19th September, 2013
On Tuesday at the 54th annual conference of the Nigerian Economic Society in Abuja, President Goodluck Jonathan scored a point, a very cheap point. The President spoke very extensively about corruption and how Nigerians encourage it but shocking was the fact that he said his government had put institutional reforms in place to combat corruption.
On corruption, what he said was not new as Nigeria’s lofty ranking on the list of the most corrupt countries in the world is constant. In July this year, anti-corruption nonprofit organisation, Transparency International, TI, released its 2013 Global Corruption Barometer, which surveyed residents in 107 countries, including Nigeria. Of the 107 countries, Nigeria was ranked the eight most corrupt country in the world.
More staggering was the fact that since Goodluck Jonathan became president, Nigeria has become even more corrupt than before. About 84 per cent of those surveyed in Nigeria by TI claimed corruption had increased in the past two years, a higher percentage than almost any other country in the world.
To debunk Jonathan’s cheap point that his administration was combating corruption, TI said 75 per cent of those surveyed said the government was, at best, ineffective at fighting corruption, worse than in all but 10 countries.
More troubling is that 94 per cent of people claimed that political parties in Nigeria were corrupt, the most in the world. But there’s more, the corruption indices for public officials was put at 69 per cent (28th highest in the world) and the Nigerian Police Force, which the president claims are wrongfully blamed for corruption is put at 92 per cent (tied for 4th highest in the world).
Jonathan’s administration has not only failed to tackle corruption in the public sector, it has failed to do same in the private sector. According to TI, the government refuses to act on accusations that the oil companies are under-reporting the value of the resources they extract and the tax they owe by billions of dollars.
At the conference, the president also mentioned two key things. First was that the management of government finances is now being done electronically. That is ludicrous to say the least. Electronic fraud is as easy to perpetuate as the manual fraud. Computers and electronic gadgets only save and compute figures and records put into it. If those figures are falsified the computer does not know and cannot object.
All around the world, electronic fraud is perpetrated everyday. Human beings work behind the desktops and laptops, so electronic fraud is a possibility, a huge one.
Secondly, he said he was going to use the rule of law as a framework. He said the leadership of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, ICPC, had been repositioned to ensure effective, efficient and transparent way of managing corruption and corrupt practices. Since Jonathan became president, the EFCC and ICPC have become toothless dogs chasing shadows. They are a shell of what they used to be. In the last two years, no high profile case has been pursued by these agencies that were repositioned by the president. In the real sense, what does this repositioning mean?
All around the world, Nigeria has become synonymous with corruption, manually or electronically. It is about time we saw some action. Talk is cheap.