Lecture delivered at Freedom House, Lagos, Nigeria by Larry Diamond June 30, 2014
It goes without saying that something is seriously wrong when the Governor of the Central Bank finds that during an 18-month period between January 2012 and July 2013 Nigeria failed to repatriate three-quarters of the roughly $65 billion it presumably earned from oil sales.[3] Add to this the findings of the Farouk Lawan Committee, which exposed a fuel subsidy scam costing Nigeria some $7 billion, the work of Nuhu Ribadu and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, and so many other reports and revelations not just in recent years but over the tragic history of oil wealth in Nigeria, and it is hard to dismiss the assertion of former World Bank Vice President and former Minister Oby Ezekwesli that some $400 billion of the Nigeria’s oil revenue has been stolen or misspent since its independence.[4]As one of the most astute foreign scholars of Nigeria, Peter Lewis, recently observed to me, “In the last decade, the government has been hemorrhaging the resources from Nigeria’s second oil boom. Not even the electricity program that is supposed to be part of the government’s “transformation agenda” can move ahead.”[5]
It is just not credible for defenders of the current order to dismiss all these allegations as partisan or “unproven”. They form a pattern of documentation of embezzlement, mismanagement and misappropriation of public funds that is shocking in scale, irrefutable in essence, and devastating in impact.
Certainly Nigerians perceive that corruption is out of control. In the recent Global Corruption Barometer, 78 percent of Nigerians—one of the largest proportions in the world—said corruption is a significant problem in the country. 72% felt it had increased substantially in the last two years. 75% said the government was doing little to combat it. 94% perceived political parties as corrupt or extremely corrupt (and about the same percentage the police as well).[6] These percentages are backed up by expert ratings, such as those done by the World Bank, which rank the quality of governance in Nigeria in the bottom quartile of all the world’s countries.
This scale of corruption has serious consequences for development and human wellbeing. To understand this, let us look at one simple statistic—the percentage of children under five years old who die every year. And let us compare Nigeria and Ghana. Four decades ago, in the wake of the first oil boom, Nigeria was a much wealthier country than Ghana. Its per capita income was about 40 percent higher than Ghana’s.[7]Since the darkest days of military rule and partial state collapse in Ghana, that country has moved forward to develop democracy and lift up state capacity and performance. Nigeria has not. As a result, Ghana has significantly improved its rankings onthe quality of governance, while Nigeria’s have remained miserable. In control of corruption, Ghana is now in the 56th percentile worldwide, Nigeria is in the 11th percentile. On Rule of law, Ghana is in the 50th percentile. Nigeria is in the bottom 10 percent. Here are the other percentile rankings, on a scale from 0 to 100:
State effectiveness: Ghana 52, Nigeria 16.
Voice and accountability: Ghana 60, Nigeria 27
Regulatory quality: Ghana 56, Nigeria 25.
As a consequenceof all of this, Ghana ranks in the 50th percentile in terms of political stability, and Nigeria is in the third percentile, down in the neighborhood of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the DRC. And this was before Boko Haram abducted some 276schoolgirls in Chibok a few weeks ago as part of its latest and most ruthless rampage. Given these data, how surprised should we be that order is disintegrating in a part of Nigeria’s territory, with repeated bombings as well in and around the capital city?
Now let us look at under age five mortality rates. Ghana has reduced this grim statistic since 1980 by 57%; Nigeria by only 42%. Today about 7.2% of Ghanaian children under age five die each year—a horrible statistic, but much better than the Nigerian rate, which is 12.4%. Nigeria has the ninth worst child death rate in the world, of the 196 countries for which UNICEF presents data. The difference between Nigeriaand Ghana is the difference between one out of 14 kids dying a year versus one of out eight. UNICEF estimates that 827,000 Nigerian children under age five died in 2012, about one of every eight such deaths in the entire world. Now imagine for a moment that Nigeria had Ghana’s under-five mortality rate of 7.2 percent. The number of Nigeria’s child deaths in 2012 would have been about 347,000 fewer. Multiply that figure, or some large portion of it, by however many years you wish to go back in time, and the number of children who have died because Nigeria’s child death rate is larger than Ghana’s runs well into the millions. In the last decade alone, it has surely been over two million, probably over three million Nigerian children. That is many more deaths than in the Nigerian civil war. It is more than three times as many deaths as in the Rwandan genocide, and comparable to the number of Cambodians murdered by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.
These were children, who had their whole lives ahead of them. It is hard to see what can possibly account for the difference in child death rates between Nigeria and Ghana except the demonstrably worsegovernance in Nigeria.
