Once again, President Goodluck Jonathan
has exhibited his penchant to underplay the hydra dimensions that
corruption has assumed in Nigeria. Or is it that he doesn’t understand?
On Sunday, September 29, 2013, the
President indicated that corruption was number three on the scale of
problems that Nigeria was grappling with. Although he did not share what
the more serious problems might be on that episode of his presidential
media chat, he claimed to have been speaking from a survey carried out
through some unnamed members of the civil society. Jonathan concluded as
follows: “I am not saying corruption does not exist in this country,
corruption is existing and it is as old as the human race. What our
administration is doing is to ensure that public funds are not exposed
to people to steal.” This position immediately showed the narrowness of
the President’s perception of the extent of corruption in Nigeria.
Apparently, he spoke about corruption in public office but things have
gone worse than that. But I should not preempt myself.
Continue reading after the cut....
Jonathan was to restate his position when
he addressed Nigerians living in Southern Africa in Windhoek, Namibia
last month. During his speech, he was quoted as saying that the level of
corruption in Nigeria is blown out of proportion and that this has
stigmatised Nigerians. While Jonathan is right on the latter point, he
is in my opinion very wide of the mark on the former. Today, there is
hardly any organisation in Nigeria, where some level of compromise is
not tolerated, even those that deal with foreigners.
Take the international airports for
instance. Regular passengers in any of our airports would agree that
representatives of all agencies from the Nigeria Immigration Service,
the Customs Service, the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency and the
Quarantine Service would beg, coerce and manipulate until they get tips
out of virtually every passenger. To make their venture easy, they have
designed the peculiar task of having to ransack every luggage as you
approach the check-in counter. As they dip their hands into your bag,
one of them is on the mission of quietly soliciting tips that is if they
do not find anything in your luggage with which they can easily extort
money from you. I do not think any other country in the world subjects
passengers to this kind of treatment, hence the open invitation to
stigmatisation.
Same story exists at different levels in
virtually all sectors of our economy. In education, those who do not
have access to huge contract sums which they can misappropriate, take
bribes from students or seduce the girls in exchange for marks.
Secretariat staff in the education sector are not left out of the rot.
Those who cannot sell questions, negotiate to have results changed. I
have heard of all sorts of manipulations even with professional exams.
We are a country of people who must find a way out of every situation, a
reason for which we produce half-baked school-leavers; why fake
certification and claims to false scholarship have become an everyday
affair in our country
The collapse of infrastructure in the
country is a direct result of corruption. At all levels of government,
we have had allegations of endless inflation of contracts, requests for
10 per cent and outright failure to execute projects for which money has
been appropriated. In the past one or two years, members of the
National Assembly from some parts of the country, have continued to
raise the alarm about certain projects that have been appropriated for
almost on a yearly basis for the last few years which have remained
unexecuted.
Some weeks back, the Senate Committee on
the Environment discovered a number of erosion sites which are said to
have been captured and fixed in the 2013 budget but are still in the
same state they were two years ago. Ecological funds have become avenues
for personal enrichment for officials while the mass of the people
continue to live under very dangerous circumstances.
Even the health sector is not spared. As
government officials help themselves with funds meant to improve the
conditions of our hospitals, so do doctors, nurses and other personnel
in these facilities. I have heard countless stories of doctors who would
issue any form of certificate, sickness, birth, death or whatever for
just a fee, even when the person in whose name this certificate is being
issued is not near any of the conditions.
In 2012, an Assistant Director with the
Police Pensions Office colluded with a few other people to steal a
whopping N27.bn pensioners’ money. Lately, we have heard reports that
another 24bn was missing from this fund; thank goodness this has been
denied by the finance ministry.
And then the headquarters of sleaze in
Nigeria – the oil and gas sector. In the past four months, arguments
have raged on over shortfalls in the remittance of accruals from the
country’s crude by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. While we
are awaiting the result of the forensic audit into the $20bn which the
suspended Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Lamido Sanusi,
alleged remains unremitted into the federation account, news about the
petroleum minister’s alleged fritering away of the sum of N10.2bn on a
hiring of a private jet over the past two years broke. That is not to
speak of the trillions of naira that the country has lost to all manner
of subsidies in the oil and gas sector. These subsidies themselves
result from Nigeria’s inability to refine enough crude for local
consumption, a failure which is due, firstly to the inability to get our
refineries to work optimally and secondly, our inability to establish
new refineries, both of these come out of our financial imprudence.
Someone should please ask him what the
two other problems that beat corruption to the third place in Nigeria
are. And I honestly hope that he would not suggest poverty, insecurity,
ethnicity or anything of sorts. The truth is that corruption leads the
vicious circle to which all these other tormentors of Nigerians belong.
If all the monies stolen in Nigeria were to remain within the system
and we had competent and prudent leaders, Nigeria would be much better
off than it is today.
I agree with the President that
corruption is everywhere; however, in other places, corruption is
effectively punished as a deterrent to others. But not in Nigeria. The
only public official who has been sentenced for pilfering state
resources is the Assistant Director in the Pension Office who got away
with a miserable fine for stealing N27bn. That, I promise you, would
encourage people to steal more rather than discourage anyone.
Again, I agree with Jonathan that
wielding the big stick would not solve the problem by itself. In
addition to doing that, we must make efforts to reduce the level of
poverty in the land, reduce unemployment and make access to health care
and housing easier for our people. In addition to all that, the
President must stop making it look like the scandalous level of impunity
in Nigeria is our normal way of life. That is itself, creates a huge
perception problem and makes us look really rotten, in my opinion.
– Niran Adedokun (nadedokun@gmail.com. @niranadedokun)
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