Nigeria Wins the "Corruption World Cup" for Keeps
By
Mike Ikhariale
For a nation hankering after cheap honors and unlimited self-aggrandizement, we certainly now have something serious to celebrate as we have managed, once more, to beat the rest of the world, except Bangladesh, a dark horse for that matter, to retain the trophy of being the “Most Corrupt Nation” (MCN) on earth in a race that involved 102 contestants. That is real news for our people who are evidently still wondering why life has become so hard for the honest, the upright and the hard ward working while lay-abouts and crooks are having the fun of their lives.
Nigeria won the cup last year and the year before, and it must therefore be the greatest feat that we won it again, the third time, this year. Is it not good time to declare a national holiday to mark our achievements as the most corrupt nation on earth?
Transparency International, TI, the Berlin based international institution that meticulously assesses nations on their corruption rankings on what they call the ‘Corruption Perceptions Index’, consistently find that Nigeria has all it takes to lead the world in corruption, contract inflation, racketeering, 419, kickbacks and treasury looting. And without much challenge, we remain the world champion. And as rightly observed by the TI, corrupt leaders “are trapping whole nations in poverty and hampering sustainable development.”
This year’s report released on Tuesday, the 28th of August 2002 was unique in many respects. This time around, the report drew a very strong causal connection between national poverty and political corruption. As explained by Peter Eigen, the boss of TI, “Corrupt political elite in the developing world, working hand-in-hand with greedy business people and unscrupulous investors, are putting private gain before the welfare of citizens and the economic development of their countries". Let me make it clear that corruption is everywhere, including the so-called developed nations. After all, we are yet to recover from the very sophisticated thievery by American CEOs as the stench from Enron and other cases confirm. The only significant difference is that anyone caught there immediately becomes a social pariah, a public enemy, who would be named, shamed and jailed. In Nigeria, on the contrary, we hail such thieves as ‘successful’ men; smart guys ‘with the Midas touch’, and they are openly overloaded with chieftaincy titles and honorary degrees.
It is therefore very significant that at a time when we are being told that the nation is going bankrupt and the National Assembly is polluting the national atmosphere with its phony impeachment threats that corruption has reached its zenith in the nation. According to the TI report, our corrupt polticians are halting national development on its tracks resulting in massive and grinding poverty for the common man. How do you explain, for example, that a nation like Nigeria that exports so much oil, the world sixth largest, is ranked amongst the very poorest? Where did the dollars go? Apart from the Abachas, who else is holding on to the nation’s wealth?
I concede that, in absolute terms, the estimated annual revenue of between 12 and 15 billion US dollars from oil is damned to little for a country with the size and population of Nigeria. Even if we were to match that with other domestic production of, say, another 12 to 15 billion dollars, the aggregate figure would still be too little to make us a medium rich nation giving the garguantuan economic problems confronting us. Anyone familiar with the way the nation’s economy is managed will agree that Nigeria is courting serious poverty by her undue flamboyance, squandermania, big mouth and baseless arrogance. The cheap oil money, instead of boosting our investment capacity, has given rise to the ‘siesta syndrome’ in which government people go to their offices only to eat guguru, gossip, collect bribes, genuflect obsequious rankadede to their boss, watch TV, and go home at the earliest possible time. You hardly find anybody on his desk, and if you do, he is there just to collect bribe/kola from you before he can even direct you to the right official you are looking for right in the same office. It seems to me to be just wishful thinking by hoping for a sustainable economic development in such a situation when everything we do is in total negation of productivity.
From the top to the bottom, not many truly earns their pay as little as it may be. In view of the huge problems facing the nation, it must be crazy that the President is hardly in his office or in the country, thinking and working out solutions. The same for the legislators that have made absenteeism an institutional code of conduct. Many of them only come to Abuja to honor amorous dates with their girl friends at their palatial rendezvous or move away available Ghana-must-go bags whenever the executive is forced to dole out some. So people really do work for their living. But for a few of the private sector workers, it is the sad reality that people do not take their jobs seriously and this is a culture that developed and festered during the long years of military rule when it was the order of the day that army officers spend most of their time drinking pepper-soup, womanizing and stealing government money rather than seeing to the affairs of government which they by their volition seized from the civilians. The summary of the whole thing is that we are not creating enough wealth but love to steal and waste the little we can gather from oil sales and royalties as if there will be no tomorrow.
