ACTEM NEWS AFRICA
“If you are unlucky not to have a representative in the judicial council, even if you are innocent, you can be found guilty – B’eyan o l’eni ni’gbimo, bo ro’jo are, ebi lo mi a je.” This very profound saying of the Yoruba, translated into a pithy musical line in one of the tracks of Alhaji Ayinla Omowura, late Yoruba Apala musician, point unmistakably to the fact that corruption and favouritism predate colonialism in Africa. When you jointly read this line and D. O. Olagoke’s 1962-written play entitled The Incorruptible Judge, you will understand why it is almost an impossibility for Nigeria to operate an impartial and corrupt-free system.
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Nigeria’s latest narration on corruption is the allegation that the 2023 election, especially the presidential election, was corruption-ridden. Three major Nigerian politicians, Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi and Bola Tinubu jostled for the presidency in the February 25 election. At the end of the exercise, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) winner. Since then, his two opponents have inundated the system with complaints of vote-rigging. The most recent narrative in the back-and-forth allegations was a riveting story which claims that the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Kayode Ariwoola, had sneaked out of the country to hold a meeting with Tinubu. He was pictured on wheelchair. The purpose of the meeting, it was alleged, was to get Ariwoola to quash the gossamer of electoral corruption allegations against Tinubu.
Olagoke’s The Incorruptible Judge is a tip of the ice-berg in the cancer that corruption has become since the author penned the book. It is a story of a young school-leaver who, upon submitting his application to fill an advertised vacancy, was asked to pay a bribe of Five pounds. Rather than gratifying the request, he filed a report with the police and his corrupt employer was arrested. As usual in Nigeria, influences were thereafter spun to ensure that the corrupt employer did not go to jail. The applicant’s father-in-law, who was a notable chief, was used to attempt to pervert the course of justice. However, the trial Judge stuck his ground as an incorruptible judge. At the end of the day, the corrupt officer was got convicted, sentenced to a term in the prison.
If you go into historical exposes on corruption in Nigeria like Karl Maier’s This House Has Fallen or Stephen Ellis’ This Present Darkness, it may be difficult not to agree that the problem of corruption in Africa or Nigeria is genetic. In Maier’s is an audacious, brazen and disturbing report of how corruption and favouritism have destroyed the fabric of Nigeria, bellwether of Africa. Told with baffling statistics, you could smell putrid odour emitting from the lines of the book. It is a distressing story narrated with a depressing consistency. Ellis, on the other hand, traced the roots of Nigeria’s fraud-prone system to the immediate colonial era, plotting the graph to the present and why Nigeria is globally perceived as global headquarters.
With the definition of corruption as “an abuse of entrusted power for personal gains,” you will realize that Nigeria is roiling right inside a puddle of stench. It is glaring that it may even be difficult to acquit any Nigerian of corruption. This is because there is hardly any distinction between the public and private and their purses, as well as public and personal gains.
Since the exit of the colonialists in 1960, the structures of governance they left behind have proved incapable of withstanding the greater pre-colonial structure of corruption that they inherited. Hard as the British tried to battle the cankerworm with institutions of the police and the judiciary, not long after they left, corruption swam ashore with a baffling notoriety. The political class that took power from them was utterly reckless, showing open disdain for accountability and process.
It was the same story with the military who took over power from 1966. Major Kaduna Nzeogwu put the problem of corruption in perspective when he, remarked: “the country’s enemies are the political profiteers, swindlers, the men in high and low places that seek bribes and demand 10 per cent, those that seek to keep the country divided permanently so that they can remain in office as ministers or VIPs at least; the tribalists, nepotists, those that make the country look for nothing before international setting, those that corrupted our society and put the national political calendar back to their words and deeds.”
The Yakubu Gowon military government decorated the Dodan Barracks seat of power with maggots. Though generally perceived as incorrupt due to his austere lifestyle, Gowon was swamped all over by perceptibly corrupt people. His governors owned properties and assets that were far higher than their incomes. Indeed, it was estimated that, on the average, the governors owned commercial properties and farming estates of at least eight houses each, an amount that averaged between N49,000 to N120,000 by 1975 when Murtala Mohammed took over. Same 1975, a corruption scandal surrounding importation of cement called the Cement Armada erupted which engulfed many officials of the Ministry of Defence and the Central Bank of Nigeria. They were accused of falsifying ship manifestos and that many of them inflated figures of cements purchased.
To stave off this public perception, Gowon promulgated the Investigation of Assets Decree No. 37 of 1968, while frenetically engaging in the process of arresting the inexplicable post-war wealth of Nigerian soldiers, mostly accumulated during the three-year civil war. To achieve this, in 1973, Gowon appointed Alhaji Kam Salem to head the “X-Squad,” a fraud investigation arm of the Police, which unearthed many scandals within the Force.