Ayomide
“The rulers who steal Nigerian’s future and a poor man who steals a yam at the market are judged very differently. Pinch a yam in the market and you will have petrol-soaked tyre jammed round your neck and set alight. Trouser a billion dollars of state funds and everyone fawns on you…. Corruption exist everywhere, not just Africa… But Nigeria’s hilariously brazen corruption puts it in a different league. Elsewhere it is conducted behind closed doors or by nods and euphemisms. In Nigeria it is open and it is everywhere” Richard Dowden in AFRICA: Altered State, Ordinary Miracles
At the heart of the political system in Nigeria, since the transition to civilian rule in 1999, has been the declared intention of the various governments all levels to gith against corruption. No speech can be complete without some tilting against the windmill of corruption. The more corrupt our ruling elite has become, the more pious is the declaration to fight the scourge of corruption to a standstill. Of course, everybody recognizes the body blow that a corrupt process of governance has dealt our country: failed school system; dilapidated health sector; deficient infrastructure; manifestations of a failed state; low level intensity insurgencies in sections of the country; a Hobbesian state existence for the people just to mention but a few.
So there is no one who rejects the argument that corruption so gradually sapping Nigeria of its vitality, even when members of the ruling elite swim in the obscene wealth that was procured through very questionable, often corrupt ways. The truth is that we tend to wax emotional, get angry about corruption, without setting modern corruption within a historical ambience; neither do we expose the class root of the processes of corruption. Moral indignation is very useful, but at the end of the day, we do not possess sufficient knowledge which can be the only basis to design very efficient platforms to genuinely gight corruption, as part of a national project of development. We will return to this train of thought later.
Last week, the media reported that former governor of Edo State, Lucky Giedion, who had been arraigned to face a 191-count charge by the EFCC, was eventually convicted on a one-count charge of corruption by the Federal High COURT IN Enugu. Igbinedion will howe4ver not be going ot jail, because he was fined the small amount of N3.6million only, Lucky had entered into a plea bargaining with the EFCC, and one of the companies he used to fleece his stat. Kiya Corporation, was only convicted on a two-count charge out of the 23 proffered against it. It was ordered to pay a fine of N500million and to forfeit some landed property. The media reported that Lucky Igbinedion paid the fine within minutes of the verdict and was driven away. The prosecution in the case had informed the court that the EFCC had withdrawn the charges against the accused and filed amended charges; Lucky eventually entered the dock and pleaded guilty, thus paving way for the gentle rap on the wrist that went for a conviction.
The Digimedia veridc does not come as a surprise, as a classical expression of ruling class justice, in a class society. Every one knows that Lucky Igbinedion presided over the systematic looting of Edo State in his eight-year regime, yet the man has been let loose to enjoy the remaining and probably, most substantial part of the loot of his incompetent, thieving regime. If the indignation that trails verdicts like that remains merely moral, we will never get to the root of corruption. The capitalist system itself came into begin on the basis of criminal form of corruption: slavery was the basis of the primitive accumulation which funded the industrial revolution in Europe and the USA; and thereafter, there was the neo-colonial policies of the past fifty years.
Those who have chosen to build capitalism in developing countries have no heathen lands to colonize nor do they have slaves to force into back breaking toil. This is the reason why they prey on the post-colonial state to loot, institution mind-boggling forms of corrupt enrichment. In nations like Indonesia, the Suharto dictatorship was venal and corrupt, but at least it invested heavily in developing the productive capacities of Indonesia. The difference in Nigeria is that we have bandits in the driving seat; they plunder the nation and take the resources out of our country. These thieves do not even believe in the country that they fleece with so much rapacity! Richard Dowden in the book that I have quoted at the head of this piece said that “the Nigerian elite did not believe in Africa. They stole whatever they did not even keep an oil refinery and had to import oil”.
Nigeria is clearly in trouble with verdicts such as was handed out to Lucky Igbinedion. It means the toal overthrow of decency and all hope for restitution because those that continue to systematically plunder Nigeria will become emboldened that they will eventually only hand over some of their loot. They have completely taken Nigeria hostage and they have inherited the nation! Dowden said of Nigeria, that “All its institutions- the civil service, the laws, hospitals, schools, the army, police, business, academics- had become so corrupt that, although Nigeria looks like a functioning state., it is just a shell. It still holds the shape of a nation state form the outside, but withing, corruption has become the institution…Corruption does kill in Nigeria”. The Lucky Igbinedion verdict underscores this fact; if we do not build new platforms of politics to use power to rectify Nigeria, we might just as well kiss this country bye; or in the alternative just let the corrupt completely inherit the nation.