Allow me to quote again from your former Education Minister, Oby Ezekwesili:
By conservative estimate, our country has earned more than $600billion in the last five decades and yet can only boast of a United Nations Human Development Index score of .4 out of 1, proximate to that of Chad, and [a] maternal mortality rate similar to that of Afghanistan! Nothing reveals the depth of our failures [more] than such performance indicators, considering the vastly greater possibilities that we have been bestowed.[8]
53 years after independence, an estimated half of Nigerian adults are illiterate, 70 percent lack access to improved sanitation facilities, a quarter of all children are underweight, and over a third of them are not being immunized.[9]
Who will be held accountable for these developmental failures, and for the roughlythree million children who would not have died if Nigeria’s Fourth Republic had managed to improve the quality of governance—not to the level of Sweden, just to the level of Ghana? When political leaders murder a million of their own people, we call it genocide. We do not have a term for the crime that is inflicted when egregious corruption and mismanagement cause the needless death of three million children over an extended period of time.
When more than 200 school children are abducted from their school dormitories by a terrorist organisation, outrage comes easily, and justifiably. We know the names and faces of those girls. Where are recorded the names and faces of the 347,000 children under five years old who died last year but would still be alive if Nigeria had—I repeat—merely decent governance?
The current moment begs another question: If the Nigerian state, with all its natural wealth, cannot ensure that its children are given decent levels of social and economic security—education, immunization, and nutrition—how can it ensure that they have physical security? Why should anyone expect the army and police to show greater purpose, efficacy, and selflessness than other segments of the state and the body politic? Bad governance is like cancer; it is malignant—it spreads throughout the body. And cultural norms are set from the top, as people watch not what their leaders say, but what they do. This is why President Shehu Shagari’s declaration of an “ethical revolution” during the Second Republic was so unserious. What is the point of appealing to the public for better ethics when government and politics are riddled with pervasive, unchecked greed?
One of the oldest aphorisms about governance, which many cultures claim to have originated, is this: The fish rots from the head down. As Chinua Achebe eloquently noted in his essay, The Trouble with Nigeria, “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else.”
Leadership sets the tone. Some thirty years ago, when I was writing about the failure of the First Nigerian Republic, a phrase kept ringing in my ears. It was prompted by years of corruption and repression, and then the blatant rigging of the October 1965 Western Regional election, which plunged the region into violent rebellion against the government of Premier Samuel Akintola. I wrote about that period:
Looters and highway robbers were aware that their behavior differed only in its openness from that of the politicians. Said one young man as he threatened to ignite a car he had stopped on the highway, “Akintola has had his share. Now we want ours.”[10]
When most leaders of politics and government are seen as scoundrels and thieves, ordinary people tend to behave in kind, because they do not trust their fellow citizens to behave any differently, and they do not want to be the lone fool who obeys the formal rules. That is not the kind of social, legal and moral foundation on which a country can build democracy, development, or peace and stability.
The link to terrorism and insecurity
In the absence of very serious and far-reaching governance reform, the problem of Boko Haram’s murderous violence in the north is not any more amenable to termination than is the problem of piracy and criminality in the Niger Delta area. There is no purely security solution to either of these security challenges. Each emerges as a twisted response to a situation of pervasive corruption, injustice, distrust, moral decay, and state weakness. And each appears to be intertwined with struggles for political power in complex, opaque, and volatile ways.
It is not merely social scientists that have stressed the significant social, economic, and political roots of terrorist violence, across a wide range of national situations, of which Nigeria is only one. In April 2012, the then National Security Advisor to the President, the late retired general Andrew Owoye Azaze, made a similar point in a public speech, stressing that the mobilization of force alone against Boko Haram could not work, and that Nigeria could not achieve security without broad-based development:
…Even if all the leaders that we know in Boko Haram are arrested, I don’t think the problem would end, because there are tentacles. I don’t think that people would be satisfied, because the situations that created the problems are not just about the religion, poverty or the desire to rule Nigeria. I think it’s a combination of everything. Except you address all those things comprehensively, it would not work.
