An elder statesman and former Governor of Kaduna State, Alhaji Balarabe Musa, believes that a people’s revolution in Nigeria is the only way to extirpate corruption from the nation’s body polity. Knowing his ideological pedigree, that line of argument is to be expected. He insists that the nail-biting and the anger on the part of Nigerians over the level of corruption in high places should be discarded in favour of mass uprising where the people will take care of their oppressors in their own way and use it to teach future leaders how not to betray the confidence reposed in them by the collectivity.
Ordinarily, one will be persuaded to consider the suggestion by the former governor as overly extreme in its intent. But that is exactly what this country needs and urgently too if we must stop making a fool of ourselves before the rest the world. But will it work?
The coup plotters of 1966 who saw themselves in the mould of revolutionaries, hinged their putsch on the twin evil of bribery and corruption. 51 years after, we are still talking of corruption. Sadly enough, between then and now, the cankerworm has multiplied exponentially that the nation’s leaders have graduated from being 10 per centers to the level they are now that they no longer calculate in terms of percentages. What is common today is for a few people in positions to steal the whole value of a contract without doing the job.
Anyone with conscience in Nigeria will be genuinely scandalised by the sheer volume of graft in government circles to the point that one will find it difficult to imagine what our corrupt leaders are thinking when they decide to steal billions of Naira and stash them away in obscure places where the money will not be useful to the economy. No, they no longer steal in Naira, it has gone out of fashion. It is now in dollars and pound sterling. Imagine stealing $10 million when the value of the naira to the dollar was say N192.
Until President Muhammadu Buhari came into office, the rest of us had started responding to acts of corruption as routine or what an American preacher described as sweet of office. A public officer’s kinsmen will disown him if he leaves office without soiling his hands. To them, he would have misused a golden opportunity to get their own share of the national booty.
From this perspective, we are compelled to ruminate and ask; can the envisaged revolution be practicable when all of us are part of it one way or another? A political appointee is expected to offer scholarship to all the students in his constituency. From his legitimate income? In the public sector, a civil servant cannot treat a file until the owner comes around to grease his or her palm. And we are not talking about directors and permanent secretaries. Judges, as has been recently revealed, write and sell their judgments to the highest bidder. At the petrol station, the attendant is likely to play a fast one on the buyer if he is not sufficiently attentive. Teachers extort money from their students and call it ‘sorting’. The girls among them, too psychedelic or, to borrow their lingo, ‘aristo’ to face their studies, exchange their bodies in orgies of sex for marks. The importer deliberately imports a sub-standard product to be sold as the real stuff so as to maximise his returns. Even worship places are not spared the putrefied stench of filthy lucre.
Regardless, we argue that despondency in the face of the malaise is not an option because the rot will then find an excuse to fester. Revolution, in a segmented society like Nigeria where loyalty is more to tribe and religion, in our view, is hardly feasible.
However, in our opinion, corruption can still be checked by putting in place institutions with appropriate legislations that will monitor the system to ensure that everyone behaves oneself. Revolutions require strong men and women. They, too, do falter.