Prof. Niyi Osundare
(Lecture delivered under the Auspices of the Save Nigeria Group (SNG) at Sheraton Hotel, Ikeja, Lagos, Monday July 9, 2012).
Talking Points
• Nigeria is a kleptocracy: a state ruled by thieves
• We no longer blush because we have lost our skin
• Corruption is Nigeria’s fastest-growing industry
• If Nigeria does not kill Corruption, Corruption will kill Nigeria
• Our fate is in our own hands
The SNG Example
Something happened in this country in the very first week of this
year that we can never forget: Nigeria’s civil society rose with one
voice, one vision, one purpose, one agenda fuelled by extraordinary
patriotism and irrepressible anger. The government of President Goodluck
Jonathan had removed, against all warning and remonstration; against
all hint of commonsense and fellow felling, the so-called ‘subsidy’ on
the price of petroleum products, thus plunging the proverbially rickety
Nigeria economy into a fatal tailspin, and the Nigerian people into
needless agony and deprivation. And he sneaked in this cruel decree on
the Nigerian people on the very first day of the year, no doubt as a
salutary New Year gift from a caring, God-fearing leader.
President Jonathan’s drastic action and his uncharacteristic ‘No
going back’ bravado thereafter came as a surprise to many people.
Personally, I began to wonder: how could this fledgling president have
braved a monster that defied the antics of the tricky Babangida, the
murderous Abacha, and the morally indifferent Obasanjo, his illustrious
predecessors in office who kicked and caviled at the ‘subsidy’ beast but
only succeeded at nibbling at its toes? What gave Jonathan the ruthless
courage to drive the IMF sword to the hilt into the Nigerian body? What
gave him the confidence that he could decree that punitive price hike
and get away with it? I came to the conclusion that the president must
have been strengthened in his resolve by his reading of the Nigerian
malaise. Afterall, his predecessors in power as well as all public
functionaries have always treated Nigeria as a lawless fiefdom where
public opinion counts for nothing, and Nigerians, the people over whom
they rule, as civic orphans without alagbawi (advocate) and olugbeja
(defender). “Let’s go ahead with the subsidy removal”, I could hear
presidential advisers in their caucus, “we know Nigerians: they will
only shout for a few hours and then go back to business as usual. We
know Nigerians: they will quickly adjust”.
But in January this year, that mindset and its cynical calculations
found their graveyard in Lagos, in Abuja, in Kano, in Kaduna, in Ilorin,
in Ibadan, in Ado Ekiti. To protest the price hike, a coalition of
Civil Society groups and the Nigerian Labour Congress called out a
strike that shut down the country for a whole week, finally exacting a
33% climbdown in the decreed price. That reduction may look small, but
the pressure and organization that brought it about, and even more
important, the consciousness and will power generated by it, total up
to an impressive chapter in the annals of Nigeria’s civil society
organization. For, what I saw at Gani Fawehinmi Freedom Park which
served as the epicenter of the struggle, was not just the demonstration
of anger and enactment of protest; it was the platform of possibilities,
of rising screams awaiting distillation into a unified voice; of a
people sick and tired of their dehumanization; a people ready to throw
off their yoke and demolish the sickening notoriety of Nigeria as ‘big
for nothing’ country; masses saying to their rulers “Behold, we are
PEOPLE/HUMAN; we demand to be treated as such!” It was a people who saw
CORRUPTION, not oil subsidy, as the source of the country’s woes and
bane of its people’s welfare.
And what a crowd that was at Freedom Park! What an intermingling of
people beyond ethnic, religious, political, even personal barriers. For
one long week, Nigerians saw themselves as people united by their common
degradation at the hands of some of the most corrupt and most
insensitive rulers in the world. Their diverse songs coalesed into a
chorus of protest and anthem of resistance. For the first time in their
beleaguered lives, many Nigerians found an avenue for the expression of
their humanity; they had the rare opportunity to join others in the
singing of their own song of defiance. Professional bodies responded
with an infectious spontaneity: medical doctors/personnel in overcoat
and other accoutrements took care of the weak and ailing free of charge;
musicians, movies stars, and other social celebrities fired up the
crowd; many food-sellers sold at reduced prices. Violence kept its place
in the netherworld: the police found no work for their eager
truncheons. In a manner reminiscent of similar gatherings at the Tahrir
Square in Cairo at the height of the ‘Arab Spring’ revolts, Muslims in
the crowd took time out for their prayers while adherents of other
faiths formed a ring of solidarity and assurance around them. I wish a
video footage of the Freedom Park events in January could be sent to our
rulers to show them how united Nigerians are capable of being when
motivated by a noble purpose and trustworthy, committed leadership.
So there we had it: the parable of Freedom Square: the selfless,
rigorous, imagination that went into its conception; the thoughtful,
meticulous method that was behind its organization; the exuberant,
positive intelligence that saw it through. President Jonathan’s soldiers
came too late: by the time they swooped in to cordon off the Square,
the deed had already been done. The irrepressible Nigerian spirit had
already registered itself. The events of the first week of this year
have shown that it is possible to make the voice of resistance carry in
this country; that we are not the dumb, feckless bums that we are
thought to be; that unity among the people of Nigeria is not the distant
hope their rulers have made it out to be. Above all, it has
demonstrated the immense potentiality of civil society in the
engineering of change and sociopolitical momentum. And to coast home to
the specificities of today’s lecture, it has shown that Nigerians know
the meaning, import, and ramifications of CORRUPTION as the cankerworm
in Nigeria’s body politic and poison in her soul. And, what’s more, that
they are ready to do something about it!
The Save Nigeria Group, the principal civil society organization
behind the January strike, deserves more than the cursory appreciation
and gratitude that the constraints of time and space permit me to render
in a lecture of this kind. We have seen this group before, sometime in
2010, when the former President Yar’Adua lay critically ill in a Saudi
hospital, but a cabal whose satanic dominance and influence derived from
Yar’Adua’s continued hold on power, insisted that the president must
continue to rule, even from the grave. A bizarre and absolutely
confounding absurdity threw Nigeria into a state of ludicrous paralysis.
