There’s corruption. But there’s also wickedness!
So what do people say is the biggest problem of this country? In his small but powerful book, The Trouble with Nigeria, Chinua Achebe puts it like this: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”
Hmmm, that was how the sage saw the trouble with Nigeria.
There are different ways to look at the notion of leadership as the country’s trouble. Perhaps we can just sit back and not trouble ourselves researching anything around it. We can reduce everything to the more globally accepted one, I mean, the big Nigerian problem – CORRUPTION with capital C! Anyone in the world who knows anything about Nigeria, and who has bothered to find out how wealthy we are as a country (mind you, not nation), would come away asking this question: “But why are her citizens so poor?” Or put in a more World Bank-IMF speak: “Why do most of her citizens live below the poverty level?”
How I wished, so very much, that many people living below the poverty level was the major problem of this group in this wealthy nation! In truth (and perhaps to add for the sake of emphasis, in reality), it is the way and manner that life is so brutish and short, very Hobbesian, that really gets to me. There are so many poor people struggling so hard to eke a living. As if this is not enough, the daily grind of doing this is so tough that you find it in their steps, on their faces, in their language – in everything that they do. We are just coming out of what can rightly be described as man-made, man-induced petrol scarcity. You don’t want to know what Nigerians, including those who live below the poverty level, went through just to continue to exist! It’s always a difficult call to make in this country of ours!
Let us return to the problem of this country. Mind you, I am not talking about problems. Legions and battalions of them abound in this country. Chinua Achebe said it is down to ‘leadership’ or the lack of it. The international community, including some not-so-international community (that is our own people), say it is down to corruption. How can a wealthy country (not nation) with so much oil not have a refinery system that produces enough petrol for its people? That surely is a leadership issue – small-minded leaders think small-mindedly! Aha! You think I am playing on words? Well, think whatever you like. After all, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) was how Ngugi wa Thiong’o put it in 1977. I think it was Mr. Ibiam, my prose teacher at King’s College, who regaled everyone in my class with that when my mind hadn’t fully been made up about Nigeria!
What say I then about corruption? Well, it is what is likely to have happened when there is confusion about the proceeds of our collective oil wealth not being accounted for. And nobody seems really concerned! Truly, concern is not expressed by mere gesticulations. You get up from your seat and act! So, is it $20 billion? Is it $10 billion? How much is indeed unaccounted for? And can they just allow corruption account for it? Yes, there’s so much of that in this country. Vagabonds in power (apologies to the late Abami Eda, Fela Anikulapo Kuti). These are people who know nothing except the artistry of self-enrichment. Any wonder why their thought processes are often circumscribed, small and failing to attempt big things!
You can dig deeper about this trouble or problem with Nigeria and you will come up with yet something more sinister. This is a country with so much religiosity about it. In fact, the other day listening to a radio programme, it was claimed that an independent research showed that there are more religious tourists coming into Nigeria to attend churches than there are coming to experience our tourist sites! Phew! Wonders shall never end. You can take a look at all of that and come up stuck, unable to action anything you ever thought you could do! It is a religious country, but it is also a country with wicked people!
Aha! That’s the other aspect of our life, our existence and our people. Yes, there is corruption. But there is corruption all over the world, including the United States, Britain and the rest of those places where they make the choice to watch over other countries and locate the head office of Transparency International, as if corruption doesn’t take place in those places. We all know it does. So, it’s about time we began to look at our wickedness quotient. I personally think that it can only be an act of wickedness for you to be elected as president, governor, senator, representative, council chairman, or appointed a minister and find yourself failing to do the job for which you have been so elected. Instead, you are able to re-direct government money for your personal use, or corruptly enrich yourself from contracts awarded to do work for the people, and as a result not care whether the work is done or not!
Wickedness, indeed, abounds in our country. It is not just the wickedness that is meted out to citizens by government officials, but there is wickedness unleashed daily on our roads by ordinary citizens against their fellow citizens. It is just plain wickedness that is keeping the perpetrators of the killings of innocent people, including young students, in the north going! It is wickedness, not just greed, that makes traders sell fake drugs, which could harm and even kill, to other fellow citizens.
Fellow Nigerians, it is wickedness that makes employers not to care about the wellbeing of their staff, even when they are making profits. There is too much wickedness in this land. Our attention must now turn to this cancer. It is killing this country in many different ways, including by way of corruption!
By: PHILLIP ISAKPA