In a corrupt society pretty much everything gets contaminated in one way or the other. The decay is not limited to pecuniary issues but permeates every area, activity, and process. Corruption eats away at ideals which hitherto guaranteed some sort of order. As it insidiously seeps in, it’s very first casualty is almost always values. Right and wrong suddenly take on a relative colouration. It’s “right” if you can get away with it but “wrong” if you get caught and lack the “power” to wriggle your way out. One thing which so exemplifies how rotten a system is, is when someone so clearly in the wrong, instead of apologizing and showing remorse as any normal human being should, claims right. A cyclist riding in the wrong direction narrowly escaped with his life the other day as I negotiated a tight bend. Of course I didn’t expect to see anything at the spot but instead of thanking his lucky stars to have escaped unscathed, he resorted to raining abuses on me!
We pride ourselves as being better than other members of the animal kingdom because God saw it fit to give us an ability to reason. An ability expected to continue on the upward scale as our minds further develop, becoming wiser by the day. So why do we try so hard to reverse what God so kindly gave us; to convince God He made a mistake to have endowed us with this ability.
Corruption destroys lives in the present and in the future. We may think we’re smart and getting away with it but it will always come back to haunt us and perhaps more painfully, future generations too. Corruption gradually obscures our sight of humanity as it erodes our sense of “right” and “wrong”. Corruption renders countless of noble aspirations unattainable and sadistically dispatches millions of dreams to their early grave. Corruption is an opportunity destroyer as it destroys opportunities for individuals, communities as well as entire nations. Unknown to the majority of people, many countries today ensnared in seemingly intractable civil wars arrived there as a consequence of rampant corruption, which had sapped to the very last drop, any confidence the people previously had in the authorities. Corruption kills, almost more than any other epidemic. And, deceive yourself not, it is an epidemic. Here in Nigeria, corruption denies each and everyone one of us of what rightly belongs to us; a good, possibly free or heavily subsidized healthcare system, good public school system, good motorable roads, a more vibrant economy ($80 billion of funds outrightly stolen or corruptly acquired in Africa is transferred out of the country to nations already infinitely more wealthy every year), affordable housing and much more. To put it bluntly, it greatly impinges on our quality of life and the dignity of life we all deserve as members of the human race.
The sad, yet unavoidable result is an abysmally low average life expectancy (53.7 years for men and 55.4 for women, incidentally the lowest in West Africa), in a world where life expectancy is increasing in both developed (80 years for men and 84 for women) and most developing (66.9 years for men and 69.9 years for women in India) societies; according to the 2018 statistics. Corruption leads to the collapse of buildings of which quality should never have been approved by regulators in the first place, and the inevitable loss of life. Corruption has now infamously positioned our dear nation as the poverty capital of the world where hundreds of people die every day because they can’t afford to buy malaria drugs of less than N1000 or of things even more mundane. According to recent statistics, 40 million Nigerians now suffer one mental disorder or the other. That’s an alarming 20% of our nation’s population of 200 million souls. It’s not a coincidence this comes at a time when another statistic revealed about 87 million Nigerians now live below the extreme poverty line.
Corruption has impoverished the nation to the point where hundreds on a daily basis prefer to risk their lives crossing the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean sea in search of a better life, than to stick it out here where they’ll continue to suffer the indignities of oppression and numerous other forms of injustice at the hands of their own people. Is this better than when oyibo is the culprit, which we call racism? Or is it in some grotesque manner considered more acceptable when the hand of the oppressor is black? Simply put, corruption kills.
Changing the nation…one mind at a time
Dapo Akande
