President Buhari’s War on Corruption is starting a revolution in our land. Of course, most Nigerians are still sceptical, but the President’s resoluteness is gradually building trust, and even excitement. It is becoming believable that large numbers of the leading citizens of our country are likely to hear the prison doors slam behind them – for abusing our people’s trust and brutalizing our country. Panic is growing among the most influential and most powerful men and women of our land, and the euphoria of owning enormous bank accounts (and cash warehouses) of stolen public money has turned into a nightmare.
But how can the war against corruption be possibly won if certain factors in our practice of politics remain unchanged? I refer to the use of huge amounts of money by our politicians in all aspects of politics. We have reached a point where every politician must somehow bring incredible amounts of money into politics, and spend incredible amounts on politics on a daily basis, with the assurance of earning bountiful profits therefrom. Politics is no longer about serving the people and the country; it is about money – about being able to find the money to stay in the game, and about coming out at the end with indefensibly large fortunes.
Things were not like this before – at least, until as recently as the last years of the 1990s. When my people sent for me to come home from University College Ibadan in 1964 to stand election to become their representative in the Nigerian House of Representatives, they knew that I was only a Graduate Student and that I had no money, and indeed no assets, anywhere (besides a used Volkswagen Beetle which I was using for my Ph.D. research).Yet, when I sent back home to say that I could not face an election because I had no money, they got angry with me – and they forgave only when I went home, penitently apologized, and surrendered to their will. They said I didn’t need any money – and I hardly spent any. Yet, I was winning the final contest very grandly until the party I belonged to decided that we should boycott the election because of the massive rigging going on in some other parts of Nigeria. In 1979, I won the election to the Nigerian Senate with almost no money. In 1999, one my young close friends won election to the position of governor upon only a meagre budget. These experiences were by no means unique; they were more or less general.
Unhappily, things have changed totally in the past 15 years. The whole electoral process has become so viciously corrupted and monetized that no politician can now win his party’s nomination without vomiting a whole fortune, and every candidate for the final contest in any election must borrow or steal enormous fortunes to be competitive at all. One of my”sons” had to borrow N450 million to win a senatorial seat. Another worked through his businessman brother to raise N700 million, mostly by borrowing, to win a senatorial seat. One father in a South-west state is said to have sold his house to help his son win his party’s gubernatorial nomination. Unfortunately, his son lost to another candidate who could wield a larger arsenal of cash. These experiences are by no means unique; they are common in virtually all parts of Nigeria.
The typical Nigerian elected public official (at federal, state or local government level) is therefore not a public servant at all. He is a greedy, money-grubbing, money-stealing, monster. He is desperately driven by the urgency to pay the debts he contractedfor gettinginto the position he occupies – and then return home stinking rich. This is his real full-time job; his duties as a legislator or executive public official are, quite often, entirely secondary. And this is a very major pillar of Nigeria’s public corruption. It is the reason why members of the Nigerian government at all levels go to great inventiveness to find ways to get big shares of public money. It is also the reason why they must give their subordinates and officials sumptuous accesses to public money. In effect, the Nigerian president, governor or local government chairman is a coordinator and purveyor of theft and corruption. Nigerian legislators must claim a phoney “sovereignty” for the legislative body they belong to – because they need to be able to corner off much of public money for sharing among them. It is in this way that corruption became the foundation of Nigeria’s culture of governance.
But that is not all. As the widely impoverished Nigerian populace became aware of the great wealth being stolen by their public officials, they gradually became adepts at taking some share of the stolen money. Every public official is therefore forever confronted by his constituents for money and financial support – money for basic feeding of their families, for paying children’s school fees, for paying hospital bills, for meeting funeral expenses, wedding expenses, travel expenses, ritual expenses, etc. Among the impoverished elite, most have learned to live (and even to become rich) on “dignified” handouts by public officials. As for the impoverished masses of the people, there is no time or place for dignity – and their demands for money from their public officials can often be quite brutal. A local party dignitary forced his legislator to buy him a used car; four weeks later, he was furiously angry with the legislator – because the legislator had meanwhile not given him any money for four weeks! It is that brutish.
Still, that is not all. Political meetings are the main vehicle of the democratic political process, and such meetings are supposed to be gatherings of independent citizens coming together to consider the affairs of their groups or parties, communities, districts, states or country. But in the sickening slush that Nigerian politics has become, political meetings have become big money affairs. The party or leader or representative that calls a meeting must now put up enormous amounts of money to underwrite it – in various handouts to each person who comes: travelling money, feeding money, lodging money (if the meeting spills from one day to the next), pocket money to return home with. Nigeria hardly ever experiences today the kind of political meetings that my generation of political activists knew –gatherings of independent and self-supporting citizens, proudly coming to hear, express their minds, and contribute. Even the smallest political meeting of today demands a mighty budget and puts a big financial burden on the politicians.
So, each politician or elected public official spins constantly in a whirlwind of frenetic material and financial demands and, therefore, his need for stolen public money becomes larger and larger and more and more pressing. It is to be wondered how our present legislators are coping with the changed situation being created by the Buhari War on Corruption. These men and women entered, as usual, into huge debts to win elections in 2014 -15, hoping to have access as usual to vast amounts of stolen public money. But now the Buhari revolution is frightening people away from stealing and sharing public money. How will these men and women fare?
In summary, the Buhari presidency must delve right-away into this problem of political monetization with a view to curbing it. Otherwise, it will be impossible to carry through with the War on Corruption. In many countries, there are laws controlling and limiting electoral expenses, and laws making it compulsory for electoral candidates to disclose to the electoral officials the money they have raised for elections (and the givers) as well as the accounts of their electoral expenses. In many countries also, the amount of money anybody can give to a politician or public official, or to an electoral candidate, is stated under the law. And in many countries, it is a crime for an electoral candidate to give any money or gift to potential voters. I am not necessarily advocating any particular law. All I say is that we cannot possibly leave our present situation unchanged while claiming to be fighting a War on Corruption. President Buhari needs, urgently, to act about these realities.
