Chris Nwedo
April 5, 2017
The basis of every abuse, mismanagement and challenges of insecurity in Nigeria is traced to corrupt inclinations among Nigerians especially the elites. It is undeniable that in this nation as in some other badly handled economies, corruption and mismanagement of resources are robust obstacles to getting things right whether it is in terms of infrastructure development, distribution of wealth, support for education or integration of the disparate ethnic nationalities constituting the federation. Corruption is raucously blamed for the devastation that humiliated the national economy to genuflection. Social cohesion and development instruments are made dysfunctional as ignorance and quantitative values of religion are encouraged. Religion and politics are two delicate subsystems of the nation’s life that have been significantly tampered with by this disorienting phenomenon called corruption. Nigerians are today wobbled in discord orchestrated by injurious ambitions of a few clutching religion, politics or both.
We have become so sophisticated to the point that Nigerians generally see heinous crimes from the relativity of who committed them. In our complication as a nation, we have transited to a point where crime is not condemned as crime but the individual behind them. Atrocities in one end of the society are tolerated or condoned but condemned with passionate tirades in the other. Today more than ever, the lines polarising Nigeria are increasingly weaponised for the ego of a few. The outcry and the prosecution of crimes, notwithstanding the gravity, are subject to religious or political affiliations. Today, there is a longer list of religious tacticians in Nigeria than we have of true Nigerians. These tacticians are so religiously sensitive that they see need for religious divisions in everything and affiliate anywhere as long as religion is concerned.
However, at the veneer this religious activism is shocking disbelieve and atheism. It is a disoriented self-interest that looms large. Nigerians are more religious than political but trust is the hardest and the most expensive commodity to find in its vast expanse. This is hypothetically blamed on the nation’s intractable brands of corruption. Corruption has undermined trust and peaceful coexistence, slaughtered accountability and transparency in the management of national wealth and caused both political and religious rulers to fall short of their commitments to people and to God respectively.
The crowning of the contemptible situation is the fact that the mass of citizens are impoverished and insecure as lives and properties are under unrelenting threat by religious zealots in various shapes and sizes. By way of land, sea and air bombardments political rulers introduced ego-oriented policies and execute personal political projects that exfoliate the weakened economy as religious despots spew on the people recalcitrant merchants of death and destruction. By the actions of the powerful, it is debatable whether majority of the citizens are safe anywhere in this country. Ordinary Nigerians have been attacked and destroyed praying in the mosque or singing in the church. Citizens are stolen on the way by kidnappers, banks are robbed in broad day light and markets are bombed notwithstanding all the police and military check-points, and billions of dollars budget security gadgets. This situation is demonstrably mysterious.
Even more threatening is the rapidly growing scourge of employable but unemployed youths who are effectively instrumentalised by the potent enemies for their religious or political dirty jobs. First Class today does not assure first job except it is prayed over by a powerful man of God and re-anointed, or accompanied by charm or a complimentary card from a notorious politician. For those who manage to find jobs, the wages are despicable. But by the First Class, I carefully excluded all those whose scores are enhanced or fine-tuned. First Class by favour is one obtained to take advantage first.
To make it big in contemporary Nigeria you need to be political or religious. It is safer to be both to fire at both ends. The society has made these zones the only possible safe zones. In these home zones, you are impenetrable by infiltrations of poverty, indestructible by serious criminal charges, immune from correction or criticisms in the spirit of ‘touch not my anointed’.
The most immediate impact of corruption in contemporary Nigeria is, without controversy, the large scale perversion of values, revolting economic and political atrocities, lethal ethnic and religiously motivated violence that go unpunished, the impunities of those in charge, the implausible desperation that precipitated unprecedented spate of anarchy or mayhem among the nation’s security agents, the armed robbers who are unstoppably on rampage attacking police stations and banks without real challenge. Robbers, political jobbers and religious zealots have been killing and maiming the victims dispassionately and sacrilegiously. Several police officers have been indicted for drunkenly executing defenseless victims for the effrontery to delay their twenty naira bribery at whimsical check-points.
‘The police and courts are the very agencies needed to enforce human rights, but there are deeper levels of corruption within these agencies. Delayed and/or shoddy investigation of crimes and incessant adjournment of cases by courts are both acts and effects of corruption and make nonsense the right to fair hearing enshrined in our constitution and other international instruments. Justice delayed often translates into justice denied. Our prisons are terribly congested, with the result that inmates are denied the basic human rights to dignity.2
In a July 2002, Transparency International corruption barometer survey reported Nigerian police as the most corrupt institution in Nigeria. The chance of ‘advancing all human rights in Nigeria depends on effective institutions such as an independent judiciary, functional and efficient ministries, good labour relations and well trained and equipped police force. A vibrant and independent media is also necessary for promotion of human rights through education and exposition of abuses. The consensus among many commentators is that ‘most Nigerian institutions have failed to deliver, due to structural weaknesses engendered largely by corruption. Corruption is weakening governmental and non-governmental institutions and rendering the realisation of basic human freedoms difficult, if not impossible.4 It is an assumption sufficiently popular among scholars that corruption and marginalisation in Nigeria create continual opportunities fertile enough for criminally minded Nigerians to thrive in criminality.
The tribulations in Nigeria’s development are known and measurable, and remain collectively and individually expressive in diminutive genuine national advancement. There is no advancement in a country where a few are superlatively comfortable on the cadaver of the others. Nigeria is one of the world’s largest producers of crude oil but has no kerosene for her ordinary folk to cook, no electricity, no good roads, or functioning water supply system even when it is soaked with petro-dollars. It is probably only in Nigeria that a public servant is paid hundreds of millions and the other is paid N5, 500 monthly for doing about the same work. Here, it is common for a judge to declare a criminal or a murderer free and acquitted in spite of mounting credible evidences. On the other hand, evidences are doctored to imprison and punish the guiltless. It is normal in Nigeria for criminals to be carried shoulder-high as people’s heroes.
Labour leaders have always organised revolts that inflicted untold hardships on Nigerians only when they have scores to settle. Iam not aware that it has organized against inhuman and painful work culture in favour of the exploited or intervene in unjust dismissal of defenseless workers, but they force everyone traders, banks and mechanics under threat of mortal injury to close when they want their proxies to go on rampage. The Academic Staff of Nigerian Universities have been on strike because of ‘unfair treatment’ by the federal government accused of not paying them enough. But the lecturers too are neither fair to the students nor to the university system they have gradually grounded for selfish reasons. Many of the lecturers have full job and pay, yet, they have many other schools the give part-time chaff in exchange for fat salaries. Teaching in the university today is a club you need to be admitted into in order to belong. Artificial scarcities of teaching staff are created by those in charge to enable them enlarge their coast. Surprisingly, some of these universities have reprehensibly forgotten why they are in the system.
In brief, it is permissible to conclude that corruption inflicted very deep cuts in the corpus of Nigerian society. These scaring wounds actively debilitated the strides of the nation to authenticity, genuine self-direction and the realization of the legitimate targets as a nation exceptionally endowed. ‘Make no mistake about it; corruption remains the most debilitating factor standing between Nigeria and its progress. It remains a decrementing tendency that has afflicted the Nigerian state since independence. Again, there is no doubt that Nigerians especially the downtrodden abhor corruption for the corrosive effect it inflicts on them.
It is infinitely sustainable to attribute to corruption the spiteful state of the socio-political and economic atmosphere in Nigeria. Corruption has been indicted for the unresourcefull use of the country’s abundant wealth for the benefit of the people, a brazen violation of the obligation to provide needed services to the people. The best means of serious fight against the predicament is to keep talking and exposing the miasma.
