REALLY ? I am not corrupt – Atiku

Former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar has denied being a corrupt person as widely believed in many quarters.
Atiku made this known in an interview with some officials from the media team of the EFCC, which was published in the latest edition of the anti-graft agency’s Zero Tolerance Magazine.
Responding to a question on how allegations of corruption became his albatross in the race for the presidency in 2006, he said: “well if Atiku is corrupt, he would have been found guilty of corruption by all the panels and probes and cases brought before courts.”

He said: “I remember the only corruption indictment against me was a white paper which was cooked up by our own administration over night to including the very EFCC that I helped found and other cabinet ministers, which I challenged in court.
“The court rightly dismissed all those indictments as being mere political; and till todayn nobody has ever indicted me of corruption.”
On the allegations of corruption leveled against him by the Governor of Kaduna State, el-Rufai, in his book, ‘Accidental Public Servant’, Atiku said el-Rufai did not give any evidence or prove where he was corrupt.

He added that: “this is the same el-Rufai and others who incorporated Transcorp during my time as Vice President and offered me shares and I declined.”

“I wrote to them officially to say it was unethical of me to have accepted those offers; so, where is the corruption toga coming from.” He said.
Asked to explain the bribe scandal of N50 million, involving Senator Ibrahim Mantu, Jonathan Zwingina and others during el-Rufai’s ministerial confirmation screening, Atiku said: “No, that is absolutely not true.”
He said: “It is also on record, because I controlled campaign funds, every Senator benefited from those funds; and el-Rufai now went and said those campaign funds were meant to be bribe.
“Of course, my boss, the president, investigated the story and found out that indeed every Senator got contributions from the campaign fund which I was managing. So where is the corruption in that?”
The former VP at a recent function stated thar the continued concentration of power and resources in a central government would continue to suppress the advancement of the nation.

Erstwhile Vice President, Atiku Abubakar has revealed how former President Olusegun Obasanjo attempted to become a lifetime President and not third term.
Speaking with Zero Tolerance, a magazine published by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, the former Vice President alleged that Obasanjo tried to amend the constitution to make way for his agenda.
Abubakar insisted that his former principal under the guise of attempting to amend the constitution carefully removed the aspect of tenure limitation but he kicked against it.

He said, “My offence was that I disagreed with him on the amendment of the constitution to remove tenure/term limits or
“In fact, he sent the then Attorney-General and Prof. Jerry Gana to my office to bring the draft amendments to the constitution. After going through (them), I found out that tenure limits had been removed. In other words, he could be President for life.
“I then asked them that ‘if I send you to the President, can you deliver this message?’ They said yes. I said ‘go and tell him I will not support it and (I) will fight it’.”
Relatively, the former Vice President dismissed insinuations in certain quarters that he was a corrupt person.