…It is not enough for us to have a problem in 2009 and you send soldiers to stop the situation, then tomorrow you drive everybody underground. You must look at what structures you need to put in place to address the problem holistically. There are economic problems in the North, which are not the exclusive prerogative of the Northerners. We must solve our problems as a country.[11]
It is also important to stress another lesson of comparative experience in countering insurgences: By further victimizing many innocent people, human rights violations by state security forces enlarge support for the insurgency. In and outside Nigeria, there is growing concern over the climate of impunity for state security forces who are responsible for, to quote the latest annual report of Human Rights Watch, “indiscriminate arrest, detention, torture, and extra-judicial killing of those suspected to be supporters or members” of Boko Haram.[12]
What is to be done
I don’t think many Nigerians needed the suffering and shame that Boko Haram has inflicted on this country to see that the situation is desperate and is not amenable to platitudes and faint-hearted solutions. Intellectual honesty can only point in the direction of comprehensive and far-reaching policy responses. When corruption has brought a country down to the bottom three percent in the world in terms of political stability, it’s time to think outside the box.
I want to suggest six reform responses. I don’t presume that these are the only ones, and I realize that some of these are definitely “outside the box.” Nigeria has to do multiple radical and unconventional things if it is going to climb out of the deep trough in which it has been stuck for half a century.
The place to begin is with elections. Two key requirements for clean elections are effective and neutral administration, and comprehensive transparency. On the first, some progress has been made, but there are serious concerns about whether the country’s electoral administration is up to the coming challenge in 2015. There is at least on respect in which the recent Ekiti election does not inspire confidence. You cannot have the police and the military blocking the supporters (not to mention fellow governors) of one party from moving about a state and campaigning, and call that a fully free and fair election. Democratic elections require a level playing field. That must mean freedom to campaign. And it must mean strict neutrality of all the instruments of state security.
I think there is something to be learned from the experience of India in institutionalising the extraordinary power, independence, and administrative capacity of the Election Commission of India. The position of the Chief Election Commissioner is one of the most crucial and respected in India, equivalent in stature to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and it has been held by some of India’s most highly accomplished and talented career civil servants. Why not call one of them in to advise on elections here, or even to sit as an advisory member of the INEC (Independent National Electoral Commission)?
It is vitally important that the INEC vigorously advance its work, with the broad assistance of civil society and the Nigerian media, to educate Nigerians about the coming elections and strongly encourage them to register to vote. An election can only be as good as the electoral register, and it takes many months to ensure that the register of voters is as accurate, up to date, and inclusive as possible. It helps that we are in a new era now technologically, where biometric tools of voter identification can help to root out fraudulent inflation of the electoral register. But those tools, as well, must be applied in a rigorously neutral and transparent way. Every step in preparing the election must be open to scrutiny.
Second, there is a clear and unimpeachable gold standard for monitoring the fairness of elections. Neutral monitors in civil society must have the freedom and resources to conduct a parallel vote tabulation (PVT). The technology for this is well established, and Nigerian civil society organizations are well experienced in this task. In previous recent elections, their parallel counts have not (to my knowledge) dramatically diverged from the official percentage tally of the vote. Nigeria must have neutral and credible judicial processes available should the parallel vote tabulation in2015 clearly indicate a different electoral outcome than the officially declared one.
Third, there is a need to advance internal democracy within Nigerian political parties. There is a growing recognition internationally that you cannot have a quality democracy unless there are adequate procedures for transparency, accountability, constitutionalism, and democratic procedures within political parties. This must include democratic means for the selection of candidates so that they become accountable to the voters more than to party leaders and “godfathers.”
Fourth is the need to reform and modernise the state security apparatus. The military, police, and intelligence must be trained and equipped to wage the security response with the proper tools and strategy, and to target the use of force carefully and effectively. They must also be instructed and monitored to avoid needless civilian casualties, and they must be held accountable for violations of law and procedure. But reports of recent confrontations between Nigerian security forces and Boko Haram suggest that the former have often been significantly outgunned and outmaneuvered. It is the responsibility of civilian political leadership in the executive and legislative branches to work with the military and oversee the military to ensure it has the necessary weapons and other tools. International security cooperation is also needed to track and confront the shadowy movements of arms and money across borders.
Fifth, the laws on paper against bribery, corruption, and conflict of interest are reasonably good in principle, but they have huge weaknesses in enforcement that must be repaired. Corruption is like water seeping into the ground; it will find any crack or crevice and make use of it. The only way to fight it is with a system of horizontal accountability that is vigorous, comprehensive, independent, and interlocking.