Hobbled by characteristic opportunism and tragic inertia, Nigerian
politicians wringed their fingers and gnashed their teeth. The Nigerian
people gasped and wondered. The outside world chuckled at this latest
act from the unedifying drama of Africa’s delinquent giant. The
president’s terminal illness was about to plunge Nigeria itself into a
terminal coma. The Save Nigeria Group rose literally from nowhere and
took up the challenge, rallied the Nigerian people, and marched on the
National Assembly. The quaintly coded, ludicrously escapist “Doctrine of
Necessity” passed by the Nigerian Senate as a way out of this utterly
absurd imbroglio could not have come without the intense moral and
political pressure from the SNG and similarly concerned Nigerians.
Thus, in its short existence as a pressure group, conscientizer,
public opinion mobilizer in Nigeria, the SNG has taken up the role of
ombudsman and tribunal, a kind of moral opposition in a country where
the commonality of crime and mutuality of corruption has made a
reasonable differentiation between/among the political parties a
difficult if not futile exercise.
How, then, can I proceed with this lecture without paying due homage
to the patriotic zeal and visionary acumen of Pastor Tunde Bakare (who,
by the way, I’m meeting for the first time today!), founder and
motivating force behind the SNG, a pastor who, unlike many other men and
women of the cloth in Nigeria, has never failed to see the vital link
between the religious pulpit and the political platform; one who like
the prophets of old, is never afraid of telling truth to power – and
making sure that power hearkens and heeds. I cannot review his political
activities in the past decade or so without recalling the role of the
advocates and practitioners of liberation theology which facilitated the
end of military dictatorship in South America, or Rev Desmond Tutu who
confronted the Apartheid behemoth with the stinging arrows of moral
conscience. No country that I know has ever attained the heights of
human development without a vigorous and consistent tradition of public
opinion the type that is so helpfully evident in the SNG’s
Rescue-and-Salvage Mission. Pastor Bakare, may your tribe increase!
The Cankerworm Called Corruption
When some three weeks ago, Yinka Odumakin, prominent member of the
SNG and, in a manner of speaking, its unacknowledged Minister of
Information (and Strategy?), broached the idea of this lecture to me, he
already had some sense not only of the likely burden of the lecture,
but also the possible wording of its title. “Why We No Longer Blush”, he
said more in the manner of a suggestion than a dictation. Personally, I
do not respond favourably to prescribed titles. The poet in me always
prefers to plumb his own depth for possible terms and denominations. But
Odumakin’s phrasing issued from a steady fountain of passion and
patriotism; the conviction in his voice was both palpable and
infectious. I gave a tentative nod, and for a good four days, I rummaged
through a bunch of possible titles. But the suggested phrase kept
coming back to my mind as a result of its uncanny appropriateness. I
finally decided to meet Odumakin half-way by amplifying his suggested
title with my own subtitle; and that is how the full title of this
lecture was born.
Why is it that Nigerians no longer blush? How did we come to lose our
sense of shame after losing our sense of propriety and proportion? How
did we come to develop a skin that is so thick that no arrows of
degradation, no needles of dehumanization are ever sharp and violent
enough to penetrate our body and rouse our senses! How did our nerves
slide into their present state of stupor? How did we plunge into this
state of dysconsciousness? Catastrophes that would shake normal
societies to their very foundations hit and leave us unfazed. Tyrants in
military uniform whipped us with scorpions; only a few of us protested.
Now their civilian inheritors are scourging us with serpents, and
many of us respond with ‘ranka dede!’. Politicians and other public
functionaries empty public treasuries and squander our
patrimony/commonweal right before our very eyes; we pray to God to aid
their effort. Time there was when these public thieves stole our money
in millions of naira; now they do so in billions and trillions; and many
of us urge them on and envy their luck.
Are we a psychologically intimidated, morally weakened, and
politically wasted people so indolent about their rights, so unmindful
of our dignity? Are we so reprobate that we become so forgiving, so
oblivious of the crimes of those who rule us because we have lost the
capacity to recognize their malefactions as crimes? In other lands,
public figures go to jail for pinching our equivalent of 50,000 naira;
in Nigeria, the huger the amount you steal the higher you go on the
national order of merit, the closer you get to victory in the next
election. As the inimitable Wole Soyinka has so aptly put it
You thief ten kobo they put you for prison
You thief ten million na patriotism. . . .
They go give you chieftaincy and national honour
You thief even bigger, dem go say na rumour
Monkey dey work o, baboon dey chop
Sweet pounded yam, someday i go stop
When, some 30 years ago, the illustrious Dele Giwa typified
Nigerians as having gone beyond ‘shockability’, he should have reserved
his remarks for the present Jonathan-led, PDP-bled crowd of insensate
Nigerians.
As it was in the Beginning
But things have not always been this bad, this dismal. Nigerians
have not always lived in the present kind of moral desert. Time there
was when we knew the difference between wrong and right, when shame
coupled with remorse was the dreaded consequence of wrongdoing. Let me
share with you a story I heard from my father, a story which illustrates
the astonishing difference between the moral order of those days and
the degenerate laxity of the so-called postcolonial era.
As this story goes, a young man in another part of town was
beginning to give everyone around him a cause to worry. Already well
into his thirties, he had no job; he hated farming, the major occupation
at that time because it was hard and dirty. He was apprenticed to one
or two trades, but he never waited long enough to complete his training
in any of them. The extended family then called him and asked what
exactly he would like to do for a living. He said the business of buying
and selling was his prime choice, the one he dreamt about all the time,
the one that would bring him the fortune and freedom he needed. And he
insisted on doing this in some big and faraway town where his need to
make profits would not be compromised by family obligations. His family
taxed its members, raked together a tidy sum for him and sent him off
with all their good wishes.
