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Corruption and the failure of the Nigerian state 14 Aug 2022

It is official. Nigeria has been caught in a fiscal trap. In the second quarter of 2022, the country spent all its revenue and borrowed more to service its debt. This means that Nigeria is broke, even if its Debt-to-GDP ratio is still within ‘prudential’ level.

But Nigeria is a country that is blessed with abundant natural resources. It is a country that has earned hundreds of billions of dollars from oil exports but has no good hospitals, nevertheless. The Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, had a minor surgery in a Nigerian hospital, and it was a heroic deed that elicited praise and celebration. That is how bad healthcare is in the country. All Nigerian notables attend foreign hospitals for even the most routine checkup. So, it was a big deal that the VP attended a local hospital to have a low-risk surgery.  

Our national security is also failing. The country is close to being overrun by terrorists. As I write, the entire capital city, Abuja, is in the grips of palpable fears. A couple of days earlier, terrorists, under the franchise of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and Boko-Haram, attacked a Presidential Brigade of Guards, killing some of the soldiers. A few weeks earlier, terrorists attacked President Muhammadu Buhari’s advance party in his home state of Katsina. They killed a police officer attached to the team.

Now, terrorists are threatening to kidnap the President and the powerful Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, and take them to the forest in Kaduna, a few hundred miles away from the seat of power. The terrorists want to punish both of them like they are doing to the hapless victims of the Abuja-Kaduna train attack. The gruesome video of these brutalized victims is awash in Nigeria cyberspace. Four months running now, the Nigerian military could not rescue them.

One important point is often missed in the narrative of terrorism and insecurity in Nigeria. A few days after the attack on the presidential guards, Peoples Gazette reported one of those released from the terrorist captivity narrating how Nigerian soldiers shared N100 million of ransom fees. This corroborates information from insiders about how military top gun had been betraying anti-terrorism measures. What is clear is that the Nigerian military has been degraded by the corruption of its moral and professionalism.

As Abuja reels under insecurity, the immediate past Auditor General is charged for stealing N109 billion from government treasury. Many Nigerians know this is a tip of the iceberg of corrupt goings-on in government. The AGF was reported to have stolen that much, at a time all public universities in Nigeria have been shut down because university teachers are protesting non-payment of salaries and underfunding of universities. The stolen money is enough to get university teachers back to work. The same can be said about many other collapsed infrastructural services. Nigeria is not producing much. The little revenue from oil is stolen.

So, Nigeria is getting ruined because its leaders are mostly incompetent and corrupt. It is true, as Alex Perry of the US-based Time magazine, once wrote, that “Nigeria’s rulers have often been indistinguishable from its criminals. In Nigeria, corruption does not just pollute the system, it is the system.” The trial of the country’s chief accountability officer confirms this verdict.

The relationship between Nigeria’s corruption problem and its looming state collapse does not get the attention it deserves from the media and the public. Some make light of the deleterious effects of corruption on state effectiveness. They argue that corruption is a universal fact, and that if East Asia pulled off extraordinary economic development in spite of high corruption, corruption is not a good reason for Nigeria’s floundering.

The discourse of corruption is a vexed one. Many African scholars, especially those with a more radical ideology, argue that corruption as a discourse of development is being deployed to obscure the structural challenges African countries face in managing the iniquities and inequalities in the international global economy. By making corruption the cause of Africa’s economic underdevelopment, these western scholars and activists say we obscure the continuing impacts of colonialism. We are cursed, not by corruption, but by colonialization, they contend.

But any attempt at minimizing the danger of corruption to state order in Nigeria, by allusion to the universalism of corruption, is a mistake. Yes, corruption is a moral failure everywhere, but it is an existential crisis in Nigeria. There is a world of difference between corruption in Asia and in Nigeria. Renowned economist, Robert Wade, clears the doubt that corruption differs in modalities. As he puts it, “The emphasis on ‘anticorruption’ in the good governance agenda of the international development community obscures the difference between modalities, some of which are more developmentally damaging than others. As a stylized fact, Indian civil works corruption takes the form of correct pricing of substandard structures which wash out in the next monsoon. Korean civil work corruption takes the form of inflated prices for properly built structures, which endure”.

The truth is Nigeria’s corruption is unlike Asian corruption. In Asia, corruption does not degrade state effectiveness. That is why the economy grew and the society stabilized. In Nigeria, corruption is destroying the effectiveness of the state. That is why Nigeria is falling apart. Corruption has hollowed out the soul of the Nigerian state. The mummy is just ghosting about. We cannot rescue Nigeria if we do not end Nigeria’s grand corruption.

Sam Amadi, PhD, a former Chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, is the Director of Abuja School of Social and Political Thoughts.