A critical, indispensable condition for successful enforcement is transparency. What good is it for public officials to declare their assets if those declarations are not made publicly available? The Code of Conduct Bureau has never had the staffing, the manpower, the energy, and probably the will to vigorously investigate the veracity of all of these declarations. It needs the public’s help. And it needs the help of the international community. By law, all assets declarations should be made available online for public scrutiny. And since Nigerian law forbids the President, Vice-President, Governors, and federal and state legislators from operating foreign bank accounts, why not require them to sign, along with the Code of Conduct, a legal declaration foregoing any right of privacy or any claim to ownership of any foreign bank accounts that may bear their name. This still leaves open the question of accounts owned by their spouses and children, another loophole that would need to be addressed. They should also be asked to forswear ownership and invite surrender of any real property or other assets, foreign or domestic, that are discovered to be in their names, which they have not listed on their assets declaration.
In the early 1990s, when I was researching the problem of corruption in Nigeria and the total inefficacy of the Code of Conduct Bureau at that time, it became clear to me that little sustainable progress in controlling corruption would be made unless politicians knew that the public, and the international financial system, would be mobilized against them if they accumulated vast wealth in office and then tried to hide it. It took me a long time to get a Nigerian politician to engage me in an honest conversation on the subject, but finally I found one. When I explained why I thought it was essential to make the assets declarations public, he agreed with the logic of my argument, but said it would be impossible, because: “If the people ever found out how much wealth the politicians have, there would be a revolution in this country.”
Maybe it is time to declare a financial amnesty: Account for what you have, bring your money back home, hand over the bulk of it, and you will not be prosecuted. Maybe the only way to begin is by following the maxim of the leading anti-corruption scholar, Robert Klitgaard, that you must “fry big fish” if you are serious about controlling corruption. But that requires a serious and independent anti-corruption apparatus. And that in turn means hard thinking about how to insulate these bodies from partisan political control and other forms of subversion. Nigeria needs to do some creative, hard thinking about how to appoint the members of crucial agencies of horizontal accountability—such as the Code of Conduct Bureau, the INEC, the Federal Judicial Service Commission and possibly some of the other bodies enumerated in article 153 of the Constitution. If the country gets a president seriously committed to good governance and political reform, then it works fine to have the president appoint and the Senate confirm the chairmen and members of these bodies. But constitutions should be designed to protect against the worst leaders, not to empower the best. Is there a way to involve civil society in the selection of these crucial positions to ensure that they are independent and vigorous personalities, dedicated to the role envisioned in the Constitution? Would the power of appointment to these bodies be better vested with the Supreme Court or some other body?
If you want to think radically, here is a sixth possible policy reform. Give some of the oil money directly back to the people. There is growing international interest in the idea of “oil to cash,” essentially the “Alaska model,” wherein the state directly gives some of the oil revenue back to each individual citizen. With the growth of mobile phone access and mobile banking, this is a much more feasible approach in Africa than it would have been even a few years ago. And technology will make it increasingly feasible. Nigeria may be too populous a country to distribute revenue to everyone, but cash payments could at least be targeted on the poorest of the poor, as India is doing with income supplements. Some allege that the poor would waste the money on impulsive spending. But, can the poor really do a worse job than Nigerian politicians have done over the last several decades? If, as was reported in the recent Ekiti elections, Nigeria’s voters are going to demand that candidates for office pay attention to the “infrastructure of the stomach,”[13] maybe the state should do that directly and then let the voters decide who can best deliver development.
I would like to conclude with one final appeal. And it is addressed to my own country and to Europe, as much as to Nigeria. Whatever the total amount of money that successive generations of Nigerian politicians have embezzled and looted, some significant portion of it—probably well over $100 billion—sits outside Nigeria today in identifiable liquid and fixed assets: bank accounts, stocks, property, and other investments and luxury wealth. We cannot bring back to life the millions of Nigerian children who have died needlessly because their government leaders were more concerned about accumulating personal wealth than ensuring that their country’s children had clean water, decent roads, adequate food, comprehensive vaccinations, and effective education. But when the time is right, when Nigeria has a government that is serious about controlling corruption, we can help bring back as much of this stolen wealth as possible. And we can work with Nigerian government officials and civil society to help build the systems of accountability to minimize this hemorrhage of public resources in the future.
Like many people around the world, I have been deeply moved by the international campaign with the hashtag “#bringbackourgirls”. But let us use this opportunity to mobilize not only for these more than 200 abducted girls, but for the more than 2 million Nigerian girls who have died before their fifth birthday just in the last decade. I would hope in the years to come that a similar level of international outrage and commitment can be mobilized behind a broader and more transformative campaign, led by Nigerians but eliciting unprecedented international partnership:
#bring back our money.
Thank you.
