Politics

YOU CAN BE A BANKER AND A CRITIC — THE TWO ROLES ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE There is a serious flaw in the argument that because Alex Otti worked in banking during previous Abia administrations, he was somehow personally responsible for detecting, stopping and publicly announcing every alleged misuse of Abia State funds. That is not how banking works. A bank processes transactions on the mandate of its customer, subject to banking law, regulatory controls, anti-money-laundering requirements and other compliance obligations. Where a transaction raises legally defined suspicions, the obligation of the bank is ordinarily to follow the prescribed compliance…

OTTI, CORRUPTION AND THE DANGEROUS POLITICS OF INVENTED CERTAINTY I have read Moses A. Orji’s latest piece, “Otti’s Government and the Whispers of Corruption (III).” What strikes me is not the strength of the evidence presented, but the extraordinary distance between the evidence actually established and the conclusions so confidently pronounced. There is a fundamental difference between asking questions about public expenditure and declaring expenditure to be theft. The first is legitimate democratic scrutiny. The second requires evidence. You cannot simply locate an expenditure entry in a Budget Performance Report, announce that you personally have not seen the corresponding project,…