“All its institutions – the civil service, the law, hospitals, schools, the army, police, business, academics – had become so corrupt that, although Nigeria looks like a functioning state, it is just a shell. It still holds the shape of a nation state from the outside, but within, corruption has become the institution.” – Richard Dowden, Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracle (2009).
On Tuesday, May 10, 2016, ahead of an anti-corruption summit hosted by the Commonwealth Secretariat at the Marlborough House in London, British Prime Minister David Cameron was caught on microphone telling the Queen that Nigeria and Afghanistan were “possibly two of the most corrupt countries in the world.” In the informal conversation which took place in the company of the Archbishop of Canterbury (who tried to defend the anti-corruption credential of the current Nigerian president) and another British official, PM Cameron said: “We have got the Nigerians – actually we have got some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain.”
Since then, many Nigerians have been calling for the head of PM Cameron. Some others have even accused President Muhammadu Buhari of being naïve for not demanding an apology from PM Cameron. Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media, Mallam Garba Shehu described Cameron’s remark as “embarrassing to us, to say the least, given the good work that the President is doing.” Senator Chukwuka Utazi, Senate Committee Chairman on Anti-Corruption and Financial Crimes, said: “I am taken aback. I am not happy about it.” Human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, SAN said he wished that President Buhari had joined issues with PM Cameron over the insulting remark. Senator Dino Melaye described the PM’s remark as “reckless” and “demeaning.”
When asked at an interactive session, after his pre-summit lecture, if he would demand an apology from Mr Cameron, President Buhari said wittingly: “I am not going to demand any apology from anybody. What I am demanding is the return of assets,” a statement which drew wide applause. In other words, Britain should be quicker to recover assets and stolen funds stashed by corrupt Nigerian politicians in Britain and to repatriate them to Nigeria. “What would I do with an apology? I need something tangible,” President Buhari said. For many Nigerians, this was perhaps the first time their president was spontaneously making one of the wittiest remarks, full of common sense, in his nearly one year on the saddle.
Now, whether we like to admit it or not, PM Cameron has done us a great service, by helping us to confront the reality of our broken national image in the international community. Without the finesse for diplomatic correctness, Cameron has helped us to know that behind the niceties, courtesy, and politeness with which some of our African political leaders are treated in international forums, not much regard is given to their countries. Behind the façade lies the general impression in Europe and America that many African countries are simply dead shells ravaged by corruption, war, hunger, disease and misery. A Western journalist once described Nigeria as “a failed state that works.”
We who are Nigerians ought to face up to the truth and accept responsibility for what we have made of our country. Nigeria is “fantastically corrupt.” Who does not know it? Is there any patriotism in denying the truth just to save face? In today’s digital world where you can sit in the comfort of your living room and see anything and everything happening in far-flung regions of the world, does Mr Cameron need to be in in our country to know how “fantastically corrupt” Nigeria is? Is he the first person to say how corrupt a nation Nigeria is? Certainly no.
In the year 2000 two African scholars, Kempe Ronald Hope, a professor of Development Studies in the University of Botswana, and Bornwell Chikulo, Head of Department of Development Studies, University of North West, South Africa, carried out a study on corruption in Africa. In the introduction to their book titled, Corruption and Development in Africa, Lessons from Country Case Studies, Hope and Chikulo began by stating that “the incidence of corruption varies among African countries, “from rare (Botswana), to widespread (Ghana) to systemic (Nigeria).” However, “the majority of the countries are in the range of widespread to systemic. Where it is rare, it is relatively easy to detect and control. But, at the other extreme, where it is systemic, the likelihood of detection and control is somewhat minimal as an incentive and further practices are put in place to perpetuate the system. In other words, institutions, rules and norms of behaviour are adapted toward the ultimate goal of predatory gain.”
They went further to say that “from being widespread to systemic, corruption in Africa has now reached cancerous proportions and today has a demonstrable negative impact on the development process in the region. Whether in the public or private sphere, corruption results in the abuse and misuse of scarce resources that significantly affect an entire economy through multiplier effects.” It might be interesting to read that book and to see the spectrum that corruption runs in Africa. However, for the two scholars, “The entrenchment of corruption in Africa points to the fact that something has gone wrong in the governance of the individual nation-states.”
