Kleptocracy- a rule of thieves- has afflicted human society since the beginning of recorded history. No formulation can capture our plight better in contemporary Nigeria. It is a morbid society where successful thieves are celebrated and lionized by aspiring thieves. Those who have not been caught simply cannot make hay, or are merely waiting for their own interdiction. Under the spreading kola nut tree of national larceny, you steal and I steal, no wahala.
Yet even though this is not a sunny or rosy picture, one must still marvel at the banality of evil in this land. Who would have thought that the meek-looking and patrician Andrew Yakubu was indeed a burrowing billionaire; an unmoved and unmoving Bureau sans Change! And we are not talking of small change. As a Yoruba proverb caustically puts it, everybody is a thief minus opportunity. A bon mot from Chinua Achebe is even more to the point in its poignancy and pragmatism: Only a blockhead will spit out a juicy morsel of meat placed in his mouth.
Yet despite the apparent cynicism, there is an unstated moral clause in both proverbs. It speaks to the need for powerful restraining codes and their harsh enforcement—since human-beings are no angels. As Ayi Kwei Armah, the gifted Ghanaian novelist, would put it: In a society where everybody has gone mad, it is a form of insanity to stay sane and sober.
As this column noted a few months back, darkness of a spiritual, economic and political nature envelopes Nigeria like a nasty fog. When and whether this millennial eclipse will lift is a matter for conjecture. But its harsh and deleterious effects can be felt in every aspect of our contemporary national life.
Or how else can one explain the fact that some of our youths and delinquent elders, in their misguided anger and misdirected frustration, would publicly wish for the death of an afflicted head of state, no matter the circumstances or the severity of his shortcomings? This psychotic and malevolent ill-will, openly and often gleefully expressed, is a sign of how things have steadily regressed in this country, and General Buhari will do well to take note. The nation is gripped by social cannibalism in every material particular.
It has been long in coming. As this column cautioned President Buhari on the occasion of his return to power, you cannot step into the same river twice. Since General Buhari’s first advent, the National Question has taken a nasty turn, exacerbated by the failure of leadership and the virtual collapse of the structural edification of the nation in all its faulty architecture. With several nationalities in open revolt and others rumbling in quiet discontent even as some engage in covert economic sabotage and destabilization of the nation, Nigeria has never been in a worse shape.
The death of the incumbent will not alter or reverse this relentless retrogression. Far worse than presidential affliction is the ailment of comprehensive corruption which has now become a mortal threat to the continued existence of the country. The contest between light and darkness in this country has now reached a critical stage. Should General Buhari fatally succumb, and given the way the forces in contention are organized, an even more drastic exemplar would have to be in order to rescue the country from the jaws of calamity.
This collision of economic and ethical fundaments in the nation can no longer be postponed. Kleptocracy is an ancient affliction, going back to the very origins of state and political society. In its modern incarnation, kleptocracy is the organisation of a society along the principles of mindless looting of the national patrimony in a manner that recalls the Stone Age of hunter-gatherer existence.
The hunter-gatherer is an economic primitive who lives for the moment and has no concept of the valorization of natural resources. He roams the pristine jungle hunting wild animals and gathering wild fruits for immediate consumption. What he cannot finish he drags back to his cave until the hunger pangs beckon again. This is his marginal refinement over the more brutal peripatetic wanderings of his animal cousin. Like his primitive ancestor, the modern Nigerian hunter-gatherer has also taken to dragging his economic “kill” to caves, safes, burrows, underground tanks, septic sewages and other labyrinthine warrens.
This economic re-cannibalization of a people and the de-civilizing of many who are proud heirs of some lofty civilizations gave enough warning. Ironically, it began immediately after formal independence and our match towards what was supposed to be authentic nationhood. Yet when compared to subsequent political developments, particularly the advent of military rule, the Second Republic and the current Fourth Republic, The First Republic was a paradise of moral puritanism.
It will be recalled that Major Nzeogwu’s war-cry was a passionate and soul-stirring political harangue against economic profiteers and other ten-percenters. By the fall of the Second Republic, a new political coinage or what is known as a lootocracy came into existence to accommodate new realities and the unbridled plundering of national resources. In a famous intervention, a general and civil war hero lamented that corruption in Nigeria has assumed a “transnational efficiency”.
