“Having dealt with many corruption cases, I am inclined to suggest that public officers should be subjected to some form of psychiatric evaluation to determine their suitability for public office. The extent of aggrandizement and gluttonous accumulation of wealth that I have observed suggests to me that some people are mentally and psychologically unsuitable for public office. We have observed people amassing public wealth to a point suggesting ‘madness’ or some form of obsessive-compulsive psychiatric disorder”- Mrs. Farida Waziri, EFCC Boss
At a workshop on transparency and accountability in Kaduna, last week, the EFCC boss, Mrs. Farida Waziri, leant on her forensic training as a cop and head of the anti-corruption agency, to make a most interesting suggestion: check the heads of our rulers because many of them have a compulsive psychiatric disorder, which makes them thieves and should therefore not be keeping our nation’s purse. The suggestion is not even new; I think it was canvassed not too long ago by Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate. And frankly, Nigeria’s post-colonial history seems to underline that something is really wrong with those who get recruited into leadership. Those given to psychological portraiture such as artists and police officers will readily detect a pattern which suggests some form of madness amongst those we are saddled with as rulers.
Just before the 2007 elections, a colleague was surveying the eight years of civilian rule under Obasanjo, and especially the performance of the governors in Northern Nigeria; he came to the conclusion that one of the governors, that is usually unkempt and given to bizarre ideas about his badly-governed state, might end up the only one to escape imprisonment, because he would successfully plead insanity in court! That governor, the reader might recall, was the one who confessed to handing over billions of naira of his state’s resources to Nnamdi ‘Andy’ Uba to support Obasanjo’s Third Term Agenda. So Nigerians have had an underlining suspicion that we might have been allowing madmen in the corridors of power; the difference being that they have not been walking naked in markets but have been extremely busy stealing our country blind!
But is the issue as simple as that? Can the problem be isolated to the psychiatric disorders in a few individuals or might there be a more fundamental social basis for what Mrs. Farida Waziri described as “’madness’ or some form of obsessive-compulsive psychiatric disorder”? Of course I am not disputing the sociology of corruption which led to madam’s conclusion; however, I believe that reducing the problem to the subjective issues of a compulsive disorder makes some faulty assumptions: one, that the neo-colonial order is a ‘normal’ form of society and that capitalism is the only way that society can be organized. On the two grounds, I disagree with Mrs. Waziri. In matters like this, the fault is not only in the individuals, but more fundamentally in the nature of society that produces them; it is nature and nurture combined!
The Nigerian ruling class chose capitalism as path to development. But Nigeria is really a neo-colonial country, with a specific role assigned to it, within the international capitalist division of labour. That role was to supply cash crops in the past and oil today while acting as market for goods from the advanced capitalist countries. In essence, the Nigerian ruling class is about one hundred years late in its lame effort to build a capitalist society. Capitalism itself could never have become a success, without some basic preconditions, and the basic one is what Marxist scholars call the primitive accumulation of capital. In that phase, there was the colonization of the Americas and the genocide of the Aborigine populations and the slave trade which Marx said turned Africa into a warren for the commercial exploitation of black peoples. So without this phase and subsequently colonialism and neo-colonialism, which has continued to this day, the advanced capitalist countries would not have built the capitalist success which they tout as the only way society can be developed.
Unfortunately for Nigeria, the ruling class has no colonies to expropriate surplus from; there is no significant peasant production to steal neither is there a substantial working class to exploit. The resources of the state are therefore where they turn to for the “gluttonous accumulation of wealth” which Mrs. Waziri referred to. But the difference is that while the robbers in Europe and America invested their loot to develop their capitalist societies, and to earn respect, even began to set up foundations and endowments with their blood-soaked monies; in Nigeria, our thieving rulers loot and take monies out of the country. They do not invest here; they don’t make their loot serve social ends. This is the only basis to accept the theses that they are simply mad! But do not be deceived, there is no way to have capitalism without its attendant concomitants of corruption, especially in a neo-colonial setting. The Americans who preach a “corruption-free capitalism” know that the system is soaked in the blood of millions of exploited peoples around the world. Its continued hegemony is watered with more blood as we have seen in Iraq; in the theft of resources around the world and corruption. That is the nature of the capitalist system or how many times have we heard of bribes given by Western Transnational Corporations for contracts in Third World countries? Why did we have the Siemens and Haliburton scandals?
If Farida Waziri genuinely believes we must check the psychiatric state of members of our ruling class, it might be a popular move but she is still scratching the surface of the problem. Her suggestion has not gone down well with David Mark, an archetype of the ruling class in Nigeria! She has a long battle to fight because our rulers truly betray symptoms of obsessive psychiatric disorder, but it is a product of the unproductive and historically barren form of capitalism they have foisted on Nigeria. The choice created an ambience where corruption is the essence of governance and in turn it has made lunatics out of our thieving rulers! This is why Nigerian patriots must work for the liberation of our country: there is no hope on the path they have chosen for Nigeria.
A MISHEVIOUS TWIST ON THE YAR’ADUA AMNESTY PROCESS
Watching the barely-literate thugs that President Yar’adua was shaking hands with at Aso Villa the other day, I could understand Sam Nda-Isaiah’s angst at the absurdity of the entire ‘Amnesty’ situation. But I have a mischievous twist to the story; since the leading militant-thugs have all confessed that they were armed by the PDP in the first place to help rig elections in 2003 and 2007, before they turned the guns to other uses, can we then conclude that President Yar’adua was merely collecting and taking an inventory of PDP-issued arms and ammunition, in readiness for the 2011 elections? The portents for 2011 are not good and the PDP might still need the guns and the militant-thugs to ensure a “complete capture” of the entire South-South!
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