When Richard Dowden, British journalist and Director of the Royal African Society published his book, Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracle in 2009, it was built on the same premise. Having spent many years in different African countries covering news and events on politics and the economy, Dowden saw first hand how massive corruption have undermined the progress of many African nations. His book is a telling repertoire of the deep wounds that corruption has inflicted in the body politic of African nation-states. About our country, Dowden wrote: “Nigeria has a terrible reputation. Tell someone that you are going to Nigeria and if they haven’t been there themselves, they offer sympathy. Tell anyone who has been to Nigeria and they laugh. Then they offer sympathy. No tourists go there. Only companies rich enough to keep their staff removed from the realities of Nigerian life do business there. And big companies rarely mention Nigeria in their annual reports for fear of what it will do to their share price. Journalists treat it like a war zone. Diplomats regard it as a punishment posting. Everyone has a Nigerian story from beyond the normal bounds of credibility. Some are terrifying. Most are funny. Nigerian politicians try to pretend that its bad image is some Western conspiracy against Nigeria and Africa. The truth is that Nigeria’s popular image falls short of the reality. It is not just white visitors who fear it. I told a Ghanaian cab driver in London that I was going to Nigeria. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said: ‘I lived in Lagos once. Give me a million – a billion pounds, I would not go back there. Never. It is the most terrible place in the world.’”
When I published my piece, “Values and Ethos – A New Nigeria is Possible” in The Guardian (28/10/15), I began with this quotation from Richard Dowden’s book, and afterward I said: “The picture painted by Dowden above is what foreigners think about Nigeria. If one were to ask Nigerians what they think of their country, one is most likely to hear worse things. Even among those Nigerians who have an unambiguous loyalty to Nigeria you still find those who rubbish it and are cynical about its chances of going anywhere. In Dowden’s book, everything wrong with Nigeria comes down to two indices: indiscipline and corruption.”
Colin Powell, a former American Secretary of State, once let slip the opinion that all Nigerians are crooks. Dowden asks: “All? Maybe not, but a lot of Nigerians dedicate their lives to fulfilling the stereotype.” Who does not know that in Nigeria politics is a business career, and any politician who does not end up a multimillionaire is regarded as a fool? How many Nigerians want to be fools? In Dowden’s view, corruption is such an important part of the Nigerian political scene that politicians can be quite open about it. “Corruption pervades Nigerian life so broadly and deeply that it is hard to imagine life in Nigeria if it were suddenly to end. Without a little something a policeman will not investigate a crime, a journalist will not write a politician’s speech, a politician will not speak to a constituent, a tax inspector will not sign off your tax returns. You may suddenly find your telephone does not work. It has been mysteriously disconnected or ‘tossed’ as the Nigerians say. Or your electricity is cut off. When you try to find out what has happened you will be presented with a demand for a ‘quick quick’ reconnection charge.”
At this point, the question really is: Is there anything Dowden has said above which is not true? No. In other words, it is not just Dowden or Cameron or a range of Western politicians, businesspeople, journalists and writers who think that corruption runs through the system in Nigeria. We might accuse them of being Afro-pessimists, but in truth, many African politicians, businesspeople, scholars and ordinary citizens know that their countries are damn corrupt. A few years ago, the respected Nigerian professor of literature Niyi Osundare wrote in an article that corruption had become the “Grand Commander of the Federal Republic of Nigeria” That is a metaphor for “fantastically corrupt”!
Let us say that between Nigeria and Western nations, corruption works in demand and supply fashion. If our corrupt Nigerian politicians do not take our stolen commonwealth to them they will not welcome corrupt money. When we stop stealing money from Nigerian coffers and stashing them in Europe and America we can then have our peace with people like Cameron. But all this goes to show the hypocrisy of Western nations and their leaders. They talk badly about corruption in Africa and talk beautifully about why we need a concerted global effort to tackle corruption, but their countries are the very storehouses of stolen goods.
