9th June, 2015
By Odunayo Joseph
To take cue from Dr. Wale Omole, the National Coordinator of a non-governmental organization, National Problems and Solution (NPS) on his appeal for the police high command to establish a special bureau where people could freely lodge complaints on the excesses of policemen as published in his article titled “Establish Public Complaints Commission” after six traders were killed in Abuja and which appeared on page 42 in Sunday Punch newspaper of July 10, 2005, I equally make a strong appeal to the Federal Government to, as a matter of urgency, establish Federal Bureau of Whistle Blowing (FBWB) considering the pervasiveness of corruption in the Nigerian society since the return of the country to full-blown democracy in 1999.
There is no doubt that there is need to tackle the menace, which has been the cause of the present gloomy state of the nation’s economy, with vigour once and for all through the establishment of the bureau in all the 36 state capitals and in the Federal Capital, Abuja to expose acts of corruption both in the public and in the private sectors of the Nigerian economy. This is the only way by which the millions of suffering masses who laboriously lined up to vote for change on March 28, 2015 can assist the government of President Muhammadu Buhari to meet their expectations. The president, from his past antecedents when he was at the helm of governance in Nigeria between December 1983 and August 1985 and coupled with his undoubted personal integrity, has what it takes to tackle the monster and ultimately make life more meaningful for the generality of Nigerians particularly the downtrodden who have been brow-beaten by politicians to see and accept poverty as a norm in the midst of plenty.
Corruption, notably elite corruption, has been the bane of unemployment, underdevelopment of the nation in all ramifications, appalling and sub-standard living of the people nationwide just to mention. Catholic Bishops in Nigeria, speaking through their National President, Bishop Felix Alaba Job in their Second Plenary session of Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria in Ijebu Ode on Monday, September 13, 2010, attributed the nation’s poor development to reckless looting of the nation’s treasury by public office holders with a warning that if the looting of the nation’s resources was not checked, the development might force Nigerians to react as “a dog driven to a corner will bark and bite its owner.” He also admonished politicians for holding the populace to ransom for personal gains. The full story was reported in a publication titled “Looting of nation’s resources worries Catholic Bishops” which appeared on page 9 in The Punch of Tuesday, September 14, 2010.
Going down memory lane, the one-time Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, Justice Emmanuel Ayoola on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 in Kaduna while delivering an address at the opening of a three-day workshop organized by the office of the Head of Service of the Federation in conjunction with the ICPC for members of the anti-corruption and transparency units in federal agencies, described the civil service as breeding ground for corruption. Also, on the occasion, an executive member of the ICPC, Mrs. Julie Onun-Nwariakwu, blamed Nigerians for not demonstrating enough courage to fight corruption in the country and and alluded this situation to the inability of Nigerians to check the excesses of their elected representatives and failure to report cases of corruption in the country the result of which is the increasing rate of corruption in Nigeria.
In a seminar on why there was no Nigerian managing director at the helm of affairs in top performing and most profitable seven companies in Nigeria, as reported in a caption titled “Corporate leadership: Top Nigerians lose out” and published on page 21 in The Punch of Wednesday, March 5, 2008, one of the participants at the seminar, Chief John Agbedi JP, the Chairman of Sunrose Consulting and Management Services, in the same vein as other participants said there were many reasons why indigenous managers were not occupying the top seats in multinational companies chiefly among which is the fear that the Nigerian chief executive of a multinational would surely be influenced by a number of factors, other than business in the position he occupies, if made a CEO of publicly quoted companies.
In the editorial of P.M.NEWS of Tuesday, 6 July, 2010, captioned “Corrupt Public Office Holders Everywhere” reference was made to the revelation by the Senate Panel on Housing and Urban Development in their report that N1.2 billion proceeds from the sale of Federal Government houses got missing and that the revelation brought to the fore the pervasive corruption in the land and an expose on how those in position of authority use their positions to fleece the nation of billions of naira that could have been used in developing the nation. Apart from embezzling the proceeds realized from the sale of the houses, the senators also accused the Presidential Implementation Committee (PIC) officials of refusing to disclose the number of houses sold so far, those yet to be sold and the beneficiaries of those sold. The Senate panel not only alleged that N1.236 billion of the proceeds was missing and unaccounted for but also revealed how the members of PIC rather than keeping the N80 billion generated from the sale of the houses in a bank at five percent or 10 percent interest, as directed by the government, instead allegedly negotiated with banks to fix the interest payable on the various sums kept with them at two percent and pay them the remaining three percent up front. The senators also alleged that some choice properties in Ikoyi, Lagos were sold to prominent persons and companies instead of the sitting tenants who had bidded for them but were not allowed to pay for them, and mentioned an instance where a mansion at 15 MacDonald Road, Ikoyi, Lagos that was to be sold to a sitting tenant for N251 million was rejected and the house was resold to the wife of a governor in the North East for N165 million.
A Guest Columnist, Dele Abba Kyari in his article titled “Corruption and Society” and published at the back page in ThisDay of Tuesday, March 20, 2007 wrote on three forms of corruption. He mentioned electoral fraud which poses a clear danger to our democracy. He also wrote on the second form of corruption which has a direct impact on security and standard of living in the society, and on the third one which is the outright theft of public funds, with such impunity, in large sums and flagrantly flaunted in the face of the victims, by elected public officials, and that “like dead sardines we are still expected to applaud our cans”.
