This is a Keynote Speech by Professor Patrick L.O. Lumumba at the Third Anti-Corruption Convention that held in Uganda on December 2nd, 2013. He is a Kenyan and a lawyer. This speech is to challenge you as a Nigerian and as an African.

“Corruption is something that we talk about. It is something that we complain about. It is something whose negative impact we recognize. It is something that even the corrupt acknowledge it’s a bad thing. But the irony and the tragedy at once is that those who engage in corruption love it. The tragedy at once is that those of us who do not engage in it directly accommodate it. Our levels of tolerance for corruption in Africa is amazing. Long time ago, a great Greek philosopher said that it is in the nature of man to hang the small thieves and to elect the great ones into public office. We do that in Uganda, we do that in Kenya, we do that in Tanzania, we do that in Africa. And that is why Africa remains the poorest continent on earth.

I was, this morning, re-reading a book which I commend to you. Book written by young Zambian economist called Dambisa Moyo. The book called ‘Dead Aid’. And in the introduction in that book there is a note which was found in the bodies of two young Guineans who died while trying to run away from Africa. Today, many young Africans are running away. Not so long ago, about four weeks to be exact, three hundred young Africans drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in Lampedusa because they were running away from Africa…

When you look at Africa today, whether you are looking at Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria or indeed any country in Africa. Our richest men and women are the men and women who occupy public office. We live in a continent where we celebrate thieves and vilify good men and women. That is the tragedy of Africa. While every other continent in the recent past has moved in the right direction, Africa still remains in the words of Tony Blair as 'the scar in the conscience of humanity'. We live in a continent today, where as the young man upsurge our young women are born attaining puberty cannot afford sanitary pads but our public servants have ipad which they do not know how to use. We live in a continent today, where our leaders who preside over our health sectors have no faith in the health sector. When they are sick and their families are sick they run away to seek treatment in Germany, in France, in the United Kingdom, in South Africa and India. Even our health ministers don’t have faith in our health departments. We live in a country and countries today, where the political leadership have no faith in the education sector. They bring unto us what they call free primary education or universal primary education but they can never dare take their children to those schools. We live in countries where we claim that agriculture is the backbone of our societies but we do not use technology to produce crops. Africans are dying younger than they were dying fifty years ago. We live in a country where Africans would energetically seek to amend the statutes of Rome while there is war in Mali, while there is war in Mauritania, while there is no peace in Somalia, while there is no rest in Eretria. Africa is a tragic continent. And I want to submit to you, that corruption is the source of all these.

For some reason a reason that I do not understand, Africans still engage in ‘Primitive Accumulation’. Many Africans, particularly those in public service, will never rest until they have homes in different capitals in the world which they will never live in. They have cars which they will never drive. They have beds of gold which they never sleep on because they never sleep anyway. They buy food which they cannot eat because they long lost their appetites. We live in sour times. I have the privilege of serving as the director of Kenyan anti-corruption Commission. But it would appear that I do not understand my brief well. Upon being appointed I assumed that my mandate was to go out there and fight the corrupt but the truth was that I was not supposed to fight corruption I was supposed to appear to be fighting corruption. Immediately me and my team tried to fight corruption, the parliamentarians in their wisdom and in my own view in their lack of wisdom used the occasion of the amendment of the law to disband the organization and to send myself and my four directors out of office. The history of anti-corruption crusaders in Africa is one and the same. Their mortality rate in office is very short. Before I was victimized, before my victimization, Nuhu Ribadu before me had been victimized in Nigeria. Before I was victimized, McCarty had been victimized in South Africa and the scorpions disbanded. Before I was victimized my equivalent in Malawi had been victimized. Before I’d been victimized, my equivalent in Zambia had been victimized. It would appear that in Africa that if you served your full term you have refused to fight corruption. So the question that we must ask here now in an occasion such as this, what must Africa do going forward...

I want you to remember that now that Uganda has discovered oil, the history of oil throughout us Africa has been a sad history. If you go to Nigeria which is the fourth or the fifth leading producer of oil; in Africa, the Nigerians do not have a good story to tell. Nigeria is a great country, but it’s famous for producing some of the greatest thieves that the world has ever known. You will go to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is the richest resource country in the world and the Democratic Republic of Congo is famous of producing some of the biggest thieves that the world has never known. If you did not know there once lived a Mobutu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. If you had any doubt, go to Angola, with all its oil, it has one of the richest African women in the world. The daughter of the president Isabel dos Santos. She claims to be a business woman but the last time I checked she was just an entrepreneur. And you can go to different African countries, the tragedy of Africa is that Africans are in the business of canonizing thieves and demonizing its saints. Especially you who are present in this assembly, what is it that we can do because corruption is alive and well in our communities…

Source: https://racerthoughts./2015/08/31/corruption-in-africa/
It is also available on youtube.
www.racerthoughts.

This is interesting and powerful.