Corruption has become such a huge joke in Nigeria and fighting it has become a bigger joke; a melodrama of some sort.
Every government that comes to power accuses the government it has replaced or rigged out of power of corruption. Fighting corruption has become the greatest and cheapest propaganda tool not only in Nigeria but all over the world.
Former British Prime Minister John Major was kicked out of office by Tony Blair because, among other accusations, his Parliamentarians were allegedly selling favours in parliament to corporations.
The huge difference between fighting corruption in Nigeria and other countries of the world is instant dispensation of justice once you are found guilty of corruption by a competent court of law.
In Nigeria ‘big men’ swim in corruption and the best swimmers are applauded not only by judges but also by the idiotic spectators who have been robbed silly of their patrimony.
What is really worrisome is the fact that Nigerians hardly know what constitutes corruption.
Corruption is wrongly perceived and limited to stealing whereas corruption has many feathers, many fathers, many mothers, many husbands and wives, many children and grandchildren, many players and grandmasters, and of course hundreds of thousands of cousins. Corruption is a puppet as well as a puppeteer.
If you have one million Nigerians assembled in a hall, every one of them would be condemning corruption and blaming every Nigerian of being corrupt, which literally translates to an admission that all the 180, 193, 198 (nobody is sure of the actual count) million Nigerians are corrupt!
Those who mouth the word corruption are probably not aware that telling lies is one fat leg of corruption. Fraud is also a fat arm of corruption. Extortion of any kind is another leg of hydra-headed corruption.
Taking advantage of or exploitation of another person is a cruel form of corruption. Forcing your employees or students or those who are not in position to refuse your bullying to submit their bodies in exchange for favours is another cancerous form of corruption.
But the father and mother of corruption is NEPOTISM. Nepotism is a grand design to appropriate what belongs to all to a few in your clannish nest. And when nepotism is paraded as a national creed it breeds all sorts of acrimony, ill-feeling, disaffection, greed, impunity, mediocrity, arrogance, stealing, and backwardness.
There are many; varied and various causes of corruption depending on the society, the country, the religious inclination and indoctrination, the political system, the moral and social ethos, and the history and antecedents of the community or communities involved.
In the particular and peculiar case of Nigeria, adjudged wrongly and unfortunately as the most corrupt country on earth, the root and underlying cause of the various facets of corruption is ethno-religious/geopolitical cum built-in ‘master-servant’ ideology.
This has led to over centralisation of the command structure of the political terrain leading to brazen thievery of the commonwealth.
All the ills and negativities of corruption shall remain with Nigeria and continue to bedevil her for as long as this ‘over centralisation of the command structure’ remains.
In a lecture I gave at Mayflower School Ikenne in 1976 to mark the end-of-year and graduating ceremonies of the college I opined that ‘corruption is a product of shortage culture.’
I illustrated further that if in a Girls School of 1000 students there were only 200 buckets of water available for their daily use, whoever was in charge of the distribution of the scarce water would per force be corrupt or corrupted.
Women badly need water for their daily hygiene and would go any length to procure that necessity. Water to women is an ‘essential commodity’!
But if there were 5000 buckets of water available to the1000 students, none of the girls would bother about where the water came from, except the greedy ones who would want to corner more than their normal share!
With the over flowing availability of modern telephony nobody goes cap-in-hand wooing the P&T staffers as it was in the days of yore. And with the Pay-as-you-go metering system the incident of offering bribes to NEPA people has drastically reduced.
The obvious explanation is the death of shortage culture in regards to telephoning and the ‘pay-as-you-go metering has reduced the roguish intrusion of NEPA bribe extortionists.
In my generation, once you possessed the right qualifying grades you were automatically guaranteed university admission.
Even though the universities were few and those seeking admission were also few, there were no politically and mischievously built in regulations designed to shackle the educational growth of a section of the country while promoting mediocrity in the other.
There was no JAMBAFORITI which has ruined the lives of thousands of brilliant young men and women whose only crime is that they were born in communities that valued Western education.
The same JAMBAFORITI has brought about students who were abs initio not qualified to enter university but who must now offer their bodies for marks in order to continue in class or ‘graduate’.
The pen is the tongue of the hand, the silent utterer of words for the eyes…Henry Beecher
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Tola, it’s an insult to say Nigerians don’t know what constitutes corruption. Of course, we do. The one that really portrays us in bad light to the world is massive stealing of public funds and stashing same away in foreign bank accounts. And this is the one that really gives Nigerians the greatest concern and has their ultimate focus. It’s also the root of pervasive poverty in nigeria. This is why if only we can change our laws theat affect corruption and model them after the Chinese way of dealing with corrupt public officials, then we would have started. But for now, our laws handle the idiotic kleptomaniacs and rogues with kid gloves,and that’s why we are where we are in fighting corruption. We need to adopt the Chinese model; let corrupt public officials have a date with the guilotoline.