Akwa Ibom State governor Udom Emmanuel has hailed President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption war, describing the development as fantastic.

According to Emmanuel, for the system to run effectively, it is important to put in structures to fight corruption.

It could be recalled that Governor Emmanuel is the second governor of the Peoples Democratic Party ( PDP) to endorse Buhari’s anti -corruption war in a space of two weeks.

Governor Emmanuel disclosed this to State House Correspondents on Monday after a closed door meeting with Buhari at the Presidential Villa.

He added that all the 36 state governors are setting up structures in their states to fight corruption to reduce it to the barest minimum.

When asked about the need to tackle corruption, Governor Emmanuel said, “Fantastic! Fantastic! It’s something that if we must move forward as a country we must tackle corruption. I believe it’s essential to put in place strong institutional structures to fight corruption.

“To set up structures that would enable systems to run effective without interference. All hands must be on desk in fighting corruption.

“And when we’re talking about corruption we’ll start looking round. Why can’t we start looking at ourselves? Let’s start from even you as a person, what is corruption? It’s not only when money exchanges hands that is corruption.

“Somebody trying to influence an unjust cause, it’s corruption one way or the other. Corruption is a broad concept, if you gave N10 at hand and you’re not honest about it, you will never be honest about it when you have N10million at hand. So, corruption has a lot of ramifications. So corruption is not in terms of the magnitude. It is core value system that really needs to be analysed.

“We strongly support the fight against corruption. All the governors in Nigeria are waging the same war in their different domains, and trying to set up structures trying to see how we can minimise, at least, if not possible to deal with it overnight to eliminate them. But at least we must deal with corruption even to the barest minimum,” he said.

On his visit to the Presidential Villa, he said,” I came here today because there are some investments opportunities that we have to discuss, so I had to brief the president on this opportunities and what is in it for Nigeria. It was purely a business meeting.

Asked specifically on how confident he is about securing victory at the Supreme Court, he said,” unfortunately, in a democratic setting, the executive, the judiciary and the legislature, they have different functions. You know, it’s like a rat and a lizard, they might be running towards the same direction but they run different races.

“I don’t think as someone who’s running a different arm of governor I am supposed to speak about other arms. All I know is that in Nigeria today, they’re looking for capable hands to actually run affairs of the state. People that would put structures in place.

“The people of Akwa Ibom State know who they want, what they want and how to get it and the showed this in the election of 2015 in the state. They spoke to the whole world that the best man, the right man, the right time and who’s also their right choice was elected. It was expressly displayed to the world.”