About six months later, it was Christmas time, and this young man
returned to town, looking conspicuously prosperous. People wondered
which shone the loudest: the gold chain around his neck or the gold
strap of his exotic wrist watch. On Christmas day, he floated a feast
whose lavish extravagance beggared a royal banquet. About five goats and
countless chickens collided in his giant cooking pot, while all the
palmwine tappers in town knew where to direct their kegs that day. The
great feast was about to start when the guests sent for my father to
join them. The first messenger came; my father refused to go; then the
second. The third reported with the sardonic warning that whoever failed
to get to the feast when the fireplace was still hot would only have
himself to blame if all he met were half-picked bones and the loud
belches of the punctual guests.
At this point, my father felt the need to clarify a few issues, and
said something to this effect: Let me explain myself now before
outsiders begin to explain it for me or read hostile meanings into my
absence at our brother’s feast. He is our brother, and I have nothing
against him. I know the way to our brother’s house, and I have been
there many times before without being persuaded to come. And it is not
that I woke up today of all days and could not find my appetite. But the
question for our brother is: ibi se ti reo ree? (where did he get the
money from?). Is this not the same young man for whom we had to collect
all our toro, kobo (all our little pennies) some six months ago? How
could he have made the profit that could fund the feast whose
extravagance the whole town is talking about? No one who has made money
the hard, honest way squanders it the way our brother is doing. So,
without any envy or ill wish, I ask our brother again, ibi se to reo
ree?.
My father never attended that feast; and as the story goes, there
were some members of the celebrant’s molebi (extended family) who never
did. Christmas over, the pots and pans went back where they came; the
revelers dispersed; our young man returned to his ‘station’. But about
two weeks later, when the new year was still very new and remnants of
yuletide jollifications floated on the wings of the harmattan wind, an
uncharacteristic hush fell on the town. The young man, that generous
thrower of the Christmas party, was back in town. Only that this time he
was securely handcuffed and sandwiched between two hefty policemen who
had come to search his family house. The town was later told that the
young man was charged with all kinds of crimes ranging from massive
theft to embezzlement. He was already working hard for a one-way ticket
to prison.
Ibi se ti reo ree? (Where did he get his money from?): that was the
question people asked in those days when our society’s head stood
confidently on its neck, and all manner of thieves and criminals never
found their way to power from where they could choke us in their moral
effluvia.
All kinds of interpretation could be read to this parable of a story.
The society that serves as its setting is not a perfect one; otherwise
that feast would have been boycotted by everyone. But it was a society
that still had a conscience and where moral dissent was still the norm.
Furthermore, it was a society where the Law still had its way and the
restoration of order and good governance was still possible. It was a
society which still operated by a hallowed observance of the rubric Aa
kii (We do not do....i.e. it is not done; it is forbidden). It was a
society of law and order; crime and punishment; good behavior and
adequate reward. It was a society which recognized abomination (eewo)
and kept it at bay; a society which put a healthy distance between oode
(inner room) and aatan (the dunghill) in their literal and figurative
senses. It was a society where people still blushed.
As It is Now
Ibi se ti reo ree? (where did he get his money from?). Now, wind
forward the reel. Welcome to present-day Nigeria. Welcome to our moral
desert and political jungle where the Law has been turned into a
limbless ass; where order has gone under, where the criminal is Hero.
Our world is upside down, like the bat of night. Crime pays. The
criminal is hero. Let us consider three iconic cases.
A couple of months ago, justice finally caught up with James Onanefe
Ibori, the famous ‘thief in the state house’, the ex-governor of Delta
State of Nigeria, who stole over 10 billion naira of state money which
he squandered on lavish estates and cars abroad while dumping huge sums
of the people’s money in coded and un-coded bank accounts all over the
world. Ibori’s case is so chronically symptomatic of the hopeless rot in
the Nigerian system. Here was a man with a brimming rap sheet featuring
criminal convictions both in the United Kingdom and Nigeria, but who
wangled his way through our rickety legal and political wilderness, and
ended up as governor of a state and one of the shot-callers of the
ruling People Democratic Party (PDP). Many times he was taken to court
in Nigeria to face the monster of his criminal past, but each time he
was discharged and acquitted. (I remember one of his court appearances
in Abuja at which the presiding judge said something to this effect:
Yes, you are James Onanefe Ibori, but you are not James Onanefe Ibori.
Pontius Pilate could have done better; but then he would have been
infinitely less rich from the chests of cash that must have purchased
that famous equivocation). And after each court ‘victory’, rented crowds
trooped out in the streets of Asaba to welcome home their illustrious
governor, conqueror of Abuja, the one and only Ogidigbodigbo of the
universe! Church services were held in his honour to thank God for his
victory and evoke hell fire on his traducers. When, in his post-office,
post-immunity period, the EFCC tried to bring him in to account for his
stolen wealth, he executed a rapid escape, headed for Delta State and
holed up himself in his native village where armed home boys rolled
timber logs on to the roads and drove off the anti-graft operatives
intent upon his arrest.
These boys as well as all the other political jobbers and parasitic
spongers who facilitated Ibori’s comprehensive criminality and sheltered
him from the scorching sun of justice, are well beyond the possibility
of ‘blushing’. Hardened and dehumanized into the status of small
criminals who owe their livelihood to the machinations of a bigger
criminal, they were not concerned about the source of Ibori’s wealth.
All they knew is that their son had brought in their own share of the
federal loot - a case of one thief stealing from another thief. With
this kind of moral anarchy, how can anyone ask ibi se ti reo ree? Who
the hell in present-day Nigeria has the mind for that kind of useless
question?
But in the civilized tradition of the United Kingdom, that question
is of paramount importance. When it was asked and Ibori provided no
credible answers; when they opened back the book to his previous
felonies, when they confronted him with unassailable evidence of his
rampant thievery and allied transgressions, they gave him enough years
to keep him sober in jail. More than anything else, the Ibori case has
put in bold relief the difference between the British legal system and
the Nigerian legal anarchy, the difference between civilization and
barbarism, between orderly jurispudentiality and capricious legal
ad-hocism, between the rule of Law and the rule of thieves.
