If you dare call me corrupt!

‘You are a good nigger, George’, drawled the time-keeper in typical southern style.  ‘Let’s hope you won’t waste this money on “seven-eleven” (gambling with dice).  Sign your X mark on the dotted line…’  He had mistaken the Great Zik for another illiterate negro and had handed him $297.45 for all six weeks’ work.  So Zik […]

‘You are a good nigger, George’, drawled the time-keeper in typical southern style.  ‘Let’s hope you won’t waste this money on “seven-eleven” (gambling with dice).  Sign your X mark on the dotted line…’  He had mistaken the Great Zik for another illiterate negro and had handed him $297.45 for all six weeks’ work.  So Zik (though he wasn’t great as at then), fired back; ‘Look here buddy, don’t you dare to cheat me with your curious system of accounting, because I’m nobody’s slouch.  Although I may work like a fool, I am not a fool, and I will prove it, if you give me the chance to question your honesty’.

‘You seem to be an intelligent nigger; where did you learn your ‘rithmetic from?  Down dar in Mississippi?’ asked the time keeper.  ‘Look here, red nose, it makes no difference where I learned my mathematics, I worked hard and honestly for six weeks; and I know what I made during that period.  Now you are trying to take a way from me even the modest earnings I made, despite my sacrifices down in the mines, whilst you were up here riding in high-powered cars and thinking of your ill-gotten gains’.

‘For the love of Mike, will you take your money and get out of this mine, or else we’ll stage a necktie party (lynching), tonight, and there’ll be minus one miner tomorrow’, further bluffed the hill-billy time-keeper.  Invariably he was a member of the Ku-Klux-Klan and was threatening to roast Ben Zik as he was then called, at the stake at night.  After much haggling, he gave Zik the calculator, and Zik found out that the time-keeper had deducted for himself, a neat $200 of his hard-earned pay, as he has always done to the other poor black men who worked in the mines.  He promptly put his money in his pocket and ‘skedaddled’ out of Pennsylvania that afternoon lest the KKK will make mincemeat of him that night.

I have not stopped wondering, after coming across this story in pages 106-7 of Zik’s autobiography; My Odyssey, how come the descendants of a very honest and hardworking Zik (someone like me) are made to wear the toga of corruption, while the descendants of that dishonest, racist time-keeper in the USA, today dons a squeaky clean reputation of incorruptibility.  What went wrong both ways?  How did we lose our age-long values? How did the rest of the world acquire values which some of them never had in their societies?  And how can we rediscover those values?  Don’t try and simplify the problem by mentioning the worn-out cliché; ‘leadership’.  For these are questions for the Ages.

Few months ago, news rent the air (at least online), that a Queen Idia of Benin Mask was going to be auctioned off at Sotheby’s in London, and was going to draw a record £4.6million ( N1.15billion).  The Nigerian government was silent on this, for it happened then to be issuing threats of force against a fellow West African country – Cote D’Ivoire – at that time.  But some Nigerians in London made a lot of noise, and some demonstrated in the blistering cold.  And the auction had to be stopped.  That mask was stolen from Benin by a certain Major Galway, who deposed Oba Ovoranmwen of the Benin Kingdom for refusing to sign a ‘treaty’ that would have enslaved his people to the British, sometime around 1897.  Wikipedia has it that after Ovoranmwen was deposed, the palace was looted and artefacts were auctioned off ‘in order to cover the cost of the war on Bini Kingdom’.  As if the Binis started the war!!

Galway, like George Goldie who conquered the Niger-area for his business purposes and later sold it off to the British Government on the 1st of January 1900 for £865,000, was not a honest man.  In fact they were corrupt to the point of shedding the blood of thousands of Innocents just to make money and fame!  And I also wonder how many thousands of those artefacts were stolen from Benin Kingdom and elsewhere, and how rich those African kingdoms could be today if their properties were returned.  Multiply N1.15billion by 1,000,000 artefacts and what does that come to!

I think we have seriously mis-diagnosed the corruption problem as it affects Africa.  And mis-diagnosis means that we can never find a solution.  That is why I can never support any platform that seems to genuflect, quiver and cower, patronising the world that we Africans are corrupt and will change if given more aid or more support by the West.  In the first place, we need to ask ourselves when the rules were changed. And if indeed the rules were changed and the world should now go and sin no more, why are things like that Benin artefacts not returned to Africa, so that we can all start on a clean slate?  Why is someone from a supposedly squeaky-clean country, trying to get financial benefit from the heritage of another people whom they have condemned to penury and corruption?  Something surely doesn’t jive here!

In my humble view, the problem we have here in Africa is one of knowing how to marry our traditional culture into the ‘modern’ one we are trying so hard to adopt.  That is the reason why our values then seem to allow for excesses.  We are trying to adopt the culture of a people who are used to individualism and frugality, while our traditional cultures emphasise communality and effusiveness.  That is a good place to start; to find out who we can make this paradox work, or if we want to make it work at all.  I am personally tired of merely complaining about corruption in Africa, for our complaints have changed very little.  I am therefore exploring what actually could be the problem.

Somehow, Africans are timid to really sit down and define what they want their future to look like.  We are presently in a ‘cut-and-paste’ mode, hoping that the wholesale adoption of the ways of the Western world will lead us somehow, into the Promised Land.  I admit that we cannot live in our own cocoon, detached from what the larger world deems to be acceptable, but still it will be foolhardy to expect to adopt a culture that is totally different from what we, or our ancestors, are used to.  Nigeria and Africa – black Africa – is faced with a genuine problem of redefining itself away from the norms handed down by its captors.  We are at the juncture where we have to think for ourselves.  It is a time to fight the greatest intellectual war ever.

The first port of call is perhaps to change how our democracy works – its wastefulness, its egocentrism, its imprecision to the people’s needs, its expensiveness.  If we could have a very honest discussion about the way government in Nigeria has become the very problem it purports to solve, then there may yet be hope someday, of a genuine emancipation.