EVEN for the most deeply cynical of critics, it is impossible not to recognize, observe or empathize with the anti-corruption crusade embarked upon by the Buhari/APC government. Those who originally thought it was a mere war or vengeance and vendetta at worst or a battle being waged in order to suppress opposition, will, by now have some rethink or at least a moderation of attitude/perception. What, with the recent arrest by the EFCC or an APC stalwart, Jaafaru Yisa and an alleged cousin of the President. In both cases, the reaction of the President Buhari, was clearly in favour of justice. The President has been reported to have resisted all family pressures insisting that the law must be allowed to run its course and that those found culpable and guilty should face both prosecution and the sentence. I believe with these two instances in which the President had been found non-partisan and neutral, the claim that the anti-corruption war is waged by the President to settle old scores or carry out a revenge war against those who have punished him in the past—some three decades hence or doing battle against the PDP in order to silence or decimate/crush the opposition may, of necessity begin to beat a retreat.
What is however yet to be properly handled by the President is the charge of disrespect, even impunity, with regard to those who have secured bails from the law courts but who have either been re-arrested or not allowed to proceed on bail as ordered by the judiciary. Many critical minds have argued, quite persuasively to my mind, that the refusal to let Sambo Dasuki and Nnamdi Kanu proceed on bail after the courts have granted bail as undemocratic or a reverberation of the President’s military disposition as a former non-democrat. Some, like my friend Biodun Jeyifo and the radical lawyer, Femi Falana, have seen this tendency as anti-democratic and a hangover of the military fiat with which military regimes defy lawful processes without qualms and embrace judicial processes and outcomes as he promised to do.
It has also been stated by those who held the view that the principle of presumption of innocence until found guilty as enshrined in our constitution needed to be held sacrosanct by this Administration. I cannot agree more. Had the President chosen the option of dealing with corruption as proposed by a Committee on criminal justice at the 2014 National Conference, which is yet to be implemented, he would have been able to overcome the present impatience that we all feel about delayed justice by the criminal procedures as presently enabled by the judicial processes. Whatever the situation, it is important, prevaricative as the judiciary is on cases where we all crave speedy dispensation of justice, democracy’s demands and guarantees ought to be accommodated and tolerated as the law of the land upholds—in spite of our sympathy with the President whose messianic desires that the war on corruption be won with greater alacrity and without its present encumbrances.
Now, all of these are hardly the central preoccupations of this week’s column, weighty and important as they obviously are. My reflection on this anti-corruption crusade of the government is that even if the concentration of the President on catching thieves as identified is won; even if the present direction of the war against those who have stolen prohibitively huge chunks of the nation’s money is sustained and those caught are prosecuted and punished, the war against corruption will not have been won and the nation will still not be rid of corruption. In saying this, I am calling attention to the depth and multi-dimensional character of the corruption cankerworm in our country and the need not to over-simplify the battle to equate the detection and prosecution of corrupt individuals, groups and companies.
The decay, or rot, is both deeper and more ramifying, having become so largely and so profoundly pervasive to be determined in its totality with the present tactics and weapons that are being deployed, important and effective as they are or may appear to be. What I am implying here is not to underrate the enormity of the task that the Buhari government has on its hands even with the tactics, processes and strategies that it is deploying. Far from it. The credit that must be conceded to the President in his battle against corruption is that never in the history of our country has corruption in its endemic nature been fought with such determination, gritty will and totality of genuineness of purpose as this government has been doing to the open admiration of Nigerians of all classes. Even the opposition knows that it has the wrath of the masses to contend with should it attempt openly or by surreptitiously to criticize the government on the platform of this anti-corruption crusade.
I am concerned here with the many other dimensions of this war that have scarcely, if at all, been perceived, engaged or squarely confronted. This is the dimension of what the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah graphically described in his novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born through the metaphor of rot. Armah looked at the eschatological decay of the Ghanaian and African institutions and societies in its pervasiveness and inevitability and found it almost a biological necessity. Armah had said that it was in the nature of things to rot, no matter how much plastering and painting we apply processes of accretion. In thinking about this, what comes to my mind, with the situation of corruption in some Nigerian institutions such the Nigerian police and similar other institutions, for instance, is the apparent tendency to eternally rot and decay that we find on the check-points of the Nigerian roads. You are confronted with such open and unabashed demand for bribe that you wonder whether these men in uniform are at all aware that there is a change regime in place whose avowed policy is the eradication of corruption from the Nigerian society.
They have come up with this profound sense of cynicism in their beggary approach couched in such terms as “At all at all na in bad”. It is difficult to completely unravel the depth and layers of meaning that the concept connotes and denotes. One translation is that no amount of money is too small to be offered to corrupt or to bribe with. On a deeper level, it could simply translate to mean that what is bad is to refuse to engage in corruption at all and at whatever level. What is bad is to offer nothing. On the plain of discourse of Armah’s vision paraphrased above, it is to express with philistine cynicism the inevitability of corruption. It is to perceive of rot as totally and finally inexorable in a society, which has gone totally decadent, obsolescent and irredeemably corrupt.
I know for a certainty that it is not only the police that operate this frame of mental image of rot. Some quack journalists attend serious functions and on the pretext of being journalists and also make the demand of just any amount, however demeaning— the- at- all- at- all na in bad psyche. There is also something I picked up recently among fire fighters called ‘better fire’. The implication of this phrase is that those places where you went to fight fire and where you get some gratification or post-fight reward in cash are those places where the fire is better. It is not the enormity or minuteness of the fire incidents that qualify them as better or worse fires. And if you think that this is among the men and women in uniform, what of those despicable and bad eggs among our teachers who will not read their students’ dissertations until they ‘pay up’?
When all these are considered, the ramifying and limitless nature of the crusade against corruption becomes frightening and it is very difficult to envy President Buhari. The only consolation of course is that there is no need for despondency or disillusion in this noble and ennobling battle to cleanse’ the nation of the corruption canker-worm. It is also to suggest that the battle cannot be approached with any simplistic weaponry or complacency.
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