This may sound strange to some people, but all things considered,
Ibori was just a scapegoat whose case blew into the open at the most
inauspicious time. There is something almost Shakespearean in the
unfolding of the Delta man’s unraveling . Were Umaru Yar’Adua still
alive today, James Onanefe Ibori would still be gallivanting up and down
the terrain of this unfortunate country in his capacity as one of the
principal financiers of the Yar’Adua presidential campaign, who has
therefore earned his enviable status as a formidable power broker and
the de facto second most powerful man in Nigeria. But death, that
inscrutable juggernaut, took his powerful beneficiary away and exposed
him to the whimsical wiles of a Vice President he once despised and
whose presidential emergence he did everything possible and impossible
to thwart. Put another way, Ibori’s final conviction is absolutely no
indication of the health of Nigeria’s legal cum political system. On the
contrary, it is a powerful pointer to its medieval rot and
dysfunctionality. And, finally, Ibori is just one tiny (though
significant) pimple in a body politic ravaged by a plague of boils.
There are infinitely bigger, more rapacious thieves among Nigeria’s
public functionaries today, walking freely and calling the shots because
their own lid has not been blown. Who still has the capacity to blush
in a country ruled by thieves?
Now, before you start thinking that the Ibori saga was unique and
that the people’s toleration of his crime was unbelievable, consider the
case of another big party wig from the same party, from another part of
the country, convicted for blatantly illegal manipulation of contract
awards in his position as Chairman of the board of Nigerian Ports
Authority. When chief Bode George got a two-year jail term (considered
as grossly in-commensurate with the gravity of his crime), his “teeming
supporters” thumbed their noses at a Nigerian legal system that was so
blind to the proverbial imuniti which should naturally serve as shield
for a man of the Lagos chief’s military and political record. Many even
couched their anger in sardonic rhetorical questions: Ki lo se teni kan o
se ri? Owoo baba ta na sope o ji? (What did he do that no one had done
before? Whose father owned the money they said he stole?). And, to back
up their protest in a typical Nigerian fashion, on the day the Big
Chief completed his term in jail, “teeming supporters” in dazzling aso
ebi lined the route from the prison gate to his house, chanting party
songs and other vocal ammunitions of perverse resistance. A lavish party
followed, crowned with a thanksgiving service in which the officiating
clergy berated the Chief’s political enemies, and beseeched God to
shower him with further blessings. The Lagos sky was rent by the
resounding “Amen” of party chieftains, “teeming supporters”, and kindred
spirits. Tell me, with this sanctification of crime and beatification
of the criminal, could anyone in the crowd have asked: ‘Ibi se ti reo
ree?’
Let us move quickly now from the debauchery of Nigeria’s political
gladiators to the iniquity of electoral functionaries who facilitate
their ride into office. Remember Maurice Iwu, the Ebola Professor who
infected Nigeria’s body politic with the plagues of the 2003 and 2007
polls (who can forget the infamy of the Ido-Osi jumbo numbers in a
hurry? Certainly not Femi Orebe, my compatriot and intrepid columnist!).
Well, when he finally left office and retired into well-earned comfort,
he was treated to an uproarious homecoming by an appreciative crowd
including kinsmen and women, party faithfuls, (for he was profitably
faithful to the ruling party), honourable legislators, and musical
celebrities. Did anyone in the crowd ever ask their son to give account
of his years in office? Were they ever concerned that their son
supervised an electoral heist of such phenomenal enormity that nearly
tore Nigeria apart and which brought the country the searing contempt
and opprobrium of the international community? Did any of them blush at
the abysmally low esteem in which their son was held by an honest sector
of the Nigerian population? Blame not the Iwu clan, for he has equally
famous antecedents in Nigeria’s history of ignominious election umpires.
Blame them not for in obodo dike Nigeria, the rogue politician is man
of the people; the thief is hero. Our skin has become so coarse, so
thick, our blood so pale with perfidy that we have lost our capacity to
blush.
If Nigeria does not kill corruption,
Corruption will kill Nigeria.
That was my somewhat epigrammatic rejoinder some two months ago, to a
touchingly thoughtful memo by Mobolaji Aluko, the Nigerian academic and
public intellectual, on corruption in Nigeria and the possible role of
the country’s elite in stemming its spread. Corruption kills by
blighting our blossom, frustrating new shoots while stunting the growth
of the old stem. Like a virulent weed, it does not just smother the good
crop; it shoves aside its carcass and usurps its place. Thereafter, it
starts reproducing itself in multiple folds, carving out the entire
terrain in its own image, developing new shells and shields against
possible assaults, completely erasing every trace of the old virtuous
order, and taking on a false originary aspect. Its operational lackeys
are degradation and decay; its ultimate harbor is death. Consider the
ubiquity of death and mayhem in our country today and you appreciate the
more the absolutely morbid repercussions of corruption.
The last day of May and the first three of June this year shocked Nigeria with a near-apocalyptically morbid timeline:
Thursday May 31: 8 loaded petro tankers burnt to carcass on the Lagos Ibadan expressway
Friday June 1: over 30 vehicles private and commercial caught fire and roasted on the same Lagos-Ibadan expressway
Saturday June 2: a Nigerian cargo plane overshot the runway and
killed about eight people in faraway Ghana. Poor Ghana became a victim
of Nigeria’s culpable incompetence.
Sunday June 3: Father of all disasters. Nigeria brought the
tragedy home; DANA airplane crashed in the densely populated village of
Ishaga-Agege near Lagos, killing all 153 people on board and some half
dozen on the ground.
That same day, Boko Haram, Nigeria’s dreaded Nemesis, exploded their
trademark bombs in Bauchi, dispatching over a dozen Christian
worshippers in a bloody inferno.
