Recent headlines have exposed the magnitude of the sums of money brazenly stolen from the public till. Nigerians are confronted with unbridled looting and impunity that advertise the total helplessness of the people to protect their own resources. Corruption in Nigeria is however not an episode, nor even a series of episodes: it is systemic. Crushing it therefore requires a systemic approach.
President Muhammadu Buhari and Ibrahim Magu, the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, should not view the ongoing investigations, arrests and prosecutions as the be-all of the war on graft. They should be mere opening skirmishes against an entrenched system and a damnable scourge that have permeated through the society and inhibited national development efforts. Nigeria needs to build an enduring architecture of institutions and processes to smother pervasive corruption.
No one is sure really just how much has been looted. One often quoted figure is $400 billion stolen between 1960 and 1999. A recent estimate by a coalition of civil society groups is that $350 billion was looted between 1970 and 2014. Recent disclosures show how $2.1 billion was allegedly taken, ostensibly for arms procurement to prosecute the war against insurgents, only for officials to distribute it among themselves for elections, prayers, “spiritual” contracts, non-existent consultancy and for no stated reason at all. Scandals have seen $10 billion for power projects, N1.7 trillion for fake petrol subsidy payments, $1.6 billion for refineries’ maintenance, N15 billion in pension funds, between $7 billion and $10 billion Gulf War windfall and N3 billion in SURE-P funds disappear into thin air. Nigerian officials, according to the United Nations Development Programme, typically cream off 20-40 per cent of development aid and loans. Part of the money looted by the despised dictator, Sani Abacha, and recovered, has been re-looted and successive governments have not rendered an account of what has been returned.
The looting is repeated at the state and local government levels where annual budgets are routinely padded for elected officials and civil servants to gorge themselves on. So compulsive is the corruption that even federal funds released to some states in September 2015 to meet unpaid wage bills have been looted. Some officials of the Imo State Government are being quizzed over N2 billion bailout, while civil servants remain unpaid.
Corruption has denied Nigerians free and fair elections as was played out in Rivers State recently. A report by researchers at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in 2003 listed among the 10 most corrupt institutions, the police, political parties, legislatures, customs, road safety officers, federal and state cabinets, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and local government councils. Corruption has reached its most subversive level by birthing at the judiciary and at the mass media: both institutions have come under negative public scrutiny in recent times. When the judiciary and the press cannot be relied upon, the systemic rot is alarming indeed.
Nigeria must uproot corruption or collapse. Imagine that the conversion of security funds that became routine under the Goodluck Jonathan government even when parts of the country had been occupied by jihadists had continued, a permanent partition could well have been facilitated by rapacious corruption. A more realistic assessment of the country’s corruption status was confirmed in the 2016 Best Countries rankings where she topped the list of 60 surveyed as the most corrupt.
To move away from the rentier state to a productive society, renowned global expert on corruption, John Quah of the National University of Singapore, recommends “moving with the market to incentive good behaviour, which is an honest, open, defensible and workable system, instead of hypocrisy, which results in duplicity and corruption.” Like the World Bank, the UNDP blames the absence of strong viable institutions and the breakdown of old ones for systemic corruption. Regulations like the Treasury Single Account, Public Procurement rules and constitutional accounting and auditing provisions should be scrupulously enforced and violators prosecuted.
Once a corrupt post-colonial entity, Singapore remodelled the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau into a lean, independent and well-funded anti-graft agency. It accompanied this with tough laws and deterrent penalties that are vigorously enforced, transparent administrative procedures that eliminate opaqueness, and competitive public sector pay. The onus is on the person accused of corruption to prove his or her innocence.
In Ghana, where, by the late 1970s, corruption was said to have replaced the rule of law as the “dominant regulator of society,” its 1992 constitution facilitated a Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice to, among others, investigate corruption and misuse of public funds. The country also established a Serious Fraud Office in 1999, a Whistle Blower law in 2006 and a Freedom of Information law in 2012. Transparency International ranked it less corrupt than Italy and Brazil in 2006.
Transparency International attributes the low level of corruption in Denmark, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden and Norway to strong political institutions and a broad consensus among the populace on the dangers of corruption, unlike in Nigeria, where a significant segment routinely makes excuses for graft.
In his study of the Singaporean model, Quah identifies political will as the decisive factor in the war on sleaze. Nigeria must leverage on Buhari’s apparent distaste for corruption to instil zero-tolerance for it. According to Italian criminologist, Cesare Lambroso, “there is no solution to crime, except punishment, incarceration and deterrence.” We should stop celebrating corrupt officials, but demand swift punishment for treasury looters.
The government should strengthen the anti-graft agencies and make them truly independent. The ineffective Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission needs an urgent change to purposeful leadership. The searchlight should be beamed on the judiciary and electoral agencies, while radical reforms should be initiated in the police and other security agencies.
Going forward, transparency should be entrenched in all public transactions as well as fiscal discipline in line with global best practices.
