Nigeria is a place where you cannot give direct answers to direct questions. It’s a kind of complicated place where you cannot even know who is in control of governance; Boko Hara or Gej or Coordinating Minister or Bretton wood institutions. It is a place where you cannot get one simple answer to one simple question. Hence, our curiosity to know which is dead between Corruption and Anti-Corruption may suffer the same fate. The consolation price is that we can use some parameters to arrive at a reasonable conclusion.
“Corruption is a vice which is international in scope, monstrous in nature, crudely rampant in developing economies and unobstructively devastating and pervasive in virtually all Less Developed Countries (LDCs)…” of the world, with the giant of Africa, Nigeria taking the giant lead. It is no longer news that corruption is the bane of development anywhere in the world. Good governance therefore becomes a mirage where corruption triumphs like our own.
The irony of everything is that every successive administration tends to fight corruption to the extent that Olusegun Obasanjo defines corruption as "…the abuse of public power to private and personal benefits….” Despite all efforts and machineries to excommunicate this monster from our Holy Communion table, it appears to be growing stronger each day. The bitter truth is that this may continue in as much as we are fond of putting poor (in mind) people in the corridor of power. One thing I have learnt of late is that you cannot steal what doesn’t belong to you without first demean or given up on your ability to work hard to get such things. The question is, for how long are we going to pretend as if all is well?
Despite the fact that my thesis was on corruption and nation building, I still cannot figure it out yet which is dead; corruption or anticorruption. Apart from government machineries to curtail corruption (like offices of Account General, Audit General, Legislator etc), we have myriad of agencies, task-forces, committees and so on that are there with primary responsibilities to fight corruption. Thief should be able to trace the path of fellow thief, but what happens when the thief that was assigned to nab other thieves are busy stealing? Weird? That what happens here.
It is needless to say that I don’t need a professor or prophet to answer this question for me. The answers are obvious and a corollary of what we see each passing day. If I may ask, where was EFCC by the time now convicted James Ibori was stealing $250million? Where was ICPC when OBJ (the same man that defines corruption as "…the abuse of public power to private and personal benefits….") was using his privilege of office to siphon money in the name of Presidential Library? Where was NEITI when the so called cabal was pocketing a whopping sum of N1.7trn under the smokescreen of oil subsidy? Where was Accountant General when Honorable Ministers of Finance and her Petroleum counterpart could not account for millions from subsidy? If you ask the most foolish Nigerian he will tell you that 99% of past and servicing governors, senator, minister etc are stinkingly corruption. How come anti-corruption agencies are in short of cases and convicts? The way and manner their few cases were unwittingly handled are sources of concern.
Every day is passing as if nothing wrong. The bitter truth is as I putting my fingers on my laptop to put this article together, there are hundreds of politicians across the nation planning or stealing the fortune out of our dear nation. They will not stop doing this because we have no intention of stopping them. Nigeria is so rich to the extent that the siphoned monies since independence in 1960 would have been too much for Africa to develop. Little wonder that 112 million Nigerians (i.e. 67.1% of the 167million population), according to Nation Bureau of Statistics, are living below poverty level. Daily, some people in so many locations stole something. If we modestly assume that a million naira is being stolen each day, that just 365million this is not enough for just one corrupt governor in a year. You do the math!
For the fact that we have hundreds of abandoned projects, dilapidated government hospitals, roads, erratic power supply, disease epidemics, no access to portable water, policy somersault, abject poverty, growing illiteracy level etc, are eloquent testimonies that corruption is very much alive and inversely, it shows that anti-corruption mechanisms are only walking corpses. Hence, we may need more than a miracle to raise these dead corpses hiding under the façade of EFCC, ICPC, NEITI, countless committees and task-forces.
God Bless Nigeria!
Olujide 'Gbenga Daniel