In four short days, Nigeria harvested a bulk of tragedies that
many countries do not experience in many years. This cluster of
calamities came in such a breathless succession and with such alarming
reverberation that some Nigerians felt the country was just one bang
away from Apocalypse. Some saw it as a sign that Jonathan’s rule had
brought Nigeria a fate that is the exact opposite of his first name
(Goodluck). Some were already seeing it as the first hint of the
unraveling predicted for 2015. But the rational, hard-nosed discerned
the pattern in it all, sensing the deleterious implication of Nigeria’s
number one killer: corruption.
To know what these incidents have to do with corruption, let’s ask the following questions:
Why has the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, the principal artery connecting
the rest of the country to its commercial heartbeat of Lagos, remained a
death trap in the past 10 years? What has happened to the loudly touted
plan in the past five years to rehabilitate and expand the expressway?
Is the company called Bi-Courtney still interested in the
‘concessioning’ arrangement? And, by the way, what about the billions of
naira budgeted for road rehabilitation every year? What happened to
them?
What, if not corruption, is responsible for the presence of so many
patently non-roadworthy vehicles on Nigerian roads? Time there was when
Vehicle Inspection Officers (VIO’s) made sure only fit and proper
vehicles plied the roads, and the traffic police took care of the sanity
and competence of Nigerian drivers. Now, the VIO has literally
disappeared, and, with the right bribe to give, you could speed along
with your brakeless vehicle and kill as many people as your tyres can
crush.
What about those long articulated vehicles and loaded petrol tankers
which pummel the roads with their heavy weights and park anywhere that
suits their tyrannical fancy? What became of the Nigeria rail system
that should have relieved the road of their heavy haulage? Is it true
that we have the bribing generosity of trailer magnates to thank for the
untimely demise of the Nigerian railway? Pray, to which cabal do we owe
the death of the once active Nigerian railway?
And, regarding the planes, why is the Nigerian air space full of
Tokunbo aircraft? (As if the carnage being wrought by Tokunbo
automobiles on our roads is not enough!). Why is the Nigerian sky
littered with cheap, creaking carriers from foreign scrap-yards,
refurbished jalopies imported to serve as shortcut to wealth for their
ruthless owners and one-way ticket to death for Nigerian passengers?
How are the inspection schedules and oversight procedures of planes
plying the Nigerian space handled? Is it true that some ‘inspectors’
certify airplanes in the manager’s office, declaring them air-worthy
after collecting their brown envelopes or bulging Ghana-must-go’s –
without ever laying their eye on the very object of their inspection?
There were rumours that this kind of malpractice contributed to the
crash of Sosoliso airplane in Port Harcourt on December 10, 2005 and the
Bellview one just two months before - rumours that have been blowing in
the wind ever since owing to the non-availability of the post-crash
investigation reports
And so we ask: where are these reports? Why have they not been made
public? Why have the recommendations therein not been implemented? On
whose shelves have they been gathering dust?
There is a sinister pattern to these catastrophes, a sickeningly
predictable chronology to their narratives. First, the predisposing
condition: a corruptly compromised equipment that is nothing short of an
accident waiting to happen, lives true to expectation and precipitates a
tremendous catastrophe. Then a ritual of oohs and aahs, gnashing of
teeth and rending of garment, and profuse outpouring of condolences.
Then a visit to the disaster site by the president and the governor and a
gaggle of other public functionaries, complete with a formidable press
crew. The team perform (what a word!) a guided tour of the disaster
site; the president manages to shed a tear or two, proclaims before the
camera how broken-hearted he is; declares a period of national mourning;
talks tough about the cause of the accident, and promises to bring to
‘bring to book’ all those responsible for it; sets up an investigation
panel; then heads out for his next overseas trip. Weeks later the panel
submits its report with full publicity fanfare. The president thanks
them for their patriotic service, repeats his former threat to ‘bring to
book’ all those responsible for the accident; accepts the report and
dumps it in the national archives. End of story. Well, no, until another
round of accidents and . . . .
Investigations without end. Reports without result. Recommendations
without implementation. Crimes without punishment. This is the sorry
order in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. We learn nothing from history,
and that is why for us History frequently repeats itself as a running
mix of tragedy and farce. We are like that nanny goat in the tale
whipped countless times for a repeated offence. Buffeted by political
banditry, anesthesized by gross religiosity, inundated by injustices
which stink to the high heavens, our senses have been dulled, our nerves
critically undone, our sense of reality twisted to look like something
straight out of the theatre of the absurd.
Or what could be more absurd, more jaw-droppingly nightmarish than
the present sensational bribegate involving the Right Honourable Farouk
Lawan and the House of Representatives Ad Hoc Committee on the probe of
the oil subsidy scandal? As the story goes, Honourable Lawan, chairman
of this committee, is alleged to have asked one of the oil magnates for a
hefty bribe so as to remove his company’s name from the list of those
being penciled down for investigation and possible sanction. But he
barged straight into a setup and went home with marked dollar bills. By
the time he began to badger his affluent briber for the outstanding
balance of the three-million dollar deal (after collecting the initial
620,000 dollars), the police were already knocking on his door. In the
past three weeks or so, our minds have been smothered by the slush and
sleaze of this unedifying saga. Now our Honourable Representatives are
trying to set up another committee to investigate the disgraced
investigators.
Round and round in a cycle of shame
The bribed, the briber, all the same
In a land so decrepit, so decayed
Justice always denied, for ever delayed
To think that this unforgivably silly charade is what our so-called
elected representatives are making of a serious scandal involving the
oil subsidy, the removal of which precipitated a virtual shutdown of the
country in the very first week of this year, subjecting millions of our
people to untold suffering, and in some cases, death. From the very
beginning, we never trusted the Jonathan government’s propaganda
regarding the existence of subsidy, nor were we persuaded by Dr. Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala’s IMF-induced campaign for its removal. Many argued that
the problem with Nigeria’s oil business was not the so-called subsidy on
the price at the pump-head, but the wanton hemorrhaging caused by
vulpine oil cabals who collected billions of naira as subsidy on oil
which they never supplied. The Nigerian government had, therefore, been
subsidizing corruption all along, and was bent on getting the Nigerian
people to cough out more for that ignoble purpose. The people said no in
January, and the thunderous reverberations of their voices gingered the
House of Representatives into instituting an investigation.
