Never to be found wanting for scandal, Nigeria supplied the world yet another topic for headlines in the month of March entering April. The staggering sum of N12.8 billion had been stolen from the police pension fund. The names and faces of the thieves were published, together with details of the lavish lifestyle and princely possessions acquired with their ill-gotten loot. But before we could recover from the shock of what even Senate president General David Mark — no stranger to allegations of abuse of office and unexplained wealth — could describe as “blood money,” the figure burgeoned to N32.8 billion.
Never to be found wanting for scandal, Nigeria supplied the world yet another topic for headlines in the month of March entering April. The staggering sum of N12.8 billion had been stolen from the police pension fund. The names and faces of the thieves were published, together with details of the lavish lifestyle and princely possessions acquired with their ill-gotten loot. But before we could recover from the shock of what even Senate president General David Mark — no stranger to allegations of abuse of office and unexplained wealth — could describe as “blood money,” the figure burgeoned to N32.8 billion.
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As at the time of writing, there were reports that an additional N2.5 billion had been traced, and who knows how many more billions will be discovered before the thieves get a verbal reprimand, or the prosecution enters a nolle prosequi, that is if the trial judge does not dismiss the case against them beforehand? Rant and rave or cry, if you will! In the midst of this outrage, we were reminded of the rampaging brigandage bleeding the country to death by reports of the sentencing of the self-titled Ogidigborigbo of Africa, James Ibori, former governor of Delta State, to thirteen years imprisonment in far away London. Ibori, who had been absolved of any crime by the late President Yar’Adua and his Attorney-General, Michael Aondoakaa, with the judicial seal of a suborned federal high court judge, Marcel Awokulehin, had, surprisingly, pled guilty to stealing an estimated sum of $250 million or N37.5 billion.
I had thought at first that the N32.8 billion reported as stolen from the police pension fund was an error, that perhaps it was N328 million mis-typed by the printer’s devil, though even that amount would still be astonishing. But it soon dawned on me that we entered the era of billion naira thefts a good while ago. Former police Inspector-General, Tafa Baolgun, blazed the trail. In 2005 he was convicted of stealing an estimated N20 billion and given the laughable sentence of six months imprisonment to run concurrently with his time in custody. Clearly, corruption is the police; yes, that ramshackle force that turns its men and women into highway robbers, arming them for the primary duty not of enforcing law and order but of extorting the public at gun-point. It seems to me beyond madness why anyone would steal more than he or she would need for one or more lifetimes. The thieving public official is invariably a devout Christian or Muslim, but he betrays no fear of divine retribution. Even more, it is as if she expects to live forever or to reincarnate in the same place, body and conscious mind to repossess the moneys, houses and other possessions illicitly acquired before death.
But how, I ask, did we get to this impossible point: how did we succeed so well and quickly in turning the country into a fiscal asylum? What speed train from hell, what evil whirlwind, what infernal tsunami swept us away from the days of “ten percent” kickbacks to the total emptying of the public purse? Are we beyond recall to sanity, hence the outrageous recommendation by a government panel that the EFCC and ICPC be scrapped? Toothless bulldogs they may be, but dogs with a bark at corruption nonetheless, indicating that we have not lost every shred of our humanity. The irony of contemplating our headlong descent into a moral and fiscal cesspit is that one unwittingly begins to long for those days when the late Justice Ovie-Whiskey of FEDECO’s “Verdict ’83” fiasco could protest his innocence by claiming that if he saw N250,000 he would faint. Recall also that Major Chukwuma Nzeogu and his fellow misguided majors for change through a coup d’état had railed against ten percent-ers. Oh, they should rise from the grave! So too should Fela Anikulapo-Kuti who sings in “Authority Stealing” thus, “If gun steal one thousand naira/Pen go steal one million naira.”
