On ending prebendalism (I)

If he didn’t have the will to see it through, he shouldn’t have pretended that he had the will to set up the committee in the first place. The fact that he is having difficulty making the report public or is not willing to set up a White Paper committee on it will all seem […]

If he didn’t have the will to see it through, he shouldn’t have pretended that he had the will to set up the committee in the first place. The fact that he is having difficulty making the report public or is not willing to set up a White Paper committee on it will all seem to suggest that it is adverse against the minister, one of the trio of female ministers in his administration who are close—very close—to him and believed by all to be untouchable and beyond censure.
Had the recommendations of the com-mittee been favourable, he wouldn’t have had any problem making it public, if only to absolve his embattled, dear minister, shame critics of his regime’s corruption record and momentarily be able to put on a probity toga to counter the universal impression that his government is the most corrupt that Nigeria has yet had; and, by virtue of Nigeria’s distinguished leadership position in the comity of corrupt nations, his is easily the most corrupt government in the world. This impression is a very sad fact even for the enemies of the Jonathan administration; but sad though it may be, it is very true. If Nigerians will tell themselves the truth, they should tell each other that there is no country in the world that is more corrupt than their own. Our corruption is so skilful, so pervasive but so insidious that it is beyond the experience of Transparency International to understand and beyond its eyes, which are only used to uncovering normal corruption, to detect, and too entrenched for its short broom to sweep.
It is not for nothing that Nigeria is called the nation of marvellous scammers: sometimes it requires great effort to resist the urge to marvel at, rise to attention and salute the criminal genius with which some of the exploits Nigerian fraudsters cook up and pull off, especially outside the country. Of course this is not perpetrated by all Nigerians; it is limited to two ethnic groups but for the sake of inclusiveness and national unity, Nigerians must learn to bear and accept their own share of the universalised federal character of this international blame.
It is arguable that the ingenuity required to govern Nigeria well and make it prosperous and great is less than the genius deployed in successfully committing  these and successfully avoiding detection. And within the country, corruption has become a national pastime not unlike football in Brazil; everyone is involved in it as a perpetrator or a spectator.  Perhaps the only level of corruption that this nation has not yet attained is that it has not yet reached the stage of jailing people who refuse to partake in corruption; though, at the rate things are going, the day may not be far off when that begins to happen.
In keeping with international best prac-tices, corruption may be defined as the use of public office for private gain, the abuse of entrusted authority for private profit and the use of official position for personal benefit; and it will include all instances of bribery, extortion, fraud, embezzlement, nepotism, misuse of public assets and influence peddling, all of which have become the norm here. And, in addition, Nigeria has all the corruption-friendly characteristics that aid in the growth and ascendancy of abuse of procedure: absence or weakness of institutional mechanisms to check corruption, poverty and stalled and uneven economic growth, weak or non-existent civil society institutions, a compromised and politicised civil service, a corrupt police force and an even more corrupt criminal justice system. It is a system crippled by prebendalism.
But, what exactly is this prebendalism that has crippled the Nigerian state? Prebendalism is an English word created specifically to describe the type and nature of corrupt clientelism in which public resources are corruptly allocated to co-religionists or ethnic-based beneficiaries in order to mobilise, channel and use religious, cultural and political identities in Nigeria. It is the spoils system of politics and governance in which state becomes an extension of head of state.
When elected officials, civil servants, political appointees and the cheerleading members of an ethnic clan believe they can appropriate state resources and use them to create and dispense benefits to themselves and their kin, that is prebendalism at work; and this sense of entitlement that ethnic or religious groups have to state revenues or the belief in the right to control resources of the state is a form of non-governmental prebendalism that is today being used to justify the turn-by-turn ethnic misappropriation and looting of national resources. It is this prebendal patron-client identity politics that will never allow Nigeria to develop and entrench bureaucratic and political transparency in its system.
So much has prebendalism disfigured the Nigerian system that many things have been taken for granted that a lot of what should normally have been classified as corrupt practice today—and is so classified and treated in all other countries—is taken as normal and is therefore generally acceptable in our society. Each of the following is a corrupt practice and may even be an impeachable offence: refusing to implement the budget, cross-vote expenditure without virement, overspending and extra budgetary expenditure, giving contracts without due process—and here we might note that due process was in existence before President Olusegun Obasanjo; and when he came, he created a whole office for it, and then it became a corrupt practice itself.
That is why, with the exception of only a very few individuals, all those who have led Nigeria or governed a state have become fabulously rich way beyond their legitimate earnings; but no one is asking anyone any questions because society has learnt to accept what it should have risen in unison to condemn and all aspirants to the positions of the corrupt are nursing similar aspirations.
There are many reasons why corruption takes place and why it continues unabated in Nigeria. While it may be accentuated by the display and celebration of ill-gotten wealth, it is more a function of selfishness, lack of patriotism and the absence of conscience all of which combine in the average Nigeria to manifest itself as a new personal philosophy of Meonlyism, which recognises only the pleasure and convenience of ‘me only’ at the expense of society: and is manifested most graphically in an unwillingness to wait your turn—in the traffic, in the queue, in the rush to get rich, in obeying the law, and in general in not doing what one is supposed to do. Some say poverty and the inadequacy of compensation are the cause of corruption. It is certainly not poor pay that causes corruption, because if money can combat it, corruption will have solved itself; for, the corrupt take more from the system than any salary increase will have given them.
Yet, despite all the noise about corruption, there is an absence of sanctions against corrupt practices because of the protection it enjoys from those entrusted to stamp it out, and there is very little that can be done about this; because when everyone is into it, there will be no one to out it—and if something is everybody’s business, in the end it is really nobody’s business. Curtailing corruption will certainly prove a tall order for Nigerians. First, there doesn’t appear to be the will, the desire or the power to fight corruption by the ruling party; and the opposition will have a tough time convincing Nigerians how it can successfully fight corruption with nothing more than the reputation of a single individual.
In the attempt to curtail corruption Nigerians have an uphill task before them—the entrenchment of a proper democratic culture in the polity. At the very least, this must involve the institution of a public sector reform that will create effective state institutions that will ensure participation and representation of the people in the management of their affairs; rebuilding the public service to ensure transparency and accountability in the control and management of public resources; and the creation of an independent judiciary that can be a real refuge for a short-changed nation.
And in order to further discourage those who will nevertheless commit corrupt practices, the country may decide to copy other penal systems that have proved effective in fighting corruption: the death penalty may be a fitting recompense for those who . In addition, the nation may adopt the system of asking for proof of earnings and proof of ownership of assets for those in a position to abuse trust, if they seemed to have done so by owning what they couldn’t have earned legally. This is the only way to stamp out this neopatrimonialism of our prebendary.
But while Jonathan is not the first to promote nepotism, tribalism, ethnicity, the rise and ascendancy of a provincial, thieving cabal or revel in cliquish intrigues that masquerade as governance; it is in the best interest of the Nigerian nation that he becomes the last.