To be sure, the Farouk Lawan ad hoc committee started off on a
salutary note. Its initial revelation of millions of dollars collected
as phantom subsidy by oil companies endeared it to the Nigerian people
whose strong suspicion it only served to confirm. For once, the people
thought they were about to crush the subsidy conundrum and expose, at
last, the cabal that held Nigeria to such exploitative ransom. The
canonization of Lawan and his committee was just about to begin when the
Otedola dollars threw a wrench into the works. Now attention has
shifted from the reports of the committee to the misconduct of some of
its members. The oil cabals must be laughing in their sea of subsidy
dollars while many Nigerians are still wondering: is this the end of the
probe? When will President Jonathan and Dr. Okonjo-Iweala ask Nigerians
to submit their backs for the yoke of another “subsidy” removal?
Round and round in a cycle of shame. . . . Just a few months before
Lawangate, there was Hembegate. In a classic case of “YOU HEMBE ME AND
I’LL OTEH YOU”, Arunma Oteh, then Director General of the Security
Exchange Commission (SEC) surprised the whole world with the allegation
that the chairman of the committee set up to probe her had earlier
demanded from her a bribe of 44 million naira. Before then, Honourable
Hembe was said to have also received travel funds, including estacode,
from SEC for a foreign trip he never made and the money for which he
never returned. Again, a carefully calculated distraction had supplanted
the main issue: serious allegations of mismanagement of funds and
reckless spending preferred against Ms Oteh became a side item in the
panel’s menu of egregious entrees. The accuser had become the accused.
Up till now, the nation has not got to the bottom of the serious
allegations against the SEC Director. As usual, in response to public
outcry and anger, the Very Honourable House of Representatives referred
the case to its Ethics and Privileges Committee for further
investigation, the outcome of which may never see the light of day.
Round and round in a cycle of shame. . . Before the two
‘-gates’ above there was Elumelugate. In 2007, Dimeji Bankole, then
speaker of the House, surprised the entire nation with the revelation
that the Obasanjo government had invested 16 billion dollars in the
power sector with nothing practically to show for it except the
conspicuous darkness that enveloped the nation. In January the following
year, the House Power and Steel Committee chaired by Godwin Elumelu was
mandated to probe the power sector in respect of the alleged 16 billion
dollars. After an extensive tour of power project sites all over the
country, the committee wrote and submitted a report containing a searing
indictment of many of the major players in the country’s power sector,
including the President himself, and recommended them for possible
sanctions. It was at this crucial juncture that the allegation of a
100-million naira bribe was hurled at the committee. Again, the case was
referred to the House Ethics and Privileges Committee which
investigated and cleared the Elumelu committee which then went ahead to
submit its report. Then, this macabre drama by the very honourable
members of Nigeria’s House of Representatives, as brilliantly captured
by Samson Ezea of The Guardian on Saturday:
Curiously and shockingly, virulent verbal attacks were launched
against Elumelu. Nigerians were amazed at the effusive manner majority
of the members cursed the recommendations, making many to wonder whether
these were the same people that spoke so “patriotically” in praise of
the report when it was submitted. (p.50)
After reading this one feels like screaming as Kunle Ajibade did a
couple of years ago: What a Country! Thereafter, Honourable Elumelu was
arrested by the EFCC for mismanaging the 5.2 billion naira rural
electrification contract funds, an allegation he took to a Federal High
Court where he was cleared though the presiding Justice declared that he
and some of his committee members still had a case to answer.
Dear listeners, at this juncture, I find myself wondering with the Narrator in my play The State visit:
How many, oh how many shall we count
Of the teeth of Adepele:
There are twenty incisors, fifty canines,
While uncountable molars lie buried
In the caves of the jaw
From every indication, it appears that those in positions of
authority in Nigeria especially in the political and economic spheres
have been waging an undeclared war on the country’s resources and
general welfare. And it is a war that is savage in its method and
dehumanizing in its impact. I have never seen or heard of a country in
the world in which public functionaries are as pathologically perverse,
blindly rapacious, brutally cannibalistic, and callously unpatriotic as
the ones that hold this unfortunate land in thrall. Consider the
mind-boggling scam by the Pension Reform Task Team and the two billion
naira cash discovered cruse and raw in the home of one of the officials.
Two billion naira of pension funds in a country where old, feeble
pensioners starve to death in their little hovels or collapse from
exhaustion on mindless “verification parades”! What about police bosses
who embezzle funds meant for the welfare of the Force (For an
instructive story of Tafa Balogun, one of such bosses, see Wale
Adebanwi’s A Paradise for Maggots: The Story of a Nigerian anti-Graft
Czar, a meticulously detailed, eloquently written biography of Nuhu
Ribadu, a book that should be compulsory read for every public official
in this country – from the local government councilor to the President,
from the micro-finance banker to the Central Bank governor).
What about suspected public officials and the EFCC’s revolving door?
Again, another narrative with a shameful chronology: allegation of
extensive graft, arrest, arraignment, brief detention, (with all the
publicity razzmatazz), then bail, and silence, Finis. . . . Virtually
every former governor since 1999 has gone through this deceptive ritual.
Dimeji Bankole, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, went
through his own motions recently, with the same result. Somehow, the
huge sums the ‘arrested’ officials are suspected to have
stolen/embezzled/mismanaged resonate in the public domain for a while,
then fade away as we move on to further, bigger scams. The Nigerian
people have seen and heard about so many colossal sums being stolen that
they have lost their awe for numbers.
