How bad is corruption in Nigeria and what are its root causes? Leaving aside root causes for now, let me tell you a story. It was told to me in Lagos and corroborated in Warri, just two months ago. My good friend, Emenike, and I had not seen each other for three years.
How bad is corruption in Nigeria and what are its root causes? Leaving aside root causes for now, let me tell you a story. It was told to me in Lagos and corroborated in Warri, just two months ago. My good friend, Emenike, and I had not seen each other for three years.
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In that time he had, by one of those flukes of Nigerian politics, become the acting chairman of a local government in the east. For only four months, albeit. A lawyer and practising Christian, he had always been as despondent about public service in Nigeria as the angriest citizen next door. Well, here was his chance to show what service means. Sitting down to lunch with him and his lovely family at a restaurant in Allen Avenue, I prompted his story by asking if the tales of the orgiastic looting at local governments that I hear are true.
On resumption of office, he said, he was scandalised to notice that the local government secretariat had no toilets, though the chairman’s office had one. The council’s employees were constrained to make a dash for the nearby bush to answer the call of nature. “Imagine that, the women having to go squat in the bush!” Mouth agape, I managed to ask, “Are you really telling me that no one thought of including toilets in the plan when building an entire local government secretariat? So where did the honourable councillors go when pressed?” Well, they didn’t come to work often enough, or tarry long enough when they did, to have that problem. On the rare occasion they were betrayed by biology, however, they too headed for the conveniently placed bush.
My friend named his first order of business to be the immediate construction of a toilet end to the secretariat. No! said his councillors, who were appalled by the use to which the acting chairman wished to put the lean resources of the council. A loftier end was to share the funds set to be flushed down some toilets. That was how things were done before he came, and that was how things were going to be done under him, as they surely would be done thereafter. Against their stiff resistance, my friend built the toilets, together with a borehole to service the water system. Emenike’s next tale of sleaze was not of the toilet variety, though I confess to being stuck with the faecal image. “They wouldn’t even build toilets for themselves? So what on earth would move them to build a school, a library, a clinic, or a park?” I kept interjecting as he informed me of his efforts to appease the incensed councillors by letting each take a contract for grading and making motorable the road to his village. Only one councillor cared to dump four tipper-loads of sand before considering his work done. Sensing my growing incredulity, Leechi, Emenike’s adorable wife, affirmed every word her husband had said. Thinking that they had exaggerated a bit, I recounted their story to the director of human resources in a Delta State local government. I was meeting him for the first time through my good friend, Chido Onumah. No, there had been no embellishment as the DHR had himself witnessed a similar battle over the renovation of existing but non-functional toilets.
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So how bad is corruption in Nigeria? Words cannot begin to describe it, but we can agree: corruption is arguably the greatest evil confronting the nation today. Absolutely nothing of any worth can be done in the public sphere as ninety to one hundred percent of budgeted sums, already inflated beyond insanity to begin with, end up in private hands. Consequently, seeking political office, as two-time head of state General Obasanjo declared, is a “do-or-die” battle where the spoils of war are instant fortunes for the victors. Today, a struggling man or woman barely able to make ends meet, like the great majority; tomorrow, rich beyond dreams and even flaunting the loot while still in office. Corruption has become the oxygen Nigerian public office holders and their cronies breathe. Unchecked, it seems now our “natural” way of life. We can, therefore, go about its business in the open, as the police demonstrate at numberless checkpoints across the country.
Beyond this pessimistic view, however, we must begin to search for the root causes of this plague. For the national psyche has been fundamentally altered by corruption. But since the psyche delineates a dimension of existence that resists easy materialist formulations, we must turn to the psychological modes of analysis. Start with the psychoanalytic Frantz Fanon. We will, I think, find in him valuable insights into the structure of the mind shaped by colonialism beyond the bland blaming of imperialism. We may pose the question of corruption within the prism of trauma. Defined as a shattering experience that radically alters an existing frame of reference and consciousness, trauma condemns its victims to a compulsive repetition of the past in a doomed attempt to master the catastrophe. The compulsive re-enactment of the symptoms of the traumatic past haunts the present and threatens the future, even as the victims repress or deny the trauma.
Let me try to make this argument a little clearer. In his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon famously said that “only a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the structure of the complex.” If we call this a “corruption complex” — clearly, it is now a pathology — what might we see in a trans-contextual reading when, for instance, Fanon says in The Wretched of the Earth that “The colonized man is an envious man”? Take the passage in full: “The look that the native turns on the settler’s town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession—all manner of possession: to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep with his wife if possible. The colonized man is an envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly ... ‘They want to take our place.’ It is true, for there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place.”
Might corruption be the “non-violent”means — given the poetics of violence that define Fanon’s last work — by which the colonised dreams of taking the place of the colonizer? We must remember that the colonizer symbolised not only political power but an easy and lavish lifestyle complete with the choicest colonial real estate, cars, leisure and recreation together with a retinue of domestic servants. It was a lifestyle sponsored by mindless exploitation, vaulting the colonial officer to a class or social status unavailable to him in his native Europe. But the dream of “all manner of possession’ is not satisfied by the mere possession of the coloniser’s wife; at any rate, not after independence. By crook or hook, those who had finally taken the place of the departed colonial masters had to acquire and sustain the lifestyle associated with power and governance. In other words, the equation of power and ostentatious living we witness today may have far more to do with our colonial, and so traumatic, past than is acknowledged. To the mind of the present-day inheritors of the colonial state handed down intact, blind dispossession of the people comes with the territory of power. But corruption is a universal problem, so I speak only of the Nigerian variant of its post-colonial strain.
If you think this is idle intellectualism, consider that the current chair of the EFCC, Mrs Farida Waziri, called not long ago for the psychiatric examination of public office holders. “The extent of aggrandizement and gluttonous accumulation of wealth that I have observed suggest to me that some people are mentally and psychologically unsuitable for public office,” she said. The unbridled amassing of public wealth, she added, had reached “a point suggesting ‘madness’ or some form of obsessive-compulsive psychiatric disorder.” If you still do not see the parallel, do remember nonetheless that the colonial officer, the primary instructor of the Nigerian public officer in the ethics of governance, had scant interest in developing the public sphere, unless as it enhanced the imperial project of expropriation. No wonder, you might say, local government councillors will not build public toilets!
• Dr Ifowodo teaches poetry and literature at Texas State University-San Marcos, USA.
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