When Ukpabi Asika warned decades ago that “Amnesty does not mean Amnesia,” he was in a sense alerting the nation to the perils of succumbing to this often willful refusal to appropriate the benefits of hindsight and learn from history.  History, itself, is essentially the chart of society’s evolution. The true purpose of its study is not merely to accumulate knowledge about the past but to use that knowledge to chart a society’s future evolutionary path. In this regard, history and prophecy are two sides of the coin of knowledge. To learn from history is to acquire not only hindsight but foresight as well. All of this is important as we enter 2007, a magical year in the context of Nigeria’s history.

The collective consciousness of our society is evolving. It took the totalitarian monstrousity of the Abacha junta to establish the aberration of military rule in the national psyche. Today, a military coup would be far less welcome, if at all, than would have been the case twenty years ago. Let us not forget that Nigerians welcomed General Buhari’s termination of our second republic democracy in 1984 and celebrated Babangida’s 1985 coup in even more ecstatic fashion. What has changed between now and then?

The answer is that during the Abacha years, Nigeria attained a moment of truth about military rule. A moment of truth is an instant in which a window of perceptual clarity and objective knowledge about something or someone is opened in the consciousness of an individual or a nation. At such times, the true nature and character of the subject matter becomes manifestly apparent, the odiousness of which provokes an instinctive recoil that expresses itself in two words of subconscious repentance and resolve: ‘Never again.’ Moments of truth mirror a society’s movement from what psychologists call ‘Group Think’ to what I call ‘Group Rethink.’ In Nigeria’s case the issue that needed rethinking then was military rule and the bare-knuckle brutality of Abacha’s junta, lacking the serpentine finesse of Babangida’s regime, helped to clarify and revise some notions nursed by Nigerians about the messianic potential of military rule.  Moments of truth are necessary for the progressive evolution of nations. Several times in history, individuals emerge as prophets and change agents with the task of facilitating their nations’ encounter with these critical epochs called moments of truth. Britain, for example, needed William Wilberforce to arrive at its moment of truth about slavery. America needed Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jnr, centuries apart, to attain its moments of truth about slavery and civil rights. South Africa needed Nelson Mandela to do the same about apartheid. In a moment of truth a society gains a lucid realization of an evil in its midst and a sin that threatens its future from which it must turn away.

Before 1999, only two governments in Nigeria’s history seemed to recognize the grave national crisis posed by corruption in high and low places. During the seventies, General Murtala Mohammed’s regime initiated a purge of the public service and a probe of state military administrations that was driven by his well deserved reputation for ruthlessness. In the eighties, the Buhari-Idiagbon regime which traced its ideological ancestry back to the Murtala regime, embarked upon a ruthless program to cleanse Nigeria of corruption. Buhari carried out an unprecedented purge of the political class trying and jailing several stalwarts of the second republic for corrupt enrichment and embezzlement. Both regimes were overthrown and their anti-corruption campaigns cut short. I do not believe that it is a coincidence that both regimes were overthrown. The astute student of history must keep an eye out for synchronicities, repetitive patterns and “questionable coincidences.” Nigerian society then was unprepared for the costs of tackling graft. Buhari’s termination of the second republic was welcome and his hounding of corrupt politicians was applauded but his methods were considered altogether too draconian by a society unprepared for that sort of zeal in addressing corruption. As if in answer to Nigerians’ prayers Babangida seized power promising a kinder government and subtly evincing a tolerance for the country’s moral challenges. This is why the Babangida years, to which some critics have attributed the institutionalization of corruption, is a wholly explicable phenomenon. Babangida thrived because he was precisely what our society wanted. Buhari was eased out to no one’s grief because his ‘Koboko’-powered style of addressing graft was too harsh for the Nigerian psyche. IBB’s reign was, in fact, a validation of the sleazy predisposition of the Nigerian persona. This was why his regime lasted so long.

Now as then, Nigeria has yet to come to terms with the cancer of corruption. Hypocrisy surrounding the rampant culture of graft is at an all time high. Corruption is the single greatest threat to the survival and growth of Nigerian democracy. Fifteen of the thirty-six state governors have been indicted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). A further handful is under investigation currently. Yet most of these governors who are shielded by constitutional immunity are in the race for the presidency and a variety of other offices in 2007. Our society is still in denial about the graft and sleaze that has atrophied the national conscience. There are a lot of lip-service complaints about corruption that percolate throughout the society but the zeal to face the issue head on by any means necessary is sorely lacking. For many years, corruption in Nigeria has been defined as a public sector phenomenon, a malady restricted to the high and mighty. In truth, corruption is a social plague. The melodramatic episodes of graft that we see on the stage of governance are merely a symptom of the cancer in the nation’s soul.   

