By Sheriffdeen A. Tella
Corruption has become an endemic disease and the fabric that dresses and addresses the Nigerian society today.
The distrust that it causes became evident at the commencement of the activities to mitigate the deleterious effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the society, such as distribution of palliative items and the financial donations from local and international donors.
Side talk that may not reach our leaders easily is the saying that large proportion of the funds voted and received for the palliatives would end up in private pockets or accounts of the people in charge of implementation of the projects or distribution of the funds.
Even when a politician decides to purchase and distribute palliative materials to civil society, the insinuation is that he/she is giving back from stolen ‘commonwealth’. They do not see the propriety of the action which is quite unfortunate.
It does not stop there. Among the civil society, you find people in charge of distribution hoarding some of the products for their friends and families who might even be in position to provide for others.
Every step taken is assumed to be corruption-enhanced. What is being explained here is that corruption has permeated all the strata of the society from the leaders to the followers and sowed the seeds of distrust.
That is the nature of corruption when it becomes endemic in a nation and no country develops when corruption gets to such level.
No Nigerian is seen as a clean human being as everyone has become an embodiment of corruption. Which may not be so.
Corruption appears in many forms such that the tendency is to overlook some activities as normal and legal. Ruzindana identifies the following forms of corruption that people engage in: bribery, extortion, illegal use of public assets for private use, over- and under-invoicing, payment of ghost workers and pensioners, payment for goods not supplied or services not rendered which is called “air supply”, underpayment of taxes and duties on exports or inputs through false declaration or invoicing, purchase of goods at inflated prices, fraud and embezzlement, misappropriation of assets, court decisions awarding damages in excess of any injury suffered, removal of document or even complete case file, and red-tapism and patronage.
Which one of these is absent in the Nigerian society?
Rose-Ackerman identifies four stylized types of corrupt states viz: Kleptocracy, bilateral monopoly states, mafia-dominated states and competitive-bribery states.
In kleptocracy states, corruption is entrenched at the highest level of government. In pure kleptocracy, the head of government runs the political system in such a way that it maximizes the possibilities for extracting rents and relocates the resultant benefit for personal aggrandizement.
Sometimes, such rulers tend to favour an excessively large state to maximize their rent seeking opportunities. While they prefer to avoid waste by their subordinates, they may not be able to prevent them from taking bribes also.
Under the Bilateral Monopoly State, the corrupt ruler faces a single major briber, who, in a large number of cases in developing countries, is a multinational corporation.
The relative share of the gains expropriated from their collusion will depend on the relative strength of the actors.
That is, the ruler and the briber, with the former using the state’s apparatus and his position to intimidate the latter who can also threaten to engage in violence.
In some bilateral monopolies, rulers form an alliance with a Mafia group that engages in crime to provide protective services that in ordinary societies are provided by the state.
Depending on the strength of the two actors, the state may become an appendage of the large investor, incurring distributive and efficiency losses as well as forfeiting the ability to tap the profits of economic activities for the benefit of the society.
In the Mafia-dominated State, many officials are engaged in freelance bribery and they face a monopolist briber in the private sector.
The briber could be a Mafia group or a large corporation that dominates the state. The Mafia may be powerful but organisation of the corruption may limit its ability to purchase the benefit it wants.
This is because reaching an agreement with one official does not preclude another official from coming forward while the Competitive-bribery State is one of loose relationship. Here, many corrupt officials deal with a large number of ordinary citizens and firms.
A fundamental problem in this case is the potential for an upward spiral of corruption. The corruption of some officials can encourage others to accept bribes until all but the reconstructed moralists are corrupt.
We cannot look at these as stages of corruption such that a society moves from one level to another but the society is described based on the characteristics of corruption it displays at a particular point in time. It also depends on who is interpreting the situation.
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Whichever type of corruption state, low compensation for work done, such as the recent minimum wage debate that is too low to meet basic needs of the wage earners and weak monitoring of subordinates are generally considered as the main causes of corruption especially in the public services.
When corruption is allowed to thrive uncontrollably in a society and particularly at the top, it moves down the ladder so rapidly that it becomes an endemic disease that only a revolution can cleanse.
Such revolution need not be through the use of gun but self-rediscovery and taking action, even through the ballot boxes and spiritual cleansing as Nigerian tried to do in the election of 2015.
However, the level of corruption in Nigeria requires more than spirituality or voting activities either which in itself, is enmeshed in corruption toga.
Economists are divided on the role of corruption on national growth and development. The view that corruption assists in ‘greasing the wheels of commerce’ started with an article ‘Economic Development Through Bureaucratic Corruption’ written by Nathan Leff.
The general idea on benefits of corruption is that it assists in facilitating smoothness of trade among countries which would not have taken place thereby promoting efficiency in resource allocation.
This is because individuals in the private sector latch on the loopholes provided by corrupt practices to ‘correct’ pre-existing government failures of various sorts.
Some authors also concluded that corruption in many developed and developing countries actually stimulated foreign direct investments through circumvention of regulatory and administrative restrictions. However, majority perceive corruption as a major obstacle to economic growth and development.
Most reports on “failed states” in over 10 years have never excluded Nigeria from the countries so categorized. Nigeria remains underdeveloped despite continued huge oil receipts in almost 20 years and huge government expenditure through profligate budgetary system.
Former Minister for Education and later Presidential aspirant Obiageli Ezekwesili, posited that the Nigerian governments mismanaged about N400 billion oil money in a span of few years.
Eight years after, the mismanagement has not stopped and that is not unconnected with the endemic corruption in high and low places.
Ruzindane, over 20 years ago, explained the Africa’s corruption situation thus: ‘Corruption has led to bad roads and decaying infrastructure, inadequate medical services, poor schools and falling education standards, and the disappearance of foreign aids and foreign loans and of entire projects without a trace (or their delayed completion, leading to higher costs).
Corruption has meant that fewer imported goods enter the country than were paid for, foreign exchange earned from exports is not repatriated, national assets are run down and ruined; and repairs of buildings, equipment, vehicles and physical and social infrastructure have been paid for repeatedly but never performed.’
This summarizes the past and present situation in Nigeria despite the quest for economic development. A country so blessed with human and material resources yet so poor! That is what economists call resource curse.
If we want the same picture to be painted about Nigeria in 20 years from now, then we do not need to say now that ‘enough is enough’. Albeit, the fault is not in our stars but in our hands.
- Tella is Professor of Economics, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, Ogun State.
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