Corruption And Democracy

The indigenous African cultures in which the present superficial (though powerfully extractive) Nigerian state is embedded, has an aversion for the privatisation of social being. Instead, the African gets his/her fullest being in the community of interests, in the collectivity which is built on a fusion of personal responsibility and communal privilege. He/she. gets his or her rights .and obligations from belonging to a group with which he/she shares intimate solidarity.Bureaucratic corruption is less likely to occur in such a setting as when privatisation produces private interests in both the economic and political realms. Corruption in the state of individual poverty is more a rational than a moral choice, especially when the poor citizen has to choose between his family not surviving the next day due to hunger, and his taking some petty amount from the public coffers to meet his pressing- survival needs. Yes,’ it can be argued that such a citizen cannot be absolved of the consequences of the choice that he/she has made. After all, some workers in similarly derived positions have found morally acceptable ways of making ends meet by supplementing their meagre salaries with either becoming part-time farmers after the offices close, or engaging in the’ minimalist enterprises... of supplementary petty trading: It can even be better argued that the rich in high public offices are exactly those who loot the commonwealth the most. It becomes obvious that the corrupt Nigerian cannot completely escape the responsibility of the personal choice he/she has to make. What is important to note is that some of these personal choices may be rational at the micro personal level, but extremely dysfunctional at the macro level.Yet we must face the fact that to be public-spirited under such circumstances, comes at a very high price. Worse still, even your own family to whom you would have to run for support and reinforcement is more likely to abandon you emotionally because you have chosen your own morality over their own survival.But what are the cumulative results of corruption on the Nigerian state? First to be noted is the progressive enrichment of Nigerians through fraudulent accumulation, the emptying of the national treasury, the indebtedness of the country, and the dearth of resources needed for the social, economic and cultural development of our people. As part of the 2000 World Values Survey, Nigerians were asked:· “Generally speaking, would you say that this country is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves, or that it is run for the benefit of all the people?”The high degree of alienation and cynicism engendered in the Nigerian public. reflects the scandalous position in which the prodigious wealth of key members of the ruling class, exists to mock the unspeakable mass poverty and degradation of our people. This has bred mass cynicism and a distrust of the political elite(Azarya &, Chazan 1987) which have progressively contributed to the worsening intra and inter- communal conflicts (Ikelegbe 2001).Because the state treasury has been the ultimate target for phenomenal private accumulation, the struggle for state power has been particularly fierce and bitter among the several factions of the ruling elite. The recent well documented· brazen acts of political corruption through massive rigging of the 2003 Gubernatorial and State Assemblies elections in a number of states is a direct evidence of the democratic deficit engendered by materialist political corruption. Perhaps more frightful is the recent announcement by the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) that all thirty-six State Governors except one, in 2003 are under investigation! Moreover, when excluded from the share of the booty, the losing factions are wont to use the poor masses from their villages and ethnic groups of origin as battering rams against their rivals from other areas. In this way they further undermine the stability of the already deeply divided society and undercut the possibility of the governance in Nigeria.Rampant corruption among the elite has also taught the very unfortunate lesson to the general public that being honest does not pay. As a result of this lesson, some of the ordinary citizens then try to replicate the corrupt practices of our rulers in their own lowly levels through petty acts of bribery, hiding and burning of files for small fees, and a general attitude that public money within one’s reach, no matter how small, is for the stealing. It is from this way that corruption has become our national way of life, what with the sapping effects of the Structural Adjustment Programme (S.A.P.) which has brought the standard of living of the average Nigerian as low as the thirteenth poorest in the world. And yet billions of dollars of our national wealth have been siphoned away into foreign banks of the already developed economies of the world.Since money meant to run our public institutions have been increasingly diverted to private purses, our hospitals, schools, public utilities, national airline, universities, refineries, judiciary and even the armed forces and police are run down. This state of neglect has effectively subverted these very crucial institutions