A columnist in Sunday edition of ThisDay newspaper, Simon Kolawole, in his article titled “Elites and the Nigerian Project” wrote at the back page of the paper on Sunday, February 3, 2012 thus: ”And that brings me to the topic of discussion today – the grave mistake which elites make when they think it is fun owning mansions and private jets, at our own expense, in the face of democracy and poverty in the land. This myopic mindset propels them to continually milk the system and feed from greed. By elites, I refer to the politicians, the technocrats and business moguls who collude to plunder our resources. They know themselves. We know them. By the way, I am not saying it is a sin to be rich. I am not suggesting that to be poor is to be righteous. The key phrase here is accumulating wealth “at our own expense”.
“Last week, I highlighted the twin evil of ‘outright looting’ no attempt to execute projects at all) and ‘hyperinflation of contracts’ (including padding of budgets by lawmakers). Resources that would otherwise have been freed up and utilized to accelerate infrastructure development are mindless pilfered. Definitely, there is a reason the streets of London, Dubai and Singapore are relatively safe today. There is a reason you feel secure there without a fence around your house. Long ago, their elites understood the Yoruba proverb: Irorun igi ni irorun eye” (the bird needs a comfortable tree to perch at ease”). You cannot be at ease when the society where you’re flaunting your wealth is not at ease.
In Nigeria, our political elites and their money launderers in the private sector do not appreciate this basic fact. The money for fuel subsidy gets stolen. The fertilizer subsidy meant to make food available is stolen. Housing schemes are never for those who truly need them. Budgets for education and health are looted and you find private hospitals and private schools springing up everywhere, charging fees that can be afforded only by the wealthy, most of whom probably participated in the looting in the first place. Budgets for roads are stolen and the potholes keep swallowing innocent lives. The next thing you see is private jets everywhere, at the expense of the common wealth.
“No wonder you sleep at ease in your London home, where there is no fence, than in your fortified Nigerian house where soldiers and police are on guard. It is quite easy to understand why: Our elites have created and are sustaining a society filled with outrageous inequalities. Millions of people are jobless and poor and resentful of the rich. They read the stories of sleaze in the newspapers every day. They read how someone steals billions of naira from police pensions and is fined N750,000 only! They are bitter and angry. They are desperate. They resort to violent robberies, kidnappings and other crimes. That, in a nutshell, should explain why the elites still feel insecure in their maximum-prison mansions”.
“The elites in developed countries have long understood that true wealth, true prosperity is that which reflects not just in their private accounts but in the larger society. That is why in the UK, for instance, agriculture is subsidized to make food cheap and affordable. No matter how poor you are, you should be able to feed. There is an understanding that you should not be homeless. So councils build flats and make them cheap or free for the poor. They understand that the need for affordable and efficient transport system. You don’t have to own a car. They understand that a society ravaged by poverty and crippling inequalities is a doomed society. The rich can never live at ease in such a society”.
It is high time public office holders learnt a lesson from Dr. Yusuf Maitama Sule, a one-time Nigeria’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations who in the preamble to an interview that was granted him and published in the January 2, 2011 edition or Sunday Sun newspaper was introduced as “a minister in the First Republic, who was so poor that he couldn’t build for himself even a hut and that in fact, when the civil war broke out and he had to evacuate his household from Lagos to Kano – his town of origin – he had to rely on friends and family members for the fare”. In the said interview, the minister bemoaned the high level corruption and said that:
“Oil has become both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it brought money for us to develop the country. A curse because it has made us develop a negative culture, the culture of extravagance. As a result of oil find, we have found the habit of sending our girlfriends to do their hair in Paris, do their shopping in London and spend their holidays in New York. We steal oil money and compete in buying V-boot cars for our girlfriends. With oil money, we build mansions and palaces in the midst of ghettos; sometimes we have no access roads to them. We steal the money, go abroad, and buy houses. We buy the latest, the most luxurious and most expensive American limousines only to drive them on the rough, dusty roads of Nigeria – a negative culture; culture of extravagance.”
The past 16 years in the history of Nigeria can aptly be described as years when greed, fiscal indiscipline, undeterred misappropriation and daylight looting of public funds in all the three tiers of government, money laundering, oil bunkering, flagrant abuse of power, unchecked stealing of the nation’s crude oil and establishment of petroleum refineries abroad by public office holders, scams of all sorts, flaunting of stolen wealth with impunity by politicians, public office holders and their cronies nationwide, power recycling and social vices such as kidnapping and cultism became the order of the day.
There is no doubt that the establishment of FBWB will play a significant role in the actualization of the promise of Mr. President to Nigerians on his inauguration day towards ensuring equitable distribution of the nation’s wealth that has continued to remain in the hands of a negligible percentage of Nigerians in the past 16 years.
Without mincing words, Nigerians both at home and in diaspora will actively support this idea coming in the wake of the statement made by a one-time Chairman of EFCC, Chief (Mrs.) Farida Waziri while delivering her keynote address on Monday, September 28, 2009 at a workshop in Kaduna on transparency and accountability in the public service. At that event she sought psychiatric tests for public officers and said: “The extent of aggrandizement and gluttonous accumulation of wealth that I have observed suggests to me that some people are mentally and psychologically unsuitable for public office. We have observed people amassing public wealth to a point suggesting ‘madness’ or some form of obsessive compulsive psychiatric disorder.”
A stitch in time, so says an adage, saves nine! Long Live Nigeria!!!
•Odunayo wrote from Mopa, Kogi State. Email: [email protected]
•Tel: 08053488121