Just as with Islam, fraternal correction is a pillar of Christian tradition (Matthew’s Gospel 18:15-18). We, as men, are full of defects. It seems to me a great unwisdom to refuse to acknowledge them and work to overcome them. Surely, it is the fool who fails to know he is full of defects. One defect we seem so slow to acknowledge and do something about, even if it is killing us softly, and violently, is corruption. Shortly after the first draft of this opinion piece, the United States government released its state of the world review and indicted Nigeria for pervasive corruption, impunity of action and life-taking violations of human rights.
Hardly a day passes by today that I do not run into some discussion of corruption in public or private. Most point to corruption as Nigeria’s cancer in metastasis even though an associated problem, ignoring merit, is acknowledged to be building pervasive mediocrity and cynicism about the state.
Many who complain about corruption engage in it. Their rationalisations are legion and go from the inevitability of bowing to extortion, especially to civil servants and politicians, to examples that show some very corrupt countries are making progress, so what must be slowing Nigeria down seems to be more than corruption.
My response, when I join the discussion, runs from the conceptual and theoretical to some hard street examples of the nature of the corruption process and its effects on all our lives.
The first thing that strikes you about corruption is how deeply rooted it is in transactions. For a long time I avoided transactions with the public sector just to avoid the indignity of reminding people that I neither give nor take. Then I found that even the private sector is getting quite stained by this matter seeping into popular culture.
Years ago, as I have noted often, I was quite pained to read the opening lines of a book on Corruption and Development in Africa edited by Kempe Ronald Hope Snr. and Bornwell Chukulo. It essentially indicated that corruption in Africa covers the full spectrum – from rare in Botswana to widespread in Ghana, and systemic in Nigeria. I have also narrated my encounter with Mike Wallace in 1996 when CBS Television’s 60 Minutes referred to Nigeria as the most corrupt country in the world in a Wallace interview with Farrakhan. While I continue to be proud of that encounter I had with Wallace, he was evidently on good grounds because a few months later the Transparency International index debuted with Nigeria as most corrupt country.
It would seem like the more the world cries out about the damage of corruption in Nigeria, the less interested the appropriate authorities are to take action, at least if you watch their body language and the things they do rather than what they say. I wish they were not all so ‘busy’ and could pause to consider the general lack of respect with which we are treated as a people because of corruption. As I teach in ethics sessions with business people, one tool I have deployed is relationship building. Relationship reduces the disposition to extort from you. But when the boss, from respect for your work or your person, approves, then the battle with procurement and accounts people begin. On two occasions when bosses were replaced, I had to forgo the payment. On other occasions I have waited more than one year for my payment.
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Granted that some of the rejection of the Nigerian, as a result of corruption perception, may be unwarranted, and the result of perceptions from what is said and our failure to make a decent effort of telling our story, the fact still remains of a high cost to Nigeria of a pattern of corrupt practice. Take an example often given by a friend of mine who is a soccer fanatic.
As big a football association as Nigeria is in Africa, not a single Nigerian featured as centre referee throughout the last African Nations Cup. Reason is not farfetched. CAF, like most people, cannot trust Nigerians on matters of judgment because they are presumed to be corrupt until proven innocent. In truth, even those who get the moment’s material gain from corruption lose the long term. For people of understanding, corruption is a lose-lose proposition.
From the point of view of our collective material wellbeing, corruption makes us poorer because the lack of trust for Nigerians and the Nigerian way means that people avoid transaction with us. It also means high transaction costs, which has the effect we will not be as competitive an economy. But it gets much worse – corruption is polluting culture and the work ethic in a way that leads to the kind of social collapse that Jared Diamond writes about in the book, Collapse. It also sets the stage for income inequalities that make tomorrow troubling. If those who own private jets create no jobs, tomorrow advertises itself as deadly.
I have watched in one or two parastatals that have invited my consulting intervention how civil servants act with an entitlement mentality in their pointed pursuit of bribery. Sometimes you wonder if they are not paid for the job. At other times they act as if the job were their father’s personal estate and anyone that does business there owes them one.