The nation would have been a lot better if we had continued to produce our groundnuts in Kano, rubber and palm oil in the south and other agricultural produce in very parts of the country. The farmer who can feed himself and have a little left to sell for his cash needs is a better economic being than the man looking for a mai-gaurd job or the civil servant in the city who talks and eats guguru all through the office hours without contributing anything tangible to the economy the whole day. But who would like to bear the burden of the nation by tilling the soil anymore when he can see others who do virtually nothing riding the best cars and living in the best homes? Whenever a nation has an inept and corrupt elite, the system gets infested down stream as quickly as possible because the people tend to look up to their leaders for examples. And it is the inability of the government to change this mentality by way of examples that has led to the massive poverty in the land.
It must bother us that what the City of New York or Boston spends on its utilities are far more that what we are spending on the 120 million inhabitants of Nigeria spread across 36 states and over 700 local government councils and the allied army of political hangers-on annually. Rather than use the cheap money from oil to develop the right productive base for the economy so that the system could expand through intelligent investment in men and infrastructures, the likes of IBB and Abacha saw these petrol dollars as war booties to be appropriated corruptly amongst themselves and their cronies and today, the account books are proving very difficult to balance and everyone is crying. So we ended up having some of the richest individuals in the world while the nation itself is reeling in a vicious circle of poverty and institutional wretchedness.
It is therefore not surprising that Nigeria is rated as the most corrupt nation on earth. Given the extremely low developmental index of the country, it is pretty impossible, without some fraud, for any one to become a millionaire just by working in the public service. But our 'millionaires' are people who had dealt with the government or had held top government jobs. Even the so-called self-employed private sector people among them had to strike corrupt deals with those in government to succeed because the national economy is state controlled in many destructive ways. This is why some people would resist the idea of privatization because it reduces on their opportunities for fraud, patronage and kickbacks. That is what the TI clearly brought out in the 2002 report, namely, that the system seems to reward indolence and punish hard work.
This year’s report is very damning for many nations and their leaders. Specifically on Nigeria, TI noted that the Obasanjo’s government efforts at eliminating corruption was thwarted largely by the absence of effective, purposeful and coherent legislative support which was occasioned by the debilitating crises in the National Assembly such as the cases of Okadigbo, Salisu Buhari, Ewerem and others. This was further compounded by the fact the legislature which should have been at the forefront of the war against corruption became the harbinger of corruption itself starting from the economically reckless allowances and inappropriate perquisites of office which they recklessly awarded themselves that in turn triggered a national craze for unbridled sqandamania.
It is difficult, for example, to rationalize the reality that after all they knew about the weakness of the national economy following the several years of military plunder that they would in fact indulged in greater acts of fiscal recklessness such as the buying of 4x4 jeeps to hundreds of local government officials, frivolous trips abroad by the legislators and members of the executives. These expenditures did not fit anywhere with the campaigns we were told of about transparency and probity in governance. Instead, they were contradictions in terms, if not a mockery of the whole idea of transparency, altogether.
Obasanjo, in spite of his avowed war on corruption created unnecessary diversion of energy by focusing mainly on the Abacha family loots which the TI report noted only yielded very little recovery. To make matters worse, legislative delays and needless shadow boxing saw to it that the anti-graft legislation took so much time to come out and even when it was finally passed, that there was not much teeth left in the process as the lawmakers strenuously watered down on its effectiveness as a mechanism for curbing corruption. Self interest?
With a motley crowd of nearly 1000 legislators at Abuja, more than that in the 36 State Houses of Assembly and about 8000 Local Government Councilors all asking and getting their share of the corruption action, the nation should be glad, as Babangida once had reason to do when he yelled that it is a miracle that the national economy has not collapsed given the gluttony that it faces from many voracious and unrelenting enemies. If we now add to the burden of our bloated legislative houses nation-wide, the mammoth and stupendous presidency, the 36 governors and their retinue of commissioners, advisers and assistants, it would be clear why TI came to the conclusion that politicians in many developing countries have used corruption to inflict poverty on their peoples, and in this regard, that the politicians in Nigeria hold the world record.
Do we really need so many states and local governments? If economic development is the goal, we sure do not. What the TI report suggests is that we only multiply these institutions and agencies of government simply to create more avenues for corruption, patronage and the “kill and divide” mentality.
It is important that the report did not say that democracy is the cause of our problems. If anything thing, the popular view is that it is only a truly democratic order that will put a halt to the menace of corruption and its negative impact on the well being of the people. What is happening is that due to the culture of corruption in the land, there is no more real production taking place as everyone is looking for a chance to take his slice of the immoral national cake baked with the oil from the Niger Delta without lifting a finger to do any productive work.