 Our society is still capable of making excuses for crooks in high places. Joshua Dariye fled from the UK, where the British authorities had established a case of money laundering against him. Both the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and a forum of Middle belt politicians defended Dariye attributing his travails to a grand plan to persecute prominent sons of the Middle belt. The governor had obviously bought many members of the House of Assembly as well as his political benefactors. What is unclear is how much he paid CAN to hide his skeleton in its communion closets. It took two further years of his misrule before Plateau State, with considerable encouragement from the EFCC, ejected him from public office. Even now, he remains a fugitive on the run from both local and international law enforcement. When DSP Alamyiesiegha fled from British custody in 2005, he returned home a hero, and described his bail-jumping escapade as an act of God. He maintained that the charges of money laundering leveled against him by the British authorities in collaboration with the EFCC were “politically motivated” until he was impeached. Yet some people had the effrontery to link his executive larceny with to his defence of the Ijaw interests.  Few saw the inanity of having a common crook, once dismissed from the air-force for exam cheating and now an international fugitive parading himself as Governor-general of the Ijaw nation or as a state Governor. Strangely enough we don’t see the so called pro-democracy groups and their confederates in the civil society picketing government houses and putting pressure on corrupt governors or their acolytes. The real spade work that could affect the nature of governance at the grassroots is eschewed in favour of the noisier though ultimately futile sloganeering against the federal government on the pages of newspapers. 

Clearly, Nigeria has not woken up to the absolute imperative of fighting corruption because of the plethora of excuses that our people, politicians and press can put forward. When corrupt governors are impeached, the EFCC is called a threat to democracy and an instrument of selective justice. In truth the real threat to democracy is the spectacle of fugitives, crooks and criminals in public office. What becomes of the system when political authority figures operate without legitimacy? There is an extent to which legality can be invoked to cover up illegitimacy. In Nigeria, we have crossed the line beyond which such invocations have begun to subvert the system. Thisday columnist, Kayode Komolafe is entirely correct when he defines the situation as one of conflict between legitimacy and legality.  It is this and much more. We have a situation where high-ranking public officials and political chieftains have been indicted or are being investigated for crimes ranging from theft and money laundering to embezzlement and murder. Yet there is no shortage of lawyers and jurists that can be hired to inveigle and obfuscate issues. Our courts grant frivolous orders restraining the EFCC from carrying out its work, while newspaper pundits and social critics bandy around strange theories of EFCC’s selectivity, due process and constitutionality thus demonstrating a high tolerance for felons in public office.

Perhaps the most criminal of the assertions put forward by these pundits to back up their claims of EFCC’s selectivity is that there are several other rogues out there yet to be arrested and prosecuted. That this argument, perforated in logic as it is, still gets sufficient space in our media is a tragic reflection of the parlous state of the Nigerian mind. The most untenable defence for an apprehended thief is that there are many other thieves who should be caught first. Yet this is the defence that is peddled around most frequently. The other is that only the president’s enemies are being hounded by the EFCC. Apart from the arrant falsehood of this claim, I fail to see how being in political opposition to the president translates into a license for larceny. Tragically, these porous arguments are bought by the man of the street. 

My submission is that Nigeria has not yet come to a moment of truth about corruption. In the name of democracy we are quite willing to accommodate graft. This attitude itself calls for a review of this thing that we call democracy. As I have written elsewhere, Nigerians deep down inside, are not ideological adherents of democracy. What they want is bread and butter. Nigerians do not care if they are ruled by a soldier, a voodoo priest or a pirate so long as bread and butter are in supply. Military rule’s greatest failure in the Nigerian mind is not the oft-cited monumental plunder of national resources by dictators but simply that the brass hats failed to provide bread and butter. Besides this, the Abacha years were an education in the error of messianic expectations of the military.

