WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER
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It is a reality that we have so much to grapple with simultaneously as a country. On too many fronts, we are severely hit and scrambling for survival. Physical insecurity of lives and properties of Nigerians, food insecurity, struggling economy and a whole lot of others; but unfortunately, our challenges as presented are very traceable to a single self-inflicted ailment: corruption. We wouldn’t have to struggle with all the aforementioned but for the relentless thirst for every Nigerian to put themselves before the country and to shamelessly and unduly take from the country at all given opportunities. Our primary problem is corruption; and the actors are all of us. Even the most unexpected among us are grossly involved. But when a country like ours also has to grapple with mass corruption in the body of civil service, there are a lot to worry about.
What a decadence! That was exactly what comes to mind when the need to x-ray the extent of corruption sitting in the corridors of the Nigeria civil service and being perpetrated daily by civil servants across all tiers of government but more pronounced within the federal civil service. Each and every time we result in casting blame for public corruption and the mismanagement of national funds at the table of the president, we miss, and literally, exonerate the real and unrepentant culprits: the civil servants.
As a nation, corruption did not happen to us by accident; very much like slavery, it is man-made. We brought it upon ourselves by a series of coherent, well devised action plans that alter the course of best practices and open transactions to introduce self servicing at the expense of national development. And at the centre of the whole menace are implementers of government policies, and the middle men between all tiers of government, the civil servants.
There would be no government without the civil service and definitely without the job done by the civil servants. There wouldn’t be an appointed minister manning a ministry without the civil servant. There wouldn’t be the National Assembly without the civil servants and we would not be talking of a national budget without the civil servants preparing the document for their respective ministries, agencies and parastatals. And this is as much as there wouldn’t be incidents of manipulations of processes and figures to service personal goals as popularly referred to as corruption, without a direct input of the civil servant.
And getting the country out of this mess would not require the service of a Messiah, or out of the blues; we brought it upon ourselves and it is upon us to take it off ourselves. We will need much courage however. We will need a leader who will combine the virtue of courage with honour to decide that enough is enough and we cannot continue to look the other way in pretense, while the country is being steadily eaten off by some severely compromised civil servants.
An instance was when the minister of works went to supervised a road project already paid for and being supervised by the government’s civil servants, only to realise that those who were supposed to be the government’s eye on the project had connived with the contractors to use clay instead of laterite for the road; I presume he would be surprised and disappointed as much as a few Nigerians would be, but truly, it has been a norm too long with us for most of us to be surprised when it happens.
For a long time and till now, the civil servants have been literally designated the strongest force and the engine room of corruption in the country. There wouldn’t be a single incident of successful misappropriation of public funds without the input and cover-ups of the civil servants. It began a long time ago with job racketeering, and we did nothing until it became a norm for jobs in government agencies, parastatals and ministries to be haggled in the market for the highest bidders. We eventually got to the point that a mere teaching job in primary school would not be sold for anything less than a million naira, all paid up front.
The entire lot of corruption in contracting is supervised by the same elements, spread across all government ministries, agencies and parastatals. On one hand, they help the politicians to organise contract misappropriations, supplying cover-up information that enables manipulations of contractual deals to favour personal interests; and on the other hand, they aid contractors’ underperformance of contractual agreement for corrupt monetary returns. Eventually, they approve undone or superficially done projects at the detriments of the national need for development. That is why we see roads done in 2023 already begging again for attention in early 2024.
The worst are the evils perpetrated by these people during the assembly of the annual ritualistic national budget proposal; the smuggling of items, organisation of fake projects for politicians and the assignment of frivolous costs, to scramble into the budget that eventually rob the citizens of real development deals. When we discuss padding, we ignorantly exclude the first line of culpability; they sit right on the budget from design to implementation, they manipulate the implementations to accommodate capital not engaged and they orchestrate the movement of national resources into private purses, benefiting from the crumbs that fall into their palms from both the politicians and contractors they illegally aided.
And obviously, the living pattern and standards of the many bad elements or rather say, the opportune elements, since almost all of them are prepared to engage in these despicable and destructive acts, is a great testament to the reality of what the civil service is contributing to the national mess. It is here in Nigeria that you see a civil servant, on level 9 or even lesser, earning far less than three hundred thousand a month, having an estate of houses, riding luxurious cars and sending their children to the most expensive schools including abroad. Yet, they live freely without many consequences.
We cannot allow this regime of national anomaly to persist. It is time we rose up and do something urgently to address the decadence in the national civil service; as the first line of attack against endemic corruption in our body polity. Else, we are hitting about the bush and deceiving ourselves.
The question is, how do we stop the civil servant from aiding and organising corruption for politicians and contractors as the only way to survive within the system, because it eventually comes down to charting a survival path. What would have to be done to set the civil servants right, to do what is right by Nigeria and Nigerians?
A way out will be to extensively and urgently address the welfare packages of the civil servants. We cannot keep a bunch of lowly remunerated men and women around politicians who live in opulence on the back of national resources that are organised by the same civil service, and expect no negative response of the sort that we witness now. It is, as it seems, a game of if we cannot beat them, let’s join them. It is summarily a case of devising a method to get a share out of the national cake as the public parlance goes. The government must, for once, address the salaries and wages of civil servants to reflect the reality of our system and as a the first measure to address both corruption and insecurity.
The need for commensurate incentives to dissuade from corruption is perhaps the only feasible mutually benefiting solution to the problem as it presents itself. It is only a well remunerated civil servant that will resist attempts to be drawn into forging documents to continue the perpetuation of corruption, as much as report the same. We must devise a way to replicate the practice in FIRS, that compensates the workers with a percentage of the income they make for the country, to dissuade them from corruptly dipping their hands into the national resources at will.
But beyond amicable solutions, we cannot also allow ourselves to become a lawless nation; a nation without consequences for illegality. We will fail at stopping this entrenched menace if we cannot effectively manifest punishments for corruption among the rank and file of the civil service. We have gotten to the point where all the civil servants beyond grade level 8 must declare their financial status, including properties, and when all unexplainable assets are roundly confiscated and necessary punishments duly prescribed, if we are to begin meaningfully addressing endemic corruption
Cleaning up the civil service is now an imperative, a task upon the government, and one we cannot afford to miss out on. I hope we will have the courage to take this up forthwith.
