“To act without a conscience, but for a paycheck, makes anyone a dangerous animal. The devil would be powerless if he couldn't entice people to do his work. So as long as money continues to seduce the hungry, the hopeless, the broken, the greedy, and the needy, there will always be war between brothers.”
― Suzy Kassem
It is almost a cliché in this part of the world that corruption is a nagging menace; yet not many fully grasp how deep the cancer has eaten into our national fabric and permeated our collective soul. The statistics shows us as one of the most corrupt countries in the world but the full extent of that might have eluded the statisticians themselves. When the then U.K Prime Minister, David Cameron, described Nigeria as ‘fantastically corrupt’ you can bet he didn’t have the full picture of how dire the situation is. His remarks understandably brought a diplomatic uproar between Nigeria and the U.K, but he was putting it mildly, and for those with clear minds and conscientious spirits you can tell that he was bloody right.
In April 2018, the EFCC chairman, Ibrahim Magu, announced that 739 billion naira has been recovered by the agency in the first two years of his stewardship. Depending on who you read, these figures might be higher. When you situate this against the backdrop of several corruption trails ongoing and the loots of the past (most notorious of which were the 16 billion dollars power charade and the 322 million dollars unending Abacha loot), it helps the context. Ours is not just a fantastically corrupt country, it is one crippled by it.
President Buhari’s fight against corruption has been criticized for being selective, haphazard and targeted for political vendetta. While the argument seems valid on face value, it pales in logical scrutiny. In saner climes, the only reasonable question that will be asked is: Those being prosecuted, do they have a case to answer? Our common wealth have been amassed by a few with sagging conscience and mindless impunity and that is the real issue. As for the cronies in Buhari’s administration, you can be sure that it is only a matter of time. The purge might be one-sided but it doesn’t mean there is no need for a purge. Sadly, we live in a society where everything is politics, and politics is everything. Don’t be conned; many of those that go on television to tell you that our ‘democracy is under siege’ because they were invited by one agency or the other to answer for their sins, are riding on sentiments that only the gullible will afford them. The Nigerian political class in their current form and make-up, are the real dangers to our fragile democracy.
Systemic corruption is perhaps the biggest problem we have in the war against corruption in Nigeria. While we must recover our stolen wealth; we must ensure that there are adequate controls that makes corruption, stealing and graft extremely difficult. In too many of our agencies and parastatals, those that are at the top are often in a conundrum. There is something about our structure and system that over-empowers the men at the top such that the checks and balances on their offices are relaxed, if not non-existent in most cases. While it takes integrity to do the right thing, we must ensure that we don’t make doing the wrong thing a glaring and an appealing alternative. In the same light, we must ensure that we strip political offices of the sheer enticement it currently commands. It boggles the mind how a nation with the largest number of poor people (by UN global standards) will be one of if not the country with the highest paid legislators and executives.
The cleansing and full purging of corruption from our national life can never be a quick fix. Irrespective of who emerges president in 2019, the task remains humongous and painstaking if not completely overwhelming. Credible and competent leadership might be at the heart of the redemptive work required to return Nigeria to its glory path, but corruption is at the crucible.
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