Corruption in Nigeria .

Opeyemi Agbaje

Corruption in Nigeria, as I wrote last week, has reached epidemic proportions. The greatest evidence of this are the scandalous revelations that have been emerging from the ongoing Senate Committee investigation on pensions. At some point during the Obasanjo regime, someone said Nigeria’s problem was not just corruption, but the impunity with which it was carried out. Now the matter evidently has graduated beyond impunity – in volume, scale, breadth and depth – and has now become, as Joe Okei-Odumakin said to me on “The Policy Council” last week, a cancer! I completely endorse that characterisation of the current state of corruption in Nigeria.

Everyone knows, or ought to know the features and consequences of cancer – it spreads very rapidly through the host, destroying cells, weakening the body and, in due course, killing its victim. A cure from an advanced form of cancer, such as Nigerian corruption has become, is a rarity, and in the few cases in which that happens, it requires decisive surgical and other scientific or medical intervention, and some large dose of divine grace. Where cancer is treated with levity, the patient is a living dead. God forbid that Nigeria is just enjoying its last stages of mobile morbidity! But if we don’t engineer a quick and decisive onslaught on corruption, it will destroy Nigeria – sooner than later.

The pension probe is not the only parade of unmitigated graft and brigandage on display in these times. The oil subsidy probe also shows, as we have all suspected, that the subsidy, rather than a mechanism to smoothen oil prices for the benefit of the poor, had become oil industry bureaucrats’ (together with their allies and contractors’) source of massive enrichment. Though it seems clear enough to me that the House committee’s limited knowledge of public finance, banking, international trade and shipping, and oil and gas transactions (as well perhaps as a little exuberance) meant figures may have been somewhat exaggerated, but it is still apparent that significant impropriety took place within the oil subsidy regime, particularly during the Yar’Adua and Jonathan regimes. It is a mystery to me that the lesson our people learn from these is that subsidy must stay!

The recent conviction of James Ibori (whom it has been legally established was not qualified, by reason of prior criminal convictions in the United Kingdom, to be a state governor) in London after his wife, mistress, sister and lawyer also demonstrates the absence of moral scruples in current Nigerian sociology in relation to corruption. Corruption is no longer seen as a crime in our country; otherwise Ibori wouldn’t have involved his entire household. For the Ibori clan, it was simply their entitlement from the opportunity presented by their kith occupying a high office of state. And they couldn’t be bothered to think up legitimate activities and services they could provide to Delta State which, subject to appropriate disclosures and abstentions from the process, could have entitled them like any other citizen to earn a living by offering some value to the state.

More importantly, the Ibori conviction illustrates how corruption has subverted our policing and judicial systems. While a London court confirmed without prevarication that Ibori had two previous convictions for petty theft in the UK, Nigerian courts went through a protracted process right to the Supreme Court before concluding that one “James Onanefe Ibori”, who stole building materials somewhere in or near Abuja, was different from “James Onanefe Ibori” who became governor of Delta State. And while the London Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Services succeeded in convicting Ibori of money laundering, all 170 charges against him in Nigeria were summarily dismissed by one Justice Marcel Awokuleyin. During the Yar’Adua regime, Ibori was one of the most powerful men in the country, just a heartbeat away from (and reportedly with designs of his own for) the presidency. There are others who have obtained permanent court injunctions against investigation and trial, and many whose trials have in effect become a charade.

Today, there are really no sanctions for corruption in Nigeria. Indeed, it is glorified as the perpetrators strut across the land dispensing philanthropy from the proceeds of stealing from the common purse, while their victims hail them for their generosity and large-heartedness. In this land, there is no anti-corruption fight; the only war going on often seems to be a war on anti-corruption, i.e., a deliberate and concerted effort in which the political class and their rent-seeking contractors and business colleagues systematically undermine any possibility of eliminating corruption. Part of the problem is that there is no longer any clarity about what “corruption” means, and we do not view corruption in tangible terms.

Corruption means that 100 million Nigerians live on less than a dollar/day; it means that thousands of infants die before their first birthday due to poverty and poor ante-natal care; it means that the life expectancy of the average adult Nigerian is less than 50 years; it means that millions of destinies are destroyed as lack of educational facilities ensures that individuals who have the intellectual potential to be university professors end up as primary school teachers! I am convinced that corruption has reached a stage at which, if not drastically curtailed, it will destroy Nigeria – and anger within the populace about the phenomenon seems to be reaching a tipping point!