Time there was when millions raised the brow
And a millionaire was deemed the super rich
Then came the billions and their ceaseless itch
And now we talk in trillions in a tall and tidy row
We have not only lost our capacity to blush; swarmed by the
grossness of fraud-fraught numbers, we have also lost the ability to
count. Or to put it another way, we have been afflicted by a chronic
number fatigue. Those who steal the nation’s money have not only ruined
our economy by devaluing the national currency; they have also
impoverished our spirit and devalued our capacity to be human. Nigeria
today is suffering from moral inflation: outwardly big and bloated,
internally empty and weak.
Corruption, Nigeria’s fastest-growing Industry
Let’s face this fact: corruption is the fastest-growing industry
in Nigeria today. It is the real money-spinner, the oil which lubricates
the engine of Nigeria’s politics and economy, a sine qua non in
business deals, a desideratum for advancement in all spheres. Come to
think of it. How/what would our politics be without corruption? If our
electoral processes were less corrupt, how would judges on the Election
Petition and Appeal Court get a few ‘gifts’ to secure them in their
retirement? What about the lawyers who rake up their billions from
litigating cases that should have been determined in the polling booth?
How would the Distinguished Senator and Honourable Rep. live up to their
billing as lawmakers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria without
securing millions of naira from acts such as anticipatory approvals, or
incidents such as Lawangate or Hembegate? If you are in the aviation
sector, how can you boost your profit margin if you refuse to bribe
oversight officers and inspectors whose duty it is to pass your rickety,
octogenarian air plane as eminently air-worthy and litter the Nigeria
sky with flying coffins? If you are a banker, how can you join the big
league of billionaires without cooking the books, proliferating
unsecured loans, liquidating your bank and running away with the money
while hundreds of depositors perish from the stress engendered by your
fraud? Yes, indeed, corruption is Nigeria’s most viable industry, the
largest employer of labour, engenderer of an economy that knows no
recession. In obodo dike Nigeria, corruption pays; it pays handsomely.. .
. And this is why we no longer blush . . . .
The Way Out
Corruption is one hell of a demon which virtually everyone in
Nigeria talks so about, but which only few are ready to confront
head-on. This is because, as hinted above, corruption is the very
lifeblood of Nigeria’s politics and economy. As run in this country, the
so-called presidential system does not only feed on corruption; it
actively encourages it: the huge deposits expected from office seekers,
the large sums that exchange hands among party ‘stakeholders’; the
perverse tradition of patronage through booty-sharing and
largess-dispensation; the shocking combination of immunity and impunity
by public functionaries; the absolute lack of transparency and
accountability.
It is in the light of the above that we must appraise President
Goodluck Jonathan’s recent statement on asset declaration vis-Ã -vis
corruption. Boasted the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and
Commander-in-Chief of the Armed forces:
It is personal and I don’t give a damn about that [asset
declaration]. The law is clear about it and so making it public is no
issue and I will not play into the hands of the people. . . . I declared
(assets publicly) under late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua because he
did it, but it is not proper. . . It is not the President declaring
assets that will change the country
The Nation, Mon.June 25, 2012, front page.
And President Jonathan sees all this as ‘a matter of principle’.
Whose principle? What principle, you are tempted to ask? For him, asset
declaration is ‘personal’, ‘not proper’; it will lead to ‘play[ing] into
the hands of the people’. Again, which ‘people?’, you want to ask. Can
it be the Nigerian people to whom he owes his mandate and to whom he
swore to be transparently accountable? ‘I don’t give a damn’, swaggered
the once God-fearing, meek-looking Jonathan, with an egregious arrogance
so redolent of his “No-going-back” braggadocio when he unleashed that
untold agony on the Nigerian people in the opening hours of this year,
and his unilateral re-christening of the University of Lagos as a grand
May 29 gesture . ‘I don’t give a damn’: that must have been his reaction
to the public outcry when Gitto Construzioni General Nigeria Limited, a
company with substantial construction business deals with the Nigerian
government, refurbished a church in Otuoke, his hometown as a ‘friendly’
gift, and the President and his entourage trooped to that church to
give thanks to the Lord for his blessing.
Watch out, Nigeria: a new Jonathan seems to be emerging, one who
confuses cockiness with confidence, tactlessness with toughness,
strong-manship with statesmanship. Is Nigeria witnessing the rise of
another ‘African President’, obstinate even when wrong, intolerant even
of positive criticism? President Jonathan’s combination of naivety and
amorality is as profound as it is injurious to the health of this
country. Can a corruption-compliant ruler really lead a corruption-free
country?
The American people know the answer to that question (And I am using
the America example since the United States is one country in the world
Nigeria is aspiring to copy). That is why they hold their leaders to
high ethical standards. That is why those leaders treat them with
unstinting respect. In the first quarter of this year, President Obama
made public his tax returns, and later his total assets. Mitt Romney,
though a presidential candidate, followed suit. Those are leaders who
‘give a damn’ about the just, the proper, and the decent; leaders who
know that ‘the President declaring asset [can] change the country’.
Those are leaders with demonstrable respect for their people and the
rule of law.
To fight corruption in Nigeria we must first get our rulers to change
their attitude to the ruled via the rule of law. And we must do this by
changing our own attitude to those in the position of power. Too often
we the Nigerian people encourage the criminality of our rulers by
kow-towing to their every whim and caprice; we invite their disdain by
denying ourselves any claim to self-respect; we court their oppression
by readily offering them our backs to ride upon. We cow when we should
kick; we temporize when we need to toughen up. We smile when we should
smite. We need to change the Kabiyesi Syndrome that forbids the asking
of critical questions and the insistence on having them answered. It is
the typical Nigerian attitude to power that has turned our rulers into
aseyiowuu (the one who does as s/he pleases), and encouraged them to
corrupt the immunity innocently enshrined in the constitution into the
impunity of criminal rulership.
