“Without the death penalty, 90 percent of Nigerians will continue to see corruption as God’s blessing. The anti-corruption campaign will be a huge waste of time. We are already heavily populated, why can’t we sacrifice the top criminals to save the country’s future.” — Nasir El-Rufai
At the peak of the June 12 [1993] impasse, the ever-controversial Sen. Arthur Nzeribe, knowing his negative media rating, advised reporters to always look at the content of his statements, not his face. “Take the message, don’t look at the messenger,” he said.
The late senator’s mandate should apply to us to assimilate the message in today’s opening quote. El-Rufai is one of the most divisive of Nigeria’s political elite. He was the governor of Kaduna State.
Despite El-Rufai, we shall take his message because it provides a suitable preamble to our focus this week. It’s by the way that the germane message comes from an unlikely source; so was Senator Nzeribe of the blessed memory, providing the most strategic and intelligent reasoning during the June 12 crisis. He played the ostrich though.
Similarly, of all African leaders, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, also of the blessed memory, enriched the political lexicon with his comical quotables on virtually every aspect of African life; yet, he ended up as one of the worst leaders to come out of the continent, having squandered his heroic goodwill of his people his monumental failure in development.
If what El-Rufai is advocating applies, he is most likely going to be a casualty. But what he is saying is at the core of finding solutions to the endemic corruption that has engulfed our fatherland.
An African proverb warns us that if we cannot stop trouble from coming, we should not offer it a chair when it comes. Nigeria appeared unable to stop corruption from coming but we inadvertently welcomed it by providing comfort for it when it arrived. When land is manured, the crop grows big and faster.
What Nigeria has done is simply to dung the corruption monster and when it has grown up and engulfed the system, we have turned around to complain that everywhere is green.
I never wished to find myself on the same page with the politically devious El-Rufai, but I cannot, in this instance, agree that except for extreme measures like the death penalty, nothing will frighten us out of corruption. I know some pundits will ask, did the death penalty stop armed robbery, banditry, and other vices menacing the land? No, but that was because they were targeted at the poor operatives instead of their sponsors in the elite class. Through crime, the ruling elite in Nigeria ensures that the population of the poor is reduced when crime sponsors are spared, whereas El-Rufai’s theory targets the top, not the down.
But the question will be, who will pass the enabling law or the death sentence…corrupt politicians and judges? The answer is what is making Nigeria’s case delicate. Some persons bribe their way to power and we expect them to fight bribe-takers and bribe-givers? Somebody forged the documents that took them to power and we expect them to preside over the eradication of forgery. Somebody graduated from a nonexistent school and we want him to get shocked at a minister who approves flight money to a place where there is no airport. Are we not jokers in this country who keep looking for the piece of cake we have long eaten?
Members of the National Assembly and the Federal Cabinet who have dirty records with the EFCC are legion. And we are expecting them to make laws and formulate policies that will help clean out the Augean stable of corruption. How possible will that be? Those who insist that Nigeria has become a criminal enterprise are not just fabricating stories but stating the obvious. The unimpeachable status of the judiciary In Nigeria is to be found in its history not in the contemporary or extant times. After the 2023 judiciary merchandising with politicians, no judge or justice has any moral right to jail anybody for corruption in Nigeria.
In our gullibility, we have forgotten within seven months where we were and how we got to where we are and are expecting elder-ado on moral issues. We selfishly and greedily expect a monkey to win a beauty contest just because it comes from Nigeria.
Whatever the case, some of us will refuse to be deluded into believing that the road we followed to where we are will provide any means to fight corruption. Not with a transactional system engulfing all arms of government, including but not limited to the supposedly sacred judiciary.
The hoax and malicious deception going on in the name of fighting corruption should stop because they are insulting the people’s intelligence.
There has been this hullabaloo over the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Betta Edu, and her corruption chain. Have we stopped to ask how she became Minister of the Federal Republic? Peter Obi continues to argue that the process with which we enter the office is far more important than the office because the process determines what happens thereafter.
