In late 1975, military head of state General Murtala Mohammed decided to transform Nigeria overnight.
His big, genius plan to achieve this unprecedented phenomenon? He would organise a top-down purge of Nigeria’s entire public sector, summarily dismissing and retiring thousands of “corrupt” civil servants and public officials by way of a fiat order from Flagstaff House. As the all-powerful dictator he was, he had no need for little things like burden of proof, trials, evidence or due process – he would just get a list of names on his table and he would sign people’s careers away into oblivion with a stroke of his pen.
In what came as a shock to all of like six people in the whole of Nigeria, this plan to sanitise the allegedly corrupt civil service backfired terribly. It ended up becoming either a tool in the hands of superiors to witch hunt subordinates they did not like and kick them out of the service with no benefits, or it simply ended up taking out random innocent people’s careers for no other reason that simply to fill a retrenchment quota. “Oga wants 500 “corrupt” people sacked from this Ministry, so here is a list of 500 people for Oga.”
Dictators Destroy Institutions and Bequeath Chaos
Literally overnight, a new phenomenon was created in Nigeria’s civil service and public offices, which still defines the way they interact with the country they serve to date. This phenomenon was the fear of being turfed out on your backside unexpectedly without a pot to piss in, simply because one crazy oga at the top woke up on the wrong side of his bed. Whereas traditionally, civil servants are supposed to be difficult to fire for a number of reasons, Murtala Mohammed introduced a culture where the government was unpredictable and unsecured, so anyone in office must quickly grab all they can before the bonanza ends.
Many families never recovered after General Mohammed’s hare-brained public sector purge. The survivors of the purge took one message from all this: “Hustle o!”
Modelled after the British civil service, Nigeria’s civil service at the time had all of the country’s very best brains engaged within it. At the time, being a nation less than 16 years removed from independence and with newly-discovered oil wealth, the government was the biggest employer of labour and the most desirable employer by quite a distance. Getting into the civil service was viewed as the guarantee of enjoying a long, fulfilling and rewarding career with the promise of a generous pension and post-retirement benefits afterwards. This action of General Mohammed wrecked all of that – for good.
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People saw their colleagues suddenly thrown out arbitrarily with no pensions, gratuities or benefits. Families were suddenly plunged into poverty as their erstwhile breadwinners suddenly found themselves on the scrapheap in a job market they were not familiar with. Many families never recovered after General Mohammed’s hare-brained public sector purge. The survivors of the purge took one message from all this: “Hustle o!”
And hustle they did. Overnight, a paper could no longer pass from one table to the next without everyone from the messenger to the cleaner having their palms greased. An invoice would not be approved and forwarded to the Finance department for disbursement if the Director or Permanent Secretary did not get a cut. Everything from getting a drivers’ license to registering to write an exam became an intricate web of bribes, micropayments and squeezed naira notes.
“Fighting corruption” by planting seeds of corruption: A dictator’s guide
In other words, in trying to “transform” Nigeria and “kill” corruption overnight the way many less intelligent Nigerians are convinced is possible, General Murtala Mohammed actually instituted even more of that corruption. He got rid of a few bad eggs within the system alright, but he ended up radicalising the other eggs left in the system and turning them into bad eggs out of fearful necessity. An organised procedure that respected due process and burden of proof would clearly have been much more effective without being counterproductive, but obviously, such a procedure would not have the “flash-bang!” quality that a dictator needs to justify his dictatorship.
As I am sure you have figured out, the purpose of telling this story was to illustrate that the idea of dictatorship is preferable to democracy because of some alleged “results” comes from the same family of ideas that makes people cross busy expressways directly under pedestrian bridges because they are “in a hurry,” only to end up permanently disabled or dead.
The simple and unsexy fact is that at any point in history when politicians are looked down on and despised in favour of “straight talkers” and “people from outside the establishment,” what generally ends up happening is that demagogues and tyrants find their way into power – and then make whatever situation they met considerably worse.
We should focus our energies on improving our political and democratic processes, instead of looking for charismatic outsiders to come in and “shake things up.” General Mohammed’s destruction of the civil service did not only deform the civil service and hurt Nigeria’s state institutions. It also had a knock-on effect on all public institutions going into the Obasanjo administration that succeeded him, and the Shagari civilian administration afterwards.
Due to being a civilian government with a free press, Shagari’s administration in particular was then saddled with the unfair perception of harbouring vast amounts of “corruption.” This perception was in large part what made Nigerians take to the streets in celebration when a certain Major General Muhammadu Buhari appeared on their TV screens announcing yet another military takeover in December 1983.
The “corrupt” administration of the “clueless” civilian was thus removed by Major General Muhammadu Buhari who came in with a promise to “fight corruption.”
Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.
