War against corruption
Feed fat, fast, off the state: that’s the goal of the Nigerian politician. And that is the perception of most Nigerians. A perception confirmed by Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer for 2013 – 72 percent of Nigerians surveyed said corruption has increased a lot over the past two years; 78 percent consider it a serious problem.
And, respectively, 94 percent, 92 percent, 73 percent, 69 percent and 66 percent considered political parties, police, the legislature, public officials and civil servants, and the judiciary as the institutions affected by corruption – a toxic situation where the institutions expected to fight corruption are infected and distrusted. More than three-quarters admitted to paying a bribe to the police in the last 12 months.
In Nigeria, you can plunder with impunity. As Frederic Bastiat, the 19th century French economist and statesman, said: “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
Government officials and their cronies can steal and go scot-free because a politico-military complex of spinmeisters (sycophants), pretenders, blunderers, traffickers, counterfeiters, carpet baggers, climbers, fixers (lawyers, accountants, bankers), chancers and merchants of patronage protect their own. Fuel subsidy scammers who ripped government off N1.1 trillion and oil bunkerers engaged in industrial scale oil theft have nothing to worry about.
Corruption can be curbed, if the political will is there. Fighting corruption requires recognising the drivers of corruption. First is the size of the informal economy. Laurence Cockcroft, former chairman of Transparency International, says that in Nigeria, “unrecorded transactions amount to at least 40 percent of GDP, constituting a vast reservoir from which corrupt payments can be made without trace”.
Second is corruptly gained money used for “political finance”, by godfathers, to secure or re-secure political posts. Third is organised crime, from drugs to counterfeit pharmaceuticals. The fourth driver of corruption is mis-pricing of products by national and international companies – between 2001 and 2010 illicit financial outflows from Nigeria amounted to $129 billion, according to Washington-based Global Financial Integrity.
Government, as usual, with political statements, will either downplay the scourge of corruption or express fake concern by ‘urging’ or ‘harping’ on accountability, good governance. Which is why few Nigerians feel government is fighting corruption effectively; 2 percent said the battle against corruption is effective.
More worrying is that majority (34 percent) disagree that their individual effort can change the situation. Such attitudes are eroding trust and confidence in government institutions. What’s their own? Political corruption in Nigeria thrives in Nigeria because there’s no social contract; we operate a “don’t tax don’t tell” system.
The system can change. It is evident that Lagos can build bridges, tar roads, clear canals, etc, and provide jobs (8 percent of Nigeria’s 88 million employed people). This is evident. What isn’t evident is that Lagos’ action government needs billions to complete these projects. Those billions won’t come from the monthly federal allocations.
Lagos State is building accountability by taxing its citizens. And in the process of bargaining over tax it is laying the foundation for a social contract, “a key building block in the development of democracy”.