levity and impunity. We were in a meeting where a man lied, and I confronted him. The next thing he said was, ‘It’s all politics, Sir.’

“Every wrongdoing is excused as politics, which suggests that politics has no room for morality, principles, rectitude, ethics, good character, or positive attributes.”

He stressed that the oil-rich nation needs “transformational leaders rather than transactional leaders, truth instead of lies, honesty instead of dishonesty, integrity instead of disintegration, hope instead of despair, production instead of deduction, inclusion instead of exclusion and marginalisation.”

The Slattery Memorial lecture was organised by the Old Boys’ Association of St. Finbarr’s College at the Civic Centre in Victoria Island, Lagos.

Slattery, an Irish-born missionary, founded St. Finbarr’s College in January 1956. He was the pioneer chairman of the Nigerian Football Association and a founding member of the Nigerian Union of Journalists.

He was honoured with the Order of the Niger by Obasanjo in 2001. He died in July 2003.