and rendered them incapable of performing their functions and sometimes even endangering the lives of the citizens whom these institutions were meant to serve.This has further undermined the confidence of Nigerians in these key national institutions, and threatens to continuously erode the dividends of democracy. Asked in the same 2000 World Values Survey to indicate the amount of confidence they had in certain important national institutions, the cumulative positive evaluations of Nigerians for important national institutions were as follows: police (34.9%), political parties (44.2%), parliament (45.0%), armed forces (46.6%), national government (48.2%), as compared with the press (64.2%) trade unions (65.1 %), private companies (70.2%), civil service, (70.5%) and the churches (94.8%).The negative image of important democratic institutions as noted above is best put in focus in the light of other comparative findings about the linkage between support for democracy and permissiveness toward corruption. Alejandro Moreno (2003) working with the 1995-1996 and the 1999-2000 World Values Survey data from 58 countries, established some notable correlations. First he found that his index for permissiveness towards corruption had an overall negative correlation 0.32) with the Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI). This means that “relatively high scores on transparency (the CPI is measured in a scale where high scores mean less corruption) are associated with low levels of permissiveness toward corruption” (Moreno 2003: 268) .Second, for the subset of 58 countries examined, Moreno found that the correlation between hisscales of permissiveness toward corruption and support for democracy, is an impressive negative coefficient of -0.43. This indicates that “high support for democracy is associated with low citizen justification of corruption. Among the most supportive of democracy and least likely to justify corruption are Japan, Hong Kong, and United States in the 1995 survey” (Moreno 2003: 268).The close association between support for democracy, low permissiveness toward corruption and national prosperity becomes evident in the above findings. It is therefore very lamentable that because of the unrelenting pillage of our national wealth by our rulers, the future of an entire generation of young Nigerians is being destroyed. Many of our youths who have graduated from universities frustratingly roam the streets jobless, for years on end, while some are forced to engage in crime, drug pushing and prostitution. Those of them who can find their way out are, “brain drained” to other countries where their services may be utilized. In these and other ways, our greedy rulers are mortgaging the future of this and next generations, and have reduced, our fatherland to a beggar nation even though Nigeria has been blessed with almost inexhaustible human and natural resources. Let us now proceed from diagnosis to prescription.SolutionsCan we dare to proffer solutions to this ravaging and overpowering social cancer, of our time, guilty as we all are in .our own several ways, of contributing to this national epidemic?It is very clear that we are dealing with a deep rooted problem that will definitely not yield to any simple quick-fix solution (Ake 2000).Neither will, moralising produce the answer as it has been aptly observed that as the number of churches and mosques has exponentially multiplied in our nation during these difficult and shameful years, so also has the scale of corruption exponentially multiplied. Short of revolution, some institutional beginnings have started to appear even though shakily in the Nigerian political horizon in the form of the Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act (2000) which was forced through the National Assembly by President Obasanjo immediately after coming to office, and now repealed by the Senate just before the 2003 general elections. Even if the Courts succeed in preventing the repeal of the Act, one is tempted to ask if it has a good chance, in and of itself, of doing the trick for Nigeria.However such laws, as pointed out by Doig (1995) under certain conditions have some part to play. Have we not tried Code of Conduct Bureau and all such other institutions in the past, and where have they led us? It is therefore important that we do not simply stop at: “CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY”.To my mind what is needed is a long-term project solution. The solution that will be effective and that will endure has to be targeted at the structural deformities of the Nigerian state (Johnston, 1998). The first step therefore must be geared towards rescuing the state for our people, by creating a public no matter how rudimentary it may be. This difficult state project is aimed at realising some degree of legitimacy for the Nigerian state such that our various peoples will be enabled to see their welfare more effectively engendered by the large state entity, than by the small communal rival primordial polities that have hitherto served as our refuge in the past, (and paradoxically) are now serving as safe havens for our predators who are increasing becoming traditional chiefs.
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