When you are unwilling to be conned to give them a bribe, they delay things, files get lost and generally frustrate the payment process. They really carry on in a way that almost suggests you are denying them something that is almost a birthright. They murmur, complain loudly about why they should move the files for which they are paid to come to work.
The example of the civil servants, and increasingly, part of the private sector, in more subtle ways, have crippled an understanding of the agency function on which modern organisations are premised. The owner cannot be there to do it himself or herself if the enterprise or government organisation is to grow big enough to take advantage of scale and scope economies. The agency function is so often lived in its breach that many are unable to build significant businesses because they do not trust that agents, the managers and staff, will not replace organisational goals with personal goals.
Trust is the soul of business. Once it is lost, much is lost. The motto of Government Secondary School, Owerri which comes from colonial times does capture it well:
When wealth is lost nothing is lost
When health is lost something is lost
When character is lost all is lost.
The communal loss of character through pervasive and accepted corruption shows that so much has been lost that we have a national emergency. Is it impossible to make a dent on the plague or is it cancer in metastasis? Why have public authorities not taken corruption seriously, given how much it has slowed down so many anchor sectors of our economy, from power to infrastructure in general and even the sector that lays the golden egg, the petroleum sector.
When protest arose on fuel prices in January 2012, many confused it with an ideological discussion on subsidies. The real issue is that the budget, or drawdown for the so-called subsidy, jumped by nearly a trillion in one year because of corruption to fund elections in a way that corrupts the electoral process and prevents democracy from truly arriving our shores.
To continue to feign helplessness about corruption, as the government continues to do, in this age of impunity, is to mortgage the future of our children because current conduct is not sustainable. And what is required is not necessarily just about jailing many powerful people who are guilty.
Impunity has come to mean, beyond its typical meaning, the mindless looting of the public treasury and damning, as well as degrading institutions of integrity and justice in a way that being held to account is generally considered a joke. But the effect of impunity is seen in things considered improbable yesterday becoming normal the next day. One of the more shameful of such practices is wives of top politicians becoming not just toll gates in a rent-seeking patron-client networks but actually points of extortion for people seeking public office appointments and from incumbents in the bureaucracy and political positions. From those they extract tributes like warlords of old. The effect of all these on culture is evident in the recent murder of a lecturer at Kogi State Polytechnic by students. The news reports suggest his sin was being strict and refusing to accept bribe for grades.
How do you rescue a culture that has sunk so low and make values like merit and delayed gratification which are so critical for progress almost anathema? Just as corruption pollutes culture, in this example it damages sensible administrative and developmental policy choices.
Any remotely intelligent analysis of the budget will show that nearly 80 percent of our revenues service a civil service and political public service of less than a million of our assumed nearly 170 million people. Is that sustainable or could we be courting anarchy? Worse still, besides so lopsided a proportion going to their remunerations and welfare of the public service, a part of the portion left for capital goods provisioning still end up in their pockets through bribes, extortion, and “thank yous”. Yet we never manage an honest discussion of these matters because vested interests manage to reduce it to us versus them.
Let us begin with ensuring systems reduce discretion and penalise the behaviour that could result in the offer of gratification to overcome bottlenecks. Simple things like consequence for payment cheques not being ready within a specific time intervals and goods being free to leave the ports if appropriate duty was not levied within a certain number of days, with consequences from salaries of the officers responsible, etc. If this is followed up with simple sting operations that can result in several hundred civil servants being dismissed in a week, it will signal to the system a new way. Next, a group of angry young prosecutors can be empanelled to go after people who flaunt ill-gotten wealth.
In the final analysis, corruption will arouse the anger it deserves when we all truly come to realisation that the biggest harm it does is in the fracturing of culture which shapes human progress. When we ostracise people whose source of wealth we cannot explain, get media that blacks out people of questionable wealth and sets up teams of investigative reporters to go after public servants perceived to abuse the commonwealth while agencies of a national integrity system run sting operations on select public officials from time to time, the effect on slashing corruption will be evident. Same can be said for putting in place systems that reduce discretion and use standards to ensure conduct.
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