Since 2015 the ruling APC has been hornswoggling Nigerians in the name of fighting corruption and we are ‘mumuishly’ playing along. Under the Muhammadu Buhari era, the regime stationed the National Security Adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan, Col Sambo Dasuki (rtd) as the center of the ring trial after which Dasuki was let go, not freed of corruption and not convicted. They just put Dasuki out to use it to reach perceived enemies. All those tried then were alleged to have collected their loot from Dasuki. At the end of the day, nothing was heard of Dasuki except that he was freed from a long incarceration in a lavishly furnished guest house ostensibly done to get at some people.
Today, under the watch of Bola Tinubu we are going through the same road again. This time the former Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele is the Dasuki of this era. While his prank trial is going on, the regime is using him to reach some enemies. At the end of the day, his trial will stall because going forward will unveil some truths that Nigerians should not hear about how their commonwealth was shared. We are clapping that some banks illegally acquired by proxy are being recovered, can those recovering swear to Amadioha that they will not resell it to themselves also, by proxy?
All the kudos going to President Tinubu for suspending Betta Edu has exposed us as unwitting accomplices to the corruption chain. Is suspending the minister for trying to steal or misappropriate such a humongous sum belonging to the poor the issue? If there hadn’t been a disagreement over the sacking of the National Coordinator of the National Social Investment Programme Agency, Halima Shehu, would we have known anything? Why should the Accountant-General of the Federation Mrs. Oluwatoyin Sakirat Madein wait until the bubble burst before disowning the suspended minister? Is the Accountant-General not the proper person to raise the alarm and stop the fraud? Did he do that?
Why has Edu suddenly become the corrupt gal for the slaughterhouse when those who brought her and guided her into the fraud including approving N3b for her to count poor people are working free? If Ms Edu was a Yoruba or Fulani, would she have been suspended? Can we get sincere answers to these powers?
The Interior Minister Olubumni Tunji-Ojo brazenly abused his office, seeking and getting a contract of such a huge sum was summoned by the president to explain himself. On the contrary, Ms. Edu, who sought to explain herself, was denied access to the president and was humiliated.
Corruption in Nigeria has a tribal mark and it helps in identifying who to label or not. The last time Femi Falana spoke on corruption was when he asked for the sack of Betta Edu which has been done but on the Minister of the Interior, the activist lawyer has lost his voice and is now missing in action. Also, the revered Nobel laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka, was in the news last when he was defending his kinsman and fraternal comrade, Olu Agunloye, detained by the EFCC over corruption. Having secured his freedom, all other happenings do not attract attention. What a country!
Doesn’t that show the type of corruption fighting going on? Somebody sitting as a minister in this country once did 419 to the nation and hired an aircraft as a national carrier and made the president commission it. Nearly one year into that fraud, the former minister is working free and EFCC is doing window dressing with a corruption fight, harassing young boys carrying laptops.
It’s amazing why we are expecting this government to fight corruption. Both EFCC, ICPC, and the DSS are privy to the amount of money that went around presidential primaries, INEC, and the judiciary last year for election matters and looked away and even aided and abetted it.
Instead of looking at what is destroying our system, we are busy fishing for youngsters for crime.
If the head is rotten how do we expect the rest of the body to function optimally? From Nuhu Ribadu, the first EFCC Chair, to date, they know what can be done, either through legislation or other means to minimize corruption in our system but can they do it when they have joined the chopping spree? Sadly, our system has aligned with that of this Congolese author of self-help books, Mwanadeke Kindembo, who says, “If the education system wasn’t corrupt or meant to produce more followers, rather than leaders, then it would make sense to see princes and princesses attending the same schools as everyone else.”
If we expect to nip corruption in the bud, we must address it from the root, and the root of corruption in Nigeria is embedded in the political leadership, especially the recruitment process. The recruitment policy of our political leadership must change significantly if we sincerely hope to tackle corruption. It’s only then we can be in a position to break the vicious cycle of economic inequality and pave the path of prosperity and peace.
You cannot expect a school principal who corruptly bought his way to the position to vigorously fight examination malpractice.
The celebrated neuroscientist and famous author of best-selling books, Abhijit Naskar, provides us with a good ending for this discourse: “We are the pigs who put the pigs in power. If we wanna change that, we gotta build our character.” God help us.