Specials DIVERSITY EMPLOYERS MAGAZINE Spring 2011 - Anniversary Commemorative Issue

Nigeria: Fighting Corruption

ICPC Has it Wrong

By Obi. O. Akwani
MGV Editor

Posted December 19, 2008

During its Six O’clock Evening News on October 22, 2008, Channels Television carried a news item that the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) had begun a campaign to fight corruption beginning in the schools in Nigeria. The idea being to nip the bug of corruption in the bud at the point where habits of the future are cultivated – in the minds of our youth.

While the idea sounds good as a news bite and its propagation enhances the impression that the ICPC is doing its job, experience from other realms have proven that such postures are merely a postponement of the day of reckoning. The current corruption fighting regime in the country might be enabled by such campaigns to serve out its term with public approval, but in the end the cosmetic nature of such campaigns will mean that the problem of corruption will remain with society.

About a month earlier, before this ICPC TV news, I had read in one of the daily newspapers that the ICPC chairman, retired Justice Emmanuel Olayinka Ayoola had called for national prayers to seek God’s help to save Nigeria from corruption. That one brought an involuntary chuckle to my throat. I searched the newspaper story carefully to see if Justice Ayoola was somehow speaking metaphorically; but no, as far as I could discern from the story, he was altogether serious.

I know Nigerians take their religion seriously, but I regard it as a ludicrous impasse for this country if the head of a national corruption fighting organization has nothing more practical to offer than a call to national prayers. It is like the commanding general of an army when the sounds of war are everywhere and the battle rages and the enemy is advancing, ordering his soldiers to down their riffles, pick up their holy books and go on their knees in prayer. There is a time and a place for everything, just as the Bible says. More specifically, certain calls are suited to certain people to make. The call to prayer is not the general’s or the ICPC chairman’s to make. He should leave that to the religious leaders and concentrate on leading his fighters in plans and strategies in waging the war and battles before them.

In its focus on the young people and education, the current ICPC regime in Nigeria reminds me of another institution in another place fighting another form of corruption. For over forty years the racism fighting institutions in Canada focused their efforts on the youths. They had convinced the media and the general public that a more permanent solution to the evil of racism will come when the youths are informed and educated about how wrong it is to be racist. This was their idea about fighting racism from its foundations and they spent lots of money making advertising directed at youths and going to schools to encourage anti-racism programs that preached at young people to scorn racism. Yet despite all the financial and organizational resources poured into such campaigns, year after year, the problem of racism in that country remains and has persisted to the present time. Sometimes it grows even more virulent with the backlash of overt racism becoming more brazen.

Whether what you are trying to fight is racism in Canada or corruption in Nigeria, focusing on the youth is the wrong thing to do. The youth are not the key to either problem. The key to the problem, in both cases, is in the culture; a culture cultivated through long years of convenience. Direct the culture toward change and you will find the solution to your problems.

In the case of racism, for many centuries it was convenient to downgrade the humanity of some people because such perceptions made slavery (and the economy it supported) sustainable. That slave-based economic system helped the elite in Europe and the Americas grow very rich. To sustain the economic system and the riches it brought, the slave system, where the labors of a group is employed as cheaply as possible to grow the wealth of another group, evolved into a culture of racism where the advantages of the privileged group is maintained by continued discriminatory treatment of the downtrodden group.

In the case of corruption in Nigeria, it remains convenient for the elite in this country to tolerate corruption. It is a convenience built-up over a period of more than 50 years. About a decade and a half before independence, the agitations of youthful Nigerian nationalists had begun to pose a threat to the British colonial enterprise in the country. The nationalists took advantage of the democratic ideal to press for their country’s right to independence. They naturally found solid support with the Nigerian populace regardless of ethnic allegiance. The colonist realized that they could not win against the nationalists in a straightforward democratic political process unless they found a way to alter the values of a growing nation. They therefore found it convenient to corrupt the democratic political process through constitutional and other means to ensure that their side prevailed. Their tinkering with the constitution made it possible to acclaim to elective political office candidates the people did not choose or vote for. Their administrative structures made the political process captive to the whims of the elite. These things combined with the persuasive power of bribery and coercive force of denial to persuade the erstwhile nationalist agents of change to accept and adjust to the status quo.

These are the forces that defined our political culture and they are still alive today dictating the political and economic direction and state of our country. Anyone who wants to fight corruption in Nigeria needs to understand these facts. Only by tackling the problem from such a cultural/political perspective can the fight against corruption be successfully waged. As I tried to tell the Canadians in their struggle against racism, focusing on young people can be a waste of time as these same youths are going to grow up to seek membership in an adult world they do not control. The price for that membership is conformity. Most of the ideals of youth that do not fit the realities of the adult world must be discarded. It is the rare hardy youth that persists against all odds into adulthood. And then such a person must be content to live and operate outside the precints of mainstream adult world.

Just as in the same way that the adult world of the Canadians sees a lot of benefits in sustaining the racist condition, the adult world of the Nigerians (the establishment) knows its benefits from the corrupt condition of society. Changing those conditions will have to come from the adult world and not the youth. By the time the youth comes of age and begins to seek admittance into that adult world, it is not change that is uppermost in the youths' mind, but success and acceptance. Unless they are prepared to define their own success and remain outside the mainstream, the youth must conform. By the time the youths manage to gain that acceptance into the adult world, most of the anti-corruption tenets drummed into them in school will have been washed out of them or at best watered down considerably.