But all this was actually a child’s play compared to what was to come in the Fourth Republic. In the interim and the martial interlude, General Sani Abacha gave a new dimension to the meaning of executive burglary of the national exchequer. Implacable and impatient with the ponderous and plodding procedure of kickback, the Kano-born general simply kicked the treasury open with his military boots.
In the total football and complete economic meltdown of the Fourth Republic, ten-percentage has been replaced by maximum percentage.
There is no further need for kickbacks. Contracts are awarded and contract money is collected, the awarding being also the awardee. The football flows freely and seamlessly because the goalkeeper is also the goal-poacher.
Meanwhile, telling phrases litter the road to economic infamy as momentous milestones: Misapplication of funds, settlement of the unsettled, anticipatory approval and now budget-padding. Corruption has become so thoroughly corrosive that it has eaten into the soul of the nation. For the nation to survive its flesh-dissolving potency, it is going to be a tough battle indeed.
In an engrossing chronicle of the pilgrim’s progress to perdition, the late Stephen Ellis, a distinguished Africanist and former editor of the authoritative and influential newsletter, Africa Confidential, offers compelling insights about how corruption became the single major national industry in Nigeria. Titled, This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organised Crime, it is a compelling but depressing read.
It is instructive to note that it was in 1920 that the first properly documented case of “419” in Nigeria came to public purview. The culprit was a Ghanaian, Mr P. Crentsil, who called himself a professor of wonder. He was promptly prosecuted under section 419 of Nigeria’s criminal code .In fact such was the relative public sanity and rectitude in colonial Nigeria that in 1944, a colonial official, according to Ellis, noted that “ crime as a career has so far made little appeal to the young Nigerian.”
Yet between then and this moment, organised crime has spiralled to astronomical proportions in the nation with Nigerians youths making a strong showing as captains of global syndicates of criminal extortion and international gangsterism even as their parents perfect the science of corruption to become a unique Nigerian brand.
Among many culprits fingered by Ellis, the dubious rule of law and penance code foisted on a recalcitrant local culture by colonial authorities, the huge appetite for illegal accumulation and the natural venality of African big men and of course the advent of military gangster barons occupy pride of place. Yet what is often left unappreciated is the sociology of resource allocation particularly in a demographically volatile nation as well as the political economy of corruption itself.
Sociologically speaking, there must be a nexus between the increasing resort of dynamic and resourceful Nigerian youth to crime and the dwindling opportunities compounded by diminishing national resources and state larceny. Equally, there must be a connection between the primitive accumulation and privatization of political power and the primitive accumulation of economic power and resources. Both are symbiotically related and mutually reinforcing.
There is an organic connection between the power of corruption and the corruption of power in Nigeria. If the truth must be told, political corruption is the fountain head from which economic corruption flows. Ever since the advent of the Fourth Republic, a few men of political power and economic means have maintained an oligarchic stranglehold on the fate of the nation, determining who gets what and at what time. Their poor choices have returned to haunt and hurt the nation economically and politically.
It will amount to a startling historical irony if General Buhari fails to recognize how his own efforts to fight economic corruption have been hobbled by political corruption and how the same political corruption checkmated his attempt to reclaim his lost throne until the power masters made sure that he was well past his radically reformist prime and could hardly pass muster.
It will also be a great paradox if the general fails to see why his economic sanitization of the nation cannot succeed without commensurate sanitization of the extant political order. When you run a country as if it is a war booty, economic pillage must follow the political pillage as a reward for living in an occupied territory.
President Buhari should urgently constitute a National Restitution Commission which will take a holistic, systemic and structural look at the foundational problems of the nation. But his instincts for economic confrontation, if not his political will and appetite for structural reform, are in the right place. We must start from something even it means rough-hewn justice for some. One sure thing about reforms is that they will also undergo further reforming.
As Milton Friedman, the great American economist, argued recently any society faced with a fundamental existential quandary such as ours will have to choose which freedom —economic, political, social—to forfeit temporarily in order to catch up with the forces of modernity.
From different sides of the ideological spectrum, this is what has made modernization possible for China and Cuba on the one hand and Singapore and South Korea on the other. General Buhari’s ailment may well be providential. It may be time for divine soul-searching and introspection.
END
Be the first to comment