Mr Buhari said he fought corruption relentlessly despite pushback.
President Muhammadu Buhari said Sunday that he fulfilled his electoral promise to rid Nigeria of corruption by relentlessly fighting the menace during his eight-year administration.
"Fellow Nigerians, you know how dear the desire in my heart is to rid the country of corrupt practices that had consistently diminished our efforts to be a great country.
"I did pursue this commitment relentlessly, in spite of the expected pushback," said Mr Buhari, who hands over power on Monday, in his farewell national broadcast on Sunday.
Mr Buhari will hand over power to the president-elect, Bola Tinubu, at an inauguration ceremony on Monday.
He said he was leaving office with "a modest sense of fulfilment".
He also said his relentless fight against corruption was evidenced in the repatriation of "huge sums of money back to the country."
"I did pursue this commitment relentlessly, in spite of the expected pushback. I am happy that considerable progress had been made in repatriating huge sums of money back to the country and also taken over properties illegally acquired from our commonwealth," Mr Buhari said.
Data, anti-graft campaigners disagree
Although Nigeria has moved up four places in the latest 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), it did not improve on its previous year's points, according to the latest index released by Transparency International (TI) earlier this year.
Despite maintaining its previous score of 24 out of 100 points in the 2021 assessment, Nigeria's position went up to 150th in the new index compared to its 154th position out of 180 countries assessed in the 202 rankings.
The CPI is TI's tool for measuring the levels of graft in the systems of various countries around the world. The maximum points a country can score is 100, and the least is zero. Zero signifies the worst score, and 100 is the best.
His administration recorded progress in recovering looted assets from within Nigeria and abroad but took major missteps that are considered a major rollback on the success of the administration's fight against corruption.
Many of the missteps are directly attributable to Abubakar Malami, who has held the pivotal office of the Attorney-General of the Federation throughout the administration's life.
About a month ago, Mr Malami, who carried on unchecked by Mr Buhari, controversially withdrew a N1.84 billion corruption case involving Nicholas Ashinze, a former military aide to then National Security Adviser (NSA), Sambo Dasuki.
The EFCC had called seven prosecution witnesses in Mr Ashinze and others' trials that began over five years ago.
Mr Dasuki was the NSA to former President Goodluck Jonathan. He is being tried on charges of diversion of funds meant to procure arms.
The Buhari administration made massive capital of the corruption case against Mr Dasuki in showing to Nigeria that they had made the right choice to elect the former military leader as president.
The administration accused Mr Dasuki of diverting over $2 billion meant for the purchase of arms for fighting the insurgency to funding the political campaigns of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) during the 2015 general elections.
It escalated the case in the media as the typical form of corruption that took place in the previous administration of President Goodluck Jonathan and expressed resolve to ensure those who benefitted from the sleaze would be brought to book.
But almost eight years later, the case has yet to make any tangible progress.
The case lost many years to the illegal detention of Mr Dasuki by the State Security Service (SSS), which Mr Malami justified publicly.
During Mr Dasuki's illegal incarceration for almost four years, SSS often refused to present him in court for trial, an expression of the sabotage of the case by the Buhari administration.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
The handling of the case is typical of how many high-profile corruption matters the administration started either failed or are moving at snail's speed in court.
Several corruption cases, including the one involving Mr Dasuki's former aide, were terminated under opaque circumstances by Mr Malami.
PREMIUM TIMES has yet to grasp the full extent of the unbridled withdrawal of criminal cases by Mr Malami, who now holds the record of Nigeria's longest-serving attorney-general.
In January this year, Mr Malami justified withdrawing the corruption charges against a former Governor of Gombe, Danjuma Goje, in 2019.
Similarly, the pardon the Buhari administration granted two former governors of Plateau and Taraba States, Joshua Dariye and Jolly Nyame, whose conviction took Mr Buhari's avowal to defeat corruption.
An Abuja High Court had convicted Messrs Dariye and Nyame for stealing billions of naira from their respective states' coffers.