In a piece, “Corruption Inverted” published on the website of the Royal African Society, on May 3, 2016, Richard Dowden painted a fascinating portrait of the two-way traffic of corruption between Africa and the West. He started: “When Prime Minister David Cameron called a conference on global corruption earlier this year my first reaction was: you must be joking. From Pergau dam in the 1990s where Britain’s development agency built a useless dam in Malaysia as a sweetener for a massive arms deal, to selling Tanzania an unnecessary air-traffic control system in 2010, the UK government has used its weight to secure dodgy deals for British companies. Have these practices come to an end?”
The African end of the spectrum is even more graphic. “Earlier this year I was at Nairobi airport,” Dowden continued, “and my taxi stopped with its front wheels just touching a yellow line. The police immediately demanded money from the driver. Then they saw me – a foreigner – and were too embarrassed to take a bribe in front of a foreigner. So they insisted we went to pay the fine in an office in the main building. But that meant I could miss my plane. I left some money with the driver and left. Once I was out of the way the police accepted the cash. I was complicit in petty corruption.”
“In the early 1990s in Kinshasa I was having dinner with the local representative of a very large and – I thought – respectable British global company. He admitted that Zaire – as the Democratic Republic of Congo was called then – was extremely corrupt but that was why President Mobutu needed one good company he could trust to be clean – and that was the one he was proud to represent in Kinshasa. A few days later I ran into his son who was working for another company and I asked him why he wasn’t working for his father’s company. He was quiet for a moment and then said: ‘Because I could not stand seeing my father take a briefcase of dollars to President Mobutu every Monday morning.” Dowden concluded: “That was corruption on a grand scale.” Now, is there any Nigerian who cannot relate with Dowden’s accounts? Until recently, was this not Nigeria’s lot? Briefcases – or better still ¬Ghana-must-go bags – exchanging hands, whether in the National Assembly or in Nigeria’s oil behemoth, the NNPC.
“As I visited more and more African countries, I heard the same refrain: that is how you do business in Africa. This perception is annually reinforced by Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.” However, Dowden admits that this index “is based on a survey of the views of (mainly Western) business people and Western experts. This has framed our view of Africa as the continent of corruption. That is why – some say – Africa is poor.” In other words, beyond accusations and counter-accusations of corruption, there is a hidden international geopolitics that tries to undermine Africa and to cast it off as a place where nothing good can come out.
Nevertheless, instead of quarrelling with PM Cameron, I think that Nigerians should rather make a deep examination of conscience, and begin to demand accountability and transparency from their leaders. Individually and collectively, we must make a commitment to shun corruption in our private and public lives, including corner cutting, queue-jumping, breaking traffic regulations and all forms of indiscipline that have made us the laughing stock of the rest of civilized humanity. In own little ways, many of us have been vigorous champions of entrenching corruption, in things as minute as lying in a phone conversation, petty stealing and examination malpractice. But very often when we talk glibly about corruption, what we tend to see is the log in the other person’s eye. We do not see the splinter in our own eyes. For many of us, corruption is always about what others are doing – the huge sums of money they are stealing; we rarely see our own selves in the mirror. On this matter, there must be a radical change of attitude and behaviour from all Nigerians – without exception.
On their part, Western nations must cut their support to corrupt African leaders and stop aiding and abetting corruption in African nations. They must also stop making their countries safe havens for storing looted funds and for shielding corrupt politicians from prosecution. Dowden’s conclusion hits the truth: “For years we have seen countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Nigeria as the most corrupt countries but the countries that actually handle, hide and benefit from global corruption in Europe are Switzerland, Luxembourg and, of course, the City of London.” If Nigeria is fantastically corrupt, it is because Britain has also made itself a fantastically corrupt haven for storing stolen goods.
Let’s face it: Nigeria is corrupt. Nigeria has a terrible reputation in the international community. But that is just one side of the story. The other side is that Nigeria and many other African nations are struggling hard to break the corruption cycle. On this point, Mallam Garba Shehu is correct when he said: “The Prime Minister must be looking at an old snapshot of Nigeria. Things are changing with corruption and everything else.” When he addressed the British House of Commons on May 11, 2016, Mr Cameron seemed to reverse himself. He admitted that Nigeria is recording some good scores in the fight against corruption. The point is let the fight continue to finish!
