WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER
info@medaner.com, justme4justice@yahoo.com
So many things are happening concurrently at the speed of light. Necessities they are but unpalatable given the condition of the citizens. What has to be done has to be done, but it comes with difficult imagination. Here we are hoping afresh that the sacrifices that would have to be made by Nigerians wouldn’t be in vain. We need changes, we want changes. Nigerians want to live in a safer Nigeria; Nigerians want to see a working nation, a nation that can proudly be called once again as the giant of our continent, not only in name but in actions.
We are at a new beginning. The promise of renewed hope, we are holding strongly onto and all gaze fixed on the new administration to take the nation out of the mire of indecision, economic woes and non-abating insecurity as promised. But then, we all have our part to play; it is our nation and we all have contributions to the challenges. No one is excused. But it is now time we all repent of our undoing and join the trail of rebuilders as we walk Nigeria through a new beginning and feasible transformations on the strength of the endowment of the country.
In 2015, when the former President Muhammadu Buhari administration began, our hopes as Nigerians were highly raised; we knew of the gross corruption eating deep into the marrow of the national system, and our incapacity to do anything to arrest the menace because even those who should be in the position to do anything about it were as enmeshed in the atrocities as every other offender.
And so the administration began with fingering and arresting of alleged corrupt members of the then PDP, who were in government and had obviously misappropriated state monies for personal purposes. Within the first few months of the government, the EFCC had arrested great number of high ranking members of the PDP accused of illegally receiving, or misusing government monies. The list of the arrest is endless. Top on the list was the then National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, bringing about the infamous media sensation of Dasukigate. The then Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Allison-Madueke’s trial blazed the trail after the Dasukigate, and a long list that cannot be easily exhausted here.
The trials were sensational, the media gyration seemed more important than the substances of the cases themselves. How did they all end? How were the cases concluded? What gains accrued to Nigeria and Nigerians from the trials? I assume relatively none; most of the cases literaly died off the public media and the stolen monies forgotten. No lesson learnt and corruption continues to grow because we fail to proffer consequences for these crimes. Why? Perhaps because we did not really wanted to see justice done. It is from within us that forces arose to fight against corruption; it is from within us that we attacked the government actions as we throw supports behind the same people who had stolen the country to stupor.
Eventually, the best we got were a couple of high ranking politicians sent to jail by courts after near decades of trials. We were happy that it is beginning to happen; that those in leadership would soon begin to stay away from corruption but our joy was soon cut short. Where are they now? How many of them served their jail terms fully? Almost none. Corruption then continued to thrive in our system up till the last weeks before the emergence the new government.
We cannot talk of getting Nigeria right if we cannot get the problem of institutionalized corruption off the table. We have started the whole exercise of arrest and trial again; would it be business as usual, a case of wetting the citizens’ appetite and abandoning them hungry.
It appears as if our laws and punishment for these offences are too weak to serve as deterrents; as much as the judiciary is too weak to act its duty. Our law seems weak and the law enforcers somewhat do compromise. Corruption is a global menace, and the larger the country is, the more it is challenged by corruption; yet we have seen more populous nations exerting reasonable controls that balance the wheel of sanity and efforts at stemming corruption in their systems.
The Peoples Republic of China is a very good case study of what the fight against corruption should look like. The law was designed to effectively punish offenders and the system designed to set antecedents of implementations that scare prospective offenders. The Article 2 of the China anticorruption law categorically states that “(1) An individual who embezzles in excess of RMB50,000 shall be sentenced to 10 years or more in prison or life imprisonment and his property may be confiscated; if a case is extremely serious, the death penalty shall be meted out along with confiscation of property; (2) An individual who embezzles in excess of RMB10,000 but below RMB50,000 shall be sentenced to 5 years or more in prison and his property may be confiscated; if a case is extremely serious, a life imprisonment shall be meted out along with confiscation of property. Even an embezzlement less than RMB 2000 is not allow to go free.
The law went ahead to uniquely classify the crime of misappropriation of public funds; and beyond regular punishment, states in its Article 3 that “Heavier punishments shall be meted out for misappropriation of such public funds as disaster relief, relief for other emergencies, fund for flood prevention, subsidies for servicemen’s households and relief fund and materials for personal use”. The system works. Crime hasn’t reduce to zero, but the country, despite its huge population and more tendencies for corruption is able to reduced its corruption level far below Nigeria and several other nations.
