Corruption as national badge

Nigeria is a columnist’s dream. So many things happen at the same time. Before you completely take in one development, another one impinges on your consciousness or even completely sweeps you off your feet. There’s never a dull moment. The only regrettable aspect is that most of the time, one is compelled to report tragedy. […]

Nigeria is a columnist’s dream. So many things happen at the same time. Before you completely take in one development, another one impinges on your consciousness or even completely sweeps you off your feet. There’s never a dull moment. The only regrettable aspect is that most of the time, one is compelled to report tragedy. And, as I have said several times, the fact that we acknowledge the many warts defacing our country does not mean that we lack patriotism. Indeed, the risky business of telling truth to power – or rather placing a mirror before our leaders so that they can see the reflection of their ugliness must be considered a prime act of patriotism.
With due respect, I think President Jonathan does not appreciate the depth to which corruption has eaten into the fabric of his government. That must be why, during the last presidential media chat, he said corruption was not Nigeria’s number one problem. I reflected on the president’s position on Sunday morning when I was waylaid by a gang of bribe-seeking policemen on the way to church by 7.30am. Despite the embarrassment of one YouTube exposé after the other, our policemen are not fazed. They demand their bribes openly. The whole world can see that our system is oiled by a plethora of bribes – from Immigration and Customs officials at the airport, through the VIO, police, FRSC and other uniformed goalkeepers on our highways, to the civil servant at the Federal Secretariat who refuses to append her signature to a document unless she was bribed to do her job.
Talking about government establishments, Obasanjo’s Servicom has died. You can’t get a new passport or renew an old one or even get a re-issue of one that is still valid unless you go through the web of syndicates elaborately put in place by immigration officials who spend most of their time attending to their own customers as carefully distinguished from the rest of the naive public who believe that obtaining a Nigerian passport is their right as citizens. Here, citizenship is oiled with bribes; otherwise you are persona non grata.   
Nothing illustrates the depth to which our country has sunken like the litany of corrupt practices highlighted by Tim Newman, an oil worker who recently finished his tour of duty in Nigeria. Anyone interested in knowing how foreigners see us should read Mr. Newman’s article dispassionately. While acknowledging that corruption exists in all parts of the world, he argued that the Nigerian version is unique because of its pandemic nature and the observable social acquiescence.
“I can’t think of a single area where I didn’t encounter a scam of some sort”, he says. “The corruption, theft, and graft can take many forms: falsifying a CV (I don’t mean enhancing, I mean pretending you’re a Lead Piping Engineer of 12 years experience when actually, until yesterday, you were a fisherman); selling positions in a company; stealing diesel from the storage tanks you’re paid to protect; issuance of false material certificates; impersonating an immigration officer to access an office, from which you then tap up the people within to fund your latest venture; selling land which isn’t yours; deliberately running down the country’s refining capacity in order to partake in the lucrative import of fuels; falsifying delivery notes of said refined fuels in order to receive greater government subsidies; deliberately restricting the country’s power generation capacity in order to benefit from the importation of generators (which must be run on imported fuel)”.
That is not all. He also noted some other kinds of corrupt practices he experienced in Nigeria: “Theft of half-eaten sandwiches and opened drink containers from the office fridge(!); tinkering with fuel gauges at petrol stations to sell customers short; conspiring with company drivers to issue false receipts indicating more fuel was supplied than actually was; supplying counterfeit safety equipment; falsifying certificates related to professional competence (e.g. rope access work); paying employees less than stipulated in their contract (or not at all); cloning satellite TV cards, meaning the legitimate user gets their service cut off when the other card is in use (the cards are cloned by the same people who issue the genuine cards); the list is literally endless.”
Rather than vilify Tim Newman for showing me my country’s ugliness, I am grateful for his candour. The ball is in our court. The Newmans of this world will come and go but we are the ones that have to live with our problems all the days of our lives.
No one is saying that President Jonathan invented corruption. He inherited the problem. But it has festered under him like at no other time in our recent history. And that sad state of affairs must be partly because the president does not realise that corruption is his number one problem. Would anyone be surprised if a Boko Haram bomber bribes his way into one of our protected installations? Till date, the security cameras installed in Abuja after the bombing of the UN Building are not yet operational. Who cares? After the frenzy of awarding contracts for the supply and installation of the cameras, all has gone quiet – maybe until the next high profile bombing.
Corruption has trans-formed Nigeria into a land of anything goes. President Jonathan’s transformation agenda will be the ultimate victim of the scourge – especially as the political leadership continues to play the ostrich with the issue. At the present rate, if drastic measures are not taken against corruption, there will be no country to run as such, but just a collection of fiefdoms controlled by thieving war-lords.
I wish President Jonathan would refocus his binoculars.