“Tell the President” by Chika Okpalike.

When in 2015, PMB came up with the ‘Anti-corruption’ agenda under the “Change” slogan, I had thought that he either was completely clueless as to what corruption portends or that he was simply playing the kangaroo, fronting a populist sentiment and buying into the minds of vulnerable Nigerians. The corruption of African leaders has since then taken a centre stage in international discourses on Africa. I belong to the class of people who may not hold very fast on corruption, as an African problem, in as much as I know it is a problem; even if I may, I also like to clarify the kind of corruption which is the issue. As it stands, I stand beside that opinion since it seems that corruption is the viable term that could warm-up PMB’s passion in the art of governance. Perhaps PMB was right and has convinced me that corruption is the problem. Thanks, Mr President. Having so conceptualized corruption, I could not but find ourselves sitting in the center of corruption.

Many years ago, I came across the words embezzlement, misappropriation, fraud or pilferage as inappropriate meddling with public funds. I also encountered the couplet ‘bribery and corruption’. Obviously in those good old days inappropriate meddling with public fund was such a huge crime and leaders may not have figured out ways and means of doing it cleanly and legally. The Afro-Jazz maestro, Fela Kuti had decried these forms of practices in so many beats even taking on a former military dictator known as General Muhammadu Buhari directly and personally (Google “Beast of no nation” by Fela). When after about thirty-six years of “Beast of the Nation”, PMB came up with the “Anti-Corruption” mantra, I misunderstood him as suffering from a mental fixation that makes him think that the above inappropriate activities, an art he knew its antiques, was all there is to be known about corruption. Now I think he was right, but Mr President needed to know something more.

Now, I think, someone should help me to tell the president that corruption is much more than embezzlement/diversion of public fund; is way larger than “Bribery and corruption” the way he knew it before he distorted the second republic, hijacked that democracy and decimated the emergence of another new breed of Nigerian politicians set on course. Someone should tell the president that corruption has gone far beyond individual smart manoeuvres to formalized, structurized and legalized forms of impoverishing the nation of material, human and natural resources. Someone should tell the president that the very system that brought him into power, the very system he operates, the institutions of governance that he coordinates; government bureaucracy, processes and forms of administration are dimensions in the dictionary definition of corruption. Someone should tell the president that the map of Nigeria is corruption; he needs restructuring because the structure he operates is the graphic representation of corruption. To fight corruption is to fight all the institutions and structures of government that promotes injustice, perpetrates nepotism, normalizes marginalization, scuttles democratic processes through dialogue, harbours fear and suspicion, escalates tensions and violence and leaves every well-intentioned leader bigoted and ineffective. Fighting corruption is not using the institutions of government to witch-hunt those who are opposed to his policies and administration.

Someone should tell the president that it is corruption to have nineteen states in northern Nigeria plus FCT and seventeen in the south; it is corruption to have four hundred and eleven local governments added to another six in the federal capital territory to make four hundred and seventeen whereas there are three hundred and fifty seven in the south, the result of which is the imbalance of number in the national assemblies and the incapacitation of southern lawmakers to move any southern agenda and to aid the executive to see no justification to look southward in any developmental program. Someone should tell Mr President that it is corruption to sustain and uphold the ultimate destroyer of meritocracy in Nigeria called the “Federal Character”. Just and fair competitiveness is the catalyst of growth in any ambient of human existence; if one’s surname or ethnicity becomes the qualifying certificate for anything in this country, it is nepotism and it breeds corruption. It is corruption when government spending is so outrageous whereas very little things and ways of easing the lives of the common people are neglected.

Mr President should understand that the beginning of the fight against corruption is the systematic dismantling of the structure and processes put in place to enable corruption itself; denouncing corruption is not only when the day to day running of government under the aegis of corruption disfavours him. Mr President should be made to understand that he is administering the nation from the headquarters of corruption, with the paraphernalia of corruption and only succeeds in perpetrating corruption while the rest of his countrymen languish under the excruciating tortures of corruption. Even as he is recovering stolen public fund, the act of stealing same public fund is quadrupling under his watch because the enablers of the practice is solidly set in place.

Restructuring is not just devolution of power, resource control, returning to 1963 arrangement and constitution or creating a sixth state in the southeast. Restructuring is the beginning of the fight for the total eradication of corruption by dismantling all structures and institutions that perpetrate and enable corruption.

A corruption crusader who does not know what constitute corruption is an idiot.

Sadly

Till the dat Nigerians know what corruption actually is then that day things will start improving