Yet, as Ovie-Whiskey denied that he was bribed to rig the 1983 election in favour of the ruling NPN, thereby signalling the end of the doomed “second republic,” its mandarins were, as now, swilling in ill-gotten lucre. That was the epoch that launched the phenomenon of the billionaire club, entrance into which was marked by champagne parties. It was when conspicuous consumption and ostentatious living high and above any known or legitimate means became the easiest walk to respectability, to chieftaincy titles and national honours. No surprise, then, if it was the epoch that gave us self-branded wines, burnished in the public mind by a vintage named AMA-Akinloye Champagne. This may or may not have been an act of calculated calumny by the stern and dubious duo of Generals Buhari and Idiagbon who sought to restore some level of probity with iron fists, but the very existence of the lore indicates where the billion-naira corruption rain may have begun to beat us.
Just how did we fall pell-mell into the fiscal mad-house that Nigeria has become? I have no expert’s answers, only a few commonsense conjectures to add to the others in our market-place of ideas. Because I am speaking in particular of the normalisation of billion and trillion naira thefts, I trace the current phase of the astonishing phenomenon to General Babangida’s wholesale surrender of the currency to the IMF and World Bank for indefinite devaluation. Thenceforth, the more the naira depreciated, the more the thief-in-government needed to steal in order to maintain parity or acquired and new class privileges. It was Babangida, after all, who entrenched this new embezzlement benchmark with the “disappearance” of $12.4 billion or N18.6 trillion from the so-called oil windfall account of which he was the sole authorising signatory, as the Pius Okigbo panel set up to clear the “mystery” revealed. But however steep the decline of the naira, it is not yet toilet paper. A billion naira, a million even, can still do an awful lot of things — say for a school, hospital or unpaved street. Proof is that the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, not known for keeping tight purse-strings, could fix N1.4 million, N889.4 and N993.6 as salaries for the president, a state governor and the senate president, respectively.
But inflation is an effect and not a cause. In three previous essays here — “They Won’t Even Build Toilets for Themselves! Thinking Through the Corruption Complex with Frantz Fanon,” “Decolonising the Mind: On Colonial Trauma and Corruption” and “The Federal Republic of No-Man’s Land” — I have written of a persisting colonial factor which I believe points to the extreme alienation, bordering on neurosis, of the ruling elite (as, also, the ordinary citizen) of the post-colonial nation. Because colonialism gave us the model of a nation-state polity and public ethic, yet because it was an order of brutal subjugation and exploitation superintended by a government whose officials lived a life of opulence without accountability to the colonised, those who replaced them at independence could only sustain that lifestyle deemed part and parcel of governance by continued plunder and dispossession. In other words, the new governing elite inherited a colonial mentality of total alienation from the colonised land and people. Worse for us, there was no pre-colonial country with a defined national ethic called Nigeria to which we owed any sense of patriotic duty or loyalty. To this day, Nigeria remains in the eyes of its rulers either a rich and powerless foreign country or an internally colonised booty-land; a treasure island.
A theory, no doubt, and I cannot restate my argument in full here, but I should like to add to whatever merit it has one more thought. Aggravating a bad situation is the sudden emergence of a remuneration policy of paying non-appointive or management-level public servants unrealistic, slave salaries. Everyone knows that the wages of a worker in this category cannot, seriously speaking, take her home. Gone are the days when a Grade II teacher, such as my uncle, James Ofarie, could build a modest house from his savings. Having abandoned gestures towards living wages and regular adjustments for a cost of living allowance, government nurtures corruption in the public service. We all know that you cannot obtain any service from a ministry or government agency without paying “family support,” without “seeing” and “settling” virtually every petty or high official that will see or touch your file. Thus, by design or default, government policy promotes a thieving ethic. To put it bluntly, government expects public servants to steal if they are to linger near or above the poverty line and keep body and soul together. As long as all these factors and more govern our civic life, we should get ready for trillion naira thefts fast approaching as the new thieving order of the day.
Ifowodo may be reached at [email protected]
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