Thoughts on the Anti-Corruption War

The sleazy details gushing out of the investigations into the use of the money meant for the security of our country should point us in this direction: we need to do much more to win the war against corruption in Nigeria. Without prejudice to the cases in court, it is clear that leaping into our episodic catch-a-thief mode alone would not do. A quick clarification: I am not one of those who think that asking questions about what people did with our common wealth is a political exercise or an unnecessary distraction. I believe public officers should be held to account and that those found wanting should be punished, to serve as deterrence and discourage impunity.

However, if nothing else, the brazenness and scale of the alleged plundering we are regaled with daily show that our anti-corruption efforts have achieved neither deterrence nor restraint. Rather than abate, the corruption cancer has metastasised. This doesn’t mean that our preferred mode of treatment should stop. No. But we need to do more. We need to realise that our lingering challenge with corruption is a manifestation of deeper and unresolved pathologies of the Nigerian state: an entrenched mind-set that sees public resources as only good for plunder; an extractive economy that produces perverse incentives for graft; and a patrimonial political structure with weak levers of transparency and accountability.

To be sure, corruption has always carried a heavy tag for both the perpetrators and the rest of us. Corruption was implicated in the fall of the First Republic. Major Chukwumah Kaduna Nzeogwu, one of the leaders of the 15 January 1966 coup, memorably intoned: “Our enemies are the political profiteers, the swindlers, the men in high and low places that seek bribes and demand 10%...” Some prominent politicians were killed in that putsch. When General Murtala Muhammed undertook a massive purge of the civil service in 1975, corruption was the main charge. After they toppled the Second Republic, the Buhari-Idiagbon regime handed down jail terms to many politicians found guilty of corruption, with some getting as much as 100 years. In the current Fourth Republic, some prominent politicians have been removed from office on charges of corruption, and at least a few have been convicted and jailed.

Yet, the malaise not only lingers but worsens. Nzeogwu and his colleagues would be mortified that 10% bribe is now a joke. And those given hundreds of years in jail terms in the Second Republic now look like saints. A major reason for this is that our anti-corruption strategy has largely pivoted around prosecution and punishment. Without doubt, a law and order approach is very important, as stated above. But this approach, even when it works well, needs to be complemented by efforts that attack the systemic and structural roots of corruption in our society. Beyond hoping to catch and punish the corrupt, we need to invest a lot more in reducing the possibility of corruption happening in the first instance. Below are a few ideas, which are by no means exhaustive, that we may wish to consider in fashioning out a more comprehensive and more effective anti-corruption strategy.

Unpack the Corruption Formula

Robert Klitgaard, the renowned author of “Controlling Corruption,” memorably reduced the definition of corruption to a simple mathematical formula: C=M+D-A. This stands for: Corruption equals Monopoly plus Discretion minus Accountability. This stylised formula is not without its problems, but it is an equation we need to pay attention to if we are really interested in ‘killing corruption before it kills us’. Klitgaard’s is a systemic view of corruption which points us at what to do to eliminate or at least reduce corruption. According to this renowned economist, corruption thrives where the power to make major decisions is concentrated in a few hands, exercised with discretion and not subject to control. Long before Klitgaard propounded his formula, Lord Acton had said the same thing in a more poetic way: power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Let’s be brutally honest with ourselves: it will take a lot for our executives not to abuse the enormous powers that we have concentrated in their hands. The president can, with just the stroke of a pen, decide who gets what, including import waivers and oil blocks. He can create as many slush funds as he likes, and he doesn’t have to be very creative as there are legions of revenue-generating agencies that have become autonomous countries within a country and can be corralled to any use by the man with the knife and the yam. On paper, we have provisions that guarantee the independence of heads of some of these agencies, but in practice we have a political system that doesn’t insulate them from being thrown under the bus.

Our president and the governors are not only allowed hefty security votes, but they are also allowed to define what constitutes threats to our security, and they are allowed to dispense security votes in ways they won’t spend their own hard-earned money. In theory, no money can be spent without appropriation. But we all know that security votes/budgets are rarely discussed in the open by the legislature nor subjected to public scrutiny. We also know that all manner of extra-budgetary expenditures are undertaken from known and unknown slush centres like the central bank and the national oil company. Concentration of powers that can be exercised with discretion and without accountability is unfortunately not restricted to the president and the governors. We may be lucky to get occasional positive outliers, but our system is conditioned to produce nothing other than corruption. Subjecting our system to the test of Klitgaard Equation will help us see what we need to fix to produce a different outcome.

Sunshine Remains the Best Disinfectant

One of the other things we need to do is to introduce more transparency mechanisms and strengthen existing ones. The more things are done in the open, the less likely the possibility of sharp practices. We need to open up our governments and dispense with a culture of secrecy that only incentivises corruption. As the old saw goes, sunshine is the best disinfectant. Imagine if Nigerians had been told that a significant part of their security budget would be used for spiritual services or to finance the election of a political party. Ordinarily, public officials should be steered to common sense by the possibility that their acts could become public knowledge one day. But that possibility does not seem to be enough dis-incentive for bad behaviour. Let’s beam the search-lights on all the dark places that we enjoy further darkening in the name of national security, official secrecy and what not.

To be sure, we have some sunshine laws like the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act and some transparency agencies like the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) and the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI). But we need to tear down the barriers to openness, not erect new walls, in the application of these laws. For example, many agencies still deny FoI requests without real consequence. Also, the rationale behind assets declaration is made nonsense of by the fact it is not compulsory to make the declared assets public.

We need to energise agencies that promote transparency, like NEITI, to ensure that they have real bite. But we also need to go beyond feckless transparency and reduce public information to forms that people can relate to, as civic organisations like BudgIT are doing with information on public budgets. It is also important for us to introduce some form of participatory governance to ensure that the people, the ultimate sovereign, are part of and empowered to make input into the decision-making process. Imagine again if Nigerians were part of the decision to use public money for spiritual services and to finance the election of a party. Would they have approved? No!

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