By Cudjoe Kpor
Acceptance, tolerance or just appreciation of the efforts by Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to clean up the hideously filthy, corrupt Nigeria, has risen hopes excessively high. Now, some commentators speculate that the anti-graft agency can clean up the filth throughout the system – and eradicate corruption to the minimum it is in many civilised countries. Denmark, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, The Netherlands and Norway are the top six corruption-free countries in the world, according to Transparency International. Nigeria’s dirty society ranks 136 out of 177, tied with Comoros Island and Tajikistan, followed by Bangladesh.
But EFCC alone cleaning up the corrupt country is forlorn hope.
In fact, EFCC would be rated successful if it can clean up and retrieve the mega-billion Naira theft from treasury looters without the latter fighting back to pulverise the agency. But these mega-Naira thieves, powerful and therefore rich as they are, constitute no more than about one per cent of the 180 million population. Meanwhile an expert’s credible estimate of the corrupt in Nigeria puts their percentage at at least 90.
Consequently, needless to add, all the other security and intelligence agencies must also get into the fray of the anti-corruption combat and earn their pay. After all, if these other agencies were doing their jobs well, corruption, a crime, would not be just another norm as pervasively accepted as it is now. The failure of all the other security and intelligence agencies to combat it necessitated setting up EFCC. However, the other security agencies such as the DSS, the police, among others, are so polluted with filthily corrupt officers, men and women that by cursory appearances, they might as well be the dens of the criminally corrupt in the country. Especially because they carry identity cards with coercive power which serve them as free meal tickets.
But they are indispensable as back-ups to EFCC’s efforts. So in order to eradicate corruption from the system, all the other agencies must be purged of their criminally corrupt officers, men and women to clean them up first. Then the not-so-filthy officers who survived the purge may be pressed into service to perform their duties against the thousand- and million-naira bribe-demanders and -takers in public offices nationwide.
For instance, the renowned constitutional lawyer, Professor Ben Nwabueze believes that corruption has so much permeated the populace to the extent that it has become a way of life for up to 90 per cent of the Nigerian population. Consequently, any attempt to eradicate it from the system must entail nothing short of a moral and ethical revolution.
Simultaneously, prelates of the Catholic Church believe that prayers, exhortations and warnings would help their faithful to imbibe the culture of integrity and inculcate moral uprightness to banish corruption from their psychological make-up forever. Unfortunately, their efforts, like other religious denominations, have failed. Corruption has festered to the extent that the treasury looters get the societal accolades and honours while the rare incorruptible, upright, honest persons who retire from public office on their pension and gratuity are ridiculed as the fools of the society….
Between the two extremes of moral suasion sermons and ethical revolution, some commentators believe that EFCC would eradicate corruption from Nigeria. Especially with the agency’s planned full establishment with its own staff of 865 officers, men and women, rather than secondment from the uniformed police. But deep down, it becomes clear that they are only over-supportive of the anti-graft agency and attribute too much power of ethical and moral change to it. In other words, they do not know what they are talking about.
For, EFCC is not so omnipotent. In fact, a former rare, incorruptible deputy head of state, the late General Tunde Idiagbon was once quoted to have said that corruption is so endemic in Nigeria that even foetuses in their mothers’ wombs get their corruption infection across their placenta from their mothers’ bloodstream…. Whoever concocted the story knows it is medical nonsense of course. Yet, disregarding the medical illiteracy which went into it, it is obvious to see how desperate that rare, incorruptible ex-Nigerian head of state would have assessed the enormity of the grave problem.
No wonder Professor Nwabueze does not believe the current ongoing anti-corruption war would clean up and eradicate the vice from the society. In his words, “Whether the war will succeed in eradicating corruption is the ultimate question. We must understand that corruption has become a way of life in Nigeria. It has eaten into the blood of every Nigerian, into the fabric of the Nigerian society. You cannot eradicate it by sending one or two people to prison or by confiscating the assets of one or two people.
“Ninety percent of people in this country perpetrate corruption. You can’t get anything done in the country unless you are prepared to grease the palms of either public or private officials. You have to do this to get on. And that is where my call for social and ethical revolution comes in. How do you get this out of the mentality of the ordinary man and woman? You cannot except by social and ethical revolution.”
Still, the best explanation for the endemic crime in the country came from a conversation I once had with a Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) executive in Lagos: In his words, anybody who wants to eradicate corruption in Nigeria must first create millions of jobs. For, at present, every formally employed worker looks after up to 20 direct or indirect dependants on his monthly salary. In addition to his nuclear family, there are the extended family members and all other relations, plus the host of formal social and religious beggars of every hue and cry. So, no amount of preaching, exhortation or moral suasion will stop corruption in Nigeria…. Unless nobody offers it. Otherwise, even the “angels” will collect the gratification, chop and clean mouth. And if nobody offered, the corrupt will demand it with force as pre-condition for rendering any service.
As such, from the corporate gatemen to the executive suites, to the pulpits, classrooms, ministries, government offices at all levels and the golf courses, the corrupt are demanding bribe before they would render any service for which they are legitimately being paid by their employers. The danger to national security and government stability is that anyone who offers to bribe voluntarily gets all the secret information and data from the corrupt at bargain basement prices. No national secret is beyond selling by the corrupt.
The tragedy is, everybody in Nigeria will publicly denounce corruption as the cankerworm which destroys the country, the primitive cliche always says. But once the sermons are over in the pulpit, the demands and offers, elegantly clothed as “settlement” begin. Even in the churches, the offerings are taken for as many times as possible till the collection target for the day is met.
According to data not updated for the past five years, Nigeria has 70 million youth aged between 15 and 35 years. Only 10 per cent of them are gainfully employed, another 10 per cent are under-employed and between the official 54 percent to 80 per cent are unemployed. These malcontents and discontents, who feel marginalised by the system, form the criminals’ core of oil and gas pipeline vandals, kidnappers for ransom, cattle rustlers, hired thugs and armed militants for one brutal murders’ cause or the other, cyber-criminals of various genres, among others.
Meanwhile, in every civilised clime, the labour power of these youth idling in Nigeria build nations. Instead, they are married to crime and constitute the core of its Criminals generation. They do not have the shame or the sense of ethical values to channel their strength into building the country.
Cardinal John Onaiyekan, Catholic Bishop of Abuja Archdiocese, said recently that the church has been waging for many years the anti-corruption war with its own appropriate weapons of prayers, warnings and exhortations, long before any government started talking about it.
The Cardinal believes there should be no going back on the war against corruption; it is the indispensable step to put Nigeria back on the pathway of economic and political stability. “To restore the nation to decent society, we need to go beyond the legal process, to a serious moral, national, spiritual rebirth,” he added.
Needless to emphasise, such change entails the ethical purification of the putrefaction from individuals to aggregate into a systemic regeneration which would re-orientate the society as a whole towards ethical rectitude complete with changes in morals, ethics and individual uprightness for integrity.
In corroboration, the President of Catholic Bishop Conference of Nigeria, Bishop Ignatius Kaigama, advised Christians to encourage the President Muhammadu Buhari administration with their patriotic conduct, which will be a great incentive in its efforts to promote attitudinal change towards infrastructural construction.
Kaigama said: “We align with the efforts of President Buhari to clean the Augean stable through his attempt to purge our nation of moral dirt and disinfect Nigerians from the quest for unhealthy material aggrandizement. It is largely responsible for the needless poverty in the land and poor infrastructural development.”
Indeed, as Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said recently, the Buhari administration is looking for the outcome of the hard task of environmental clean-up of the filth. They are seeking a new tribe of incorruptible Nigerians, men and women of all faith and ethnicities, committed to building a society with high values of integrity, hard work, justice and love of country who are prepared to make the necessary crucial sacrifices to restore the nation’s lost values and norms.
Osinbajo said: “We need a new tribe of men and women of all faith, tribes and ethnicities, who are prepared to make the sacrifices crucial to building a strong society, who are prepared to stick together and insist on justice even when our friends are at the receiving end.”
If the tribe of incorruptible men and women is found, no doubt, Nigeria will begin to advance. But finding the tribe is a task nobody would underestimate as EFCC’s job alone. Assuming EFCC alone is capable of eradicating corruption from Nigeria will be a cruel joke….