It should bother our lawmakers who are now making so much noise about the president’s “incompetence” that they were amply indicted by the TI report as being obstacles to the creation of a truly effective anti-corruption legal regime. If we had laws forcefully calling for both individual and institutional accountability in the country, I doubt if we would have been in the mess that we are today. It is the height of legislative irresponsibility that after three years in office the democratic government is unable to cast off the legacy of the infamous Abacha and Babaginda style in which corruption and indolence hold sway.
There are certain consequences following this shameful report. For example, how does the president hopes to face the nation’s creditors who we are now failing to honor our debts repayment schedule to that Nigeria is indeed broke and that they should be lenient with him about debts rescheduling when they all know that the reason why Nigeria is broke is due in part to the massive corruption of the government that he heads? This must be a greater source of worry than the impeachment fever that is spreading across the nation.
The president should not forget that he was elected to set a new pattern of government in which probity is the watch word and to use his own pet phrase, one for “no business as usual”. He should stand up like George Washington, the first president of the US federation did in 1789 and acknowledge that “as the first in everything, in our situation will serve to establish a Precedent, it is devoutly wished on my part, that these precedents may be fixed on true principles.” The TI reports are no good precedents that Obasanjo would want to leave behind after another opportunity to lead the nation. It does not matter that he may extend that opportunity in 2003. And as John Adams, the man to whom Washington handed over power after four years in office correctly, proclaimed, “People and nations are forged in the fire of adversity”. The president should turn these national adversities into the building blocks for a truly strong and virile nation. But the report under review is not pointing to that direction and there are no signs that we are about to change gear. And it is tragic.
Until we start asking our selves questions about how we came about our wealth, this nation is headed for the gutters. Up till this hour, it is the case that no cause of action exists against Babaginda and thousands others who have so much money but whose sources are still unknown. That is preposterous to say the least. Our lawmakers, like their counterparts elsewhere, has the power to make laws that would require that every Nigerian gives a convincing account about his wealth or he is sent to jail. And if we do this as a national process, I bet that there would be a drastic reduction in the incidents of corrupt over night wealth.
No one becomes an instant millionaire in the rest of the decent world without a date with the taxman. I am deeply troubled that with all the Sharia ‘revolution’ in most of the north states and the booming Pentecostalism in the south, there is still enough room in our society for corruption to give us such a sodomic identity and bad name. Some people are either fake or downright hypocritical with their claim to religiosity or the nation itself has reached its time.
I have met several Nigerians who seem to have perfect understanding of the ills of the country and also have some of the best solutions to them than many of us do but have refused to take part in the process of public articulation and discourse of these malaise. They would rather siddon and nook, perhaps prosper materially and psychologically in the process instead of talking to deaf and dumb people. I used to hold them with some suspicion, if not contempt, as being cynical or selfish or unpatriotic or all. It would seem that they are indeed wiser as the Nigerian project does not look like one that will succeed, after all. So why waste time on a dead mull?
Discussing Nigeria outside of its narrow ethnic or sectarian prisms hardly garner any audience these days. Even though the house Lord Lugard built has not actually fallen apart, contrary to the doomsday estimate of some skeptical observers, there are indeed so many man-made factors militating against its long-term survival. So many things do exist that have the tendencies to permanently bifurcate and ultimately partition or totally destroy the edifice called Nigeria; from economy to religion through politics and other viciously irreconcilable antagonistic interests, there does not appear to be any meeting ground as we all seem to be pushing ourselves farther apart beyond the limits of endurance.
Much as some of us would wish it were not true, the evidences are so consistent and overwhelming that it is simply logical to estimate that it is just a matter of time. The tragedy of the Nigerian situation is that there are no more credible voices still around that could come to the rescue as everyone is in some way involved in the fray and deeply entrenched on some side. Unlike when the enemy was clearly identifiable in the days of colonialism and even recently, during the military dictatorship, the savior of last resort, the civil society, is circumstantially bewildered, if not incapacitated, living the field wide open to only myopic political warlords and their ignorant hatchet men whose agenda are decidedly inimical to the common good. If you ask me, I have gradually started to feel ashamed of my Nigerian nationality. You will agree with me that this is not the best time to be a Nigerian, what with the ugly labels that now go with it: ungovernability, anarchism, dictatorship, 419ers, corruption politics, Talibanism, armed robbery, hired assassins, ethnic militia, cheats and all that. I did not need TI to tell me about them, as they are basically self-evident. It is sad, really sad indeed.