Daily Independent Online.
*
Thursday, August 12, 2004.
Obasanjo’s administration and anti-corruption
campaign
By Bolaji Adepegba
Senior
Correspondent, Lagos
During
a dinner organised in his honour in Osogbo, the Osun State capital, when he was
visiting recently, President Olusegun Obasanjo, taking the podium, announced
that he wanted to be in a light mood and went on jokes spree.
He
spoke about the purge carried out by the Federal Military Government of which
he was a part, recalling a story of a civil servant who was jeering at others
whose names were listed for compulsory retirement, but on the third day, he
heard on radio his own retirement.
He
used the joke ironically to emphasise the seriousness he attached to his
current anti-corruption crusade. Unlike what obtains under Obasanjo’s
military regime of the 1970s, corruption in Nigeria is no more a laughing
matter.
An
African Union report released in 2002 revealed that Africa loses an estimate of
N148 billion annually to corrupt practices. With Nigeria as the second largest