There is a blatant paradox at work in our society’s thinking. IBB is demonized as the man who instituted corruption. Some so-called pro-democracy groups even made the patently undemocratic call for him to be excluded from the 2007 polls. Yet the same society that demonizes IBB and other military men makes excuses for the likes of Dariye, Alamyiesiegha and others of their ilk. We condemn the looting of our treasury by past military rulers while we condone the equally wholesale plunder being orchestrated by the political operatives of the present dispensation. The military looters relied on the customary opacity of military governance to conceal their theft. The present generation of political chieftains has dispensed with the niceties of pretense and instead relies brazenly on a conspiracy of hypocrisy involving elements of the judiciary, the media and the society to provide a judicial and a constitutional umbrella for organized crime. All of this is done in the name of rule of law and democracy. This paradox in our society’s thinking is unsustainable. If the difference between the executive misdemeanours of civilians and soldiers is the constitutional provision on immunity then we have a serious problem. Earlier in 2006, the National Assembly threw away a golden opportunity to amend the immunity clause so that its protective provisions would exclude matters of criminal liability. The legislature demonstrated the manifest inability of the political class to regulate itself. Clearly that regulation can only be executed by a supra-political agency. Our democratic structures lack both the will and the institutional capacity to tackle the crisis of corruption afflicting Nigeria. Many of the most corrupt governors who are now angling for the presidency or other offices in 2007 have amassed enough wealth over the past seven years to buy the electoral process and subvert the system. This was the theme of a 2004 edition of TELL magazine titled “The Governors that can Buy Nigeria.” These men have accumulated enough resources to shape Nigeria’s future and to influence the course of governance in this nation in the post-Obasanjo era. Where they cannot manipulate the system to further their interests, they have the means to stir up unrest and subvert the country. In other words, corruption is the greatest threat to the security and stability of the next republic.

 

Two paths lie open before Nigeria. The first is for us as a people to effect an unconditional psychical, spiritual, intellectual and social rejection of the culture of corruption in all its ramifications. The other is for us to carry on with democracy as usual, enthrone bandits at all levels of governance and set a horrific precedent of power without morality for subsequent generations. As things stand, the Nigerian society is unprepared for the former and yet cannot afford the latter. Since our democratic structures cannot address the crisis of corruption, then the solution must come through undemocratic channels if necessary. For me the issues are clear. Democracy is not an absolute good. Where it becomes a screen for high crimes and misdemeanours, then its utility becomes exceedingly dubious. History suggests that our central problem in engaging corruption is that we have not yet scored the much needed huge and symbolic victory against the culture of graft in high and low places. Nowhere in our history can you find any monument to the evil of corruption. Buhari’s purge of the polity in the eighties, if it had been completed would have provided that sort of monument. We need an event of such a scale and magnitude that it definitively engraves the sinful wrongness of corruption on Nigeria’s soul. Our society needs to attain a moment of truth about corruption. If the only difference between military and civilian looters is that the latter can avail themselves of democratic structures to perpetrate crimes while banking on some measure of public sympathy, then Nigeria truly doesn’t need democracy. What she needs is a moral revolution. History shows that empires and republics, democracies and dictatorships alike collapse whenever the degree of internal corruption and erosion of values becomes finally unsustainable. Countries tend to collapse internally from within rather than from without. The internal crisis of corruption in Nigeria which has occasioned a clash between the concepts of legitimacy and legality is now approaching a critical mass.

The logic of historical prediction suggests that Buhari’s short-lived cleansing of the polity has to be re-enacted today if the next republic is to survive. Our society badly needs to understand the karmic equation of crime and punishment in high and low places. The great philosopher King Solomon had noted that “God causes history to repeat itself” over two thousand years before George Santayana observed that “the only thing we have learned from history is that man does not learn from history.” Providence may have brought Nigeria to this crossroads once again, offering her a chance to make a break with the cancer of corruption and has cast President Obasanjo as a change agent and Nuhu Ribadu as an avenging angel in this cause.  Something drastic and unprecedented has to happen to redeem the Nigerian soul from the stranglehold of corruption. It has become wholly necessary, even if that something means taking a sabbatical from our (pseudo-)democracy, anything to bring the country to the point of catharsis. Nigeria needs to have her moment of truth. 

Robot  # 1 | 16.12.2006 02:25

Of all the Read the full article.

Tony  # 2 | 16.12.2006 18:44

Wonderful well articulated article!