We cannot say the same about our laws and its capacity to catch offenders. The Nigeria Corrupt Practices and other Related offences Act 2000, imposes the maximum penalty of seven years imprisonment and as fine of one million naira on Any public officer who in the course of his official duties, inflates the price of any goods or service above the prevailing market price or professional standards (Article 22). The Article 19 of the Act which cover most of the corrupt offences perpetrated by public office holders merely stated that “Any public officer who uses his office or position to gratify or confer any corrupt or unfair advantage upon himself or any relation or associate of the public officer or any other public officer shall be guilty of an offence and shall on conviction be liable to imprisonment for five (5) years without option of fine”.
It is about time we strengthened the nation’s anticorruption laws and create systems that effectively uphold the laws as detriments to corruption in the country. Otherwise, we would be deceiving ourselves and cycling about same point.
We failed to win the insecurity wars on all front not because our security strength is poor, no, but because the management of the system is more occupied with how to share allocations to the sensitive sector at the expense of the nation. We know this; these handlers, one after the other are under investigations and trials and those taking over from them are simply stepping into their shoes because they know they would always get away with their crimes.
The corruption in the nation’s oil and gas industry is more worrisome. From the time some elements unilaterally decided to partition the nation’s oil well and share it among themselves, just the way the colonial masters partitioned Africa and the Asia worlds for keep, the story of corruption in the industry began. The fuel subsidy scam and the organized stealing of crude continued without penalties. Yet as much as we know and talked about these crimes, they persist. Why? Because the same people who could stop it are the same people benefiting from it; why would anyone attempt to excuse the military from the corruption in the sector, is it possible crudes to be stolen everyday without the knowledge of complacency of the military? No, it is not possible.
Is it possible that the management of the NNPC would not be aware of the exact daily production, the production sites and the movement logisticxs of the crudes? Would NNPC not know before any other concern of any infractions on the production figures? Of course they do, so why deceiving ourselves that we could magically effect changes without effectively sorting out the corruption in the sector. A new administration, everyone that is not weeded out becomes a saint, whereas they have been part of the management of maladministration that characterizes the sector.
The political class and political office holders cannot be expected to stay off corruption when the system on the other hand preaches corruption. How would governors who spend over 10 billion naira to contest election and won be expected to restrain himself or herself to legal incomes? That is not possible; he must recoup his investment with profits and allowances for next election campaign cycle. The same goes to an elected Senator who spend between 600 million and 1 billion to win his election; how do we preach to him or her to stay off budget padding and abuse of position to amaze illegal recovery of spent fund. This is the case all the way to the local government. We cannot stop corruption by wishing to stop it; we must reconfigure our system to become non corruption supportive.
The revelation of the alleged corruption of the immediate past governor of Central Bank shouldn’t be surprising; it was the norm. The system allows and celebrates it. The now acting governor of the central bank, was he not sharing in the loots? Was he innocent? But now, we all assume he is innocent and a saint. That is our problem. If we want a departure, we would agree that it is no longer game as usual, and remove all structures that support the menace of corruption in every sector, none is exempted in the entire country, even the presidency. The solution is far beyond removal and replacement of leadership; it is the system
Now, this is a new beginning; the dawn of renewed hope. We cannot pretend to assume all is well and what must be done to take Nigeria away from the status quo, and to create a system devoid of inert and active corruptions, must have to be done. We cannot begin to build on faulty foundations and expecting positive results. We cannot want a sudden positive turnaround of the national system that is used to achieve only one thing in the last sixty years; corruption. A system heavily inhabited and manned by individuals who only see opportunities to take from the system for personal gains.
We are not going to get the renewed hope by changing people. We must return to the table to decide how to change the system and the mentalities of the people of Nigeria. Today, we support corruption exept when we do not benefit from it, or close to those who benefit. We must get to the point when, altogether, we all frown at it and condemn it. Till then, all efforts might be in futility. May we not labour in vain yet again in this administration; Amen.