Let us interrogate the way the Nigerian system pampers public
officials with extravagant emoluments: the bloated cabinets at all
levels of government, the slew of personal assistants, special advisers,
ministers of, ministers for, ministers on, ministers under, ministers
to, and suchlike spongers who constitute a drain on the national
economy. Not to be forgotten: the estacode regimen and its use and abuse
by functionaries in the political realm as well as those in the civil
service. Let every Nigeria ask their councilor, assembly man/woman,
representative, and senator today: how much exactly do you earn? What is
the difference between your stipulated salary and your actual income?
How much is your constituency allowance and how much of it actually goes
to your constituency? Let us ask the president and the governors: how
much exactly does the nation spend on security votes? How is the money
spent? Where is that ‘security’ in a country so beleaguered by wanton
violence?
We need to ask these questions and more because experience has shown
that Nigerian public functionaries steal so greedily while in office so
as to stow fortunes away for the continuation of their extravagant
lifestyle when their term is over. (For instance, a governor, minister,
senator, permanent secretary, or vice chancellor already used to flying
first/business class at public expense, or being fussed over by a crowd
of ‘personal assistants’, will have a serious withdrawal problem letting
go of these privileges and perks. The solution? Steal all you can in
preparation for the rainy day!
Nor can/must we forget the issue of religion and its ironic role in
the sanctification of corruption in Nigeria. It is a known but hardly
acknowledged fact that Nigeria boasts one of the highest
church/population ratios in the world and yet ranks as one of the most
corrupt countries on planet earth. As concerned compatriots such as GA
Akinola, Biodun Jeyifo, Ebenezer Obadare, Eddy & Bene Madunagu, Okey
Ndibe, Festus Iyayi, Pius Adesanmi, Ogaga Ifowodo, Abimbola Adelakun,
and others have frequently observed, for the most part, religion in
Nigeria is nothing more than superstition, a crafty mask, and grand
pretence. This is particularly so with the country’s swelling ranks of
Prosperity Gospel preachers, those faith-vendors who purchase sins and
sell forgiveness at equally exorbitant prices. If you are poor, we are
told, it’s because of your sin; if you are jobless, it’s because you’ve
strayed from the straight ‘n narrow way. Absolving the creators of the
corrupt socio-economic system that turns its victims into paupers and
social cannibals, these preachers portray every crook in power as
God-chosen, even when that power has come through rigged elections and
murderous brigandage. They conduct thanksgiving service for notorious
political jobbers and perform homecoming ceremonies for returnees with
looted fortunes. When the wealthy crook hands them the key to a luxury
car (or private jet), they shower the ‘cheerful giver’ with blessings,
beseech God to ‘prosper his ways’, and extol his virtues to the heavens.
Hardly do they ever ask, as father did in those days: ‘ibi se ti reo
ree?’.
And, very important, Nigeria’s super-structure and the phenomenality
of corruption. This may sound rather far-fetched to some people, but one
of the ways of tackling graft in this country is to address the
structural corruption in the very composition of Nigeria itself. The
present rickety, loosely assembled contraption with all its Lugardian
paralysis is riddled with dissonance and disconnect. A succession of
visionless, close-minded rulers has made the country both loveless and
unlovable. To many Nigerians, Nigeria is ‘their country’, some distant
no-man’s-land where you go to scoop your own fortune and take your loot
back to your own clan. They may call it stealing in Abuja, but as far as
the home crowd is concerned, you have only brought back your/their
share of the ‘national cake’. The cases of James Ibori, Bode George, and
Maurice Iwu mentioned above owe their peculiarity to this kind of
double consciousness and moral ambivalence. The erudite political
scientist, Peter Ekeh, has put this mentality down to the existence in
Nigeria of two republics: the primordial/ethnic/pre-colonial and the
modern/national/post-colonial, the former exacting near-sacred loyalty,
the latter begrudged with faint political observance. This curious
situation has led to the relativization of morality in Nigeria, as what
is wrong and condemnable in one republic is but right and commendable in
the other. In a nutshell, to solve the problem of corruption in
Nigeria, we must first face head on the issue of the national
question.
And finally,
If Nigeria does not kill corruption, corruption will kill Nigeria.
Corruption has taken over the commanding heights of Nigerian society.
It is, without doubt, the Grand commander of the Federal Republic. Like a
frightfully aggressive cancer, it has metastasized to the vital cells
of our body politic, and the debilitating symptoms are everywhere:
perverted moral values, a rig-prone electoral arrangement designed to
throw up criminals in place of leaders, fraud-choked banking and finance
system, irregular power supply, dry water-taps, death-trap roads,
death-dispensing hospitals, a progressively illiterate educational
system, global notoriety, . . . .. Melo la o ka leyin Adepele?. (Oh how
many shall we count/Of the teeth of Adepele?. . . .) The malaise is
massive, the dysfunctionalities are daunting. But we must NEVER allow
this situation, grim as it is, to plunge us into cynicism and despair.
Yes, indeed, Nigeria is worth fighting for. And this fight will have to
be carried out by the people of this country. The soldiers have shown by
their many years of misrule that our national salvation is not in their
hands. The present gaggle of civilian rulers is proving to be no
different. At no time, therefore, is the role of civil society more
crucial, more imperative than the present. Let there be more of the
coalition of civil society organizations that brought Nigeria back from
the chaos that ensued from the politicization of President Yar’Adua’s
illness; the type that forced the “No going back” Jonathan to back down
on his callous, inequitable fuel price hike. This country has enough to
make life comfortable for ALL of us and generations yet unborn. Let us
begin to ask: Why are a few Nigerians so rich and the rest of us so
poor? Let us go beyond this and engage in a massive civil action for
change, knowing full well that our fate is in our own hands. It is
organized massive action from the Nigerian people that can eliminate the
canker worm of corruption that is sucking the lifeblood of this
bountifully endowed but criminally misgoverned country. We must make
sure that we kill corruption before it has the chance of killing
Nigeria.
I thank the Save Nigeria Group (SNG) for inviting me and you for being such an obliging audience.
Yio see se o (May it be possible).
Niyi Osundare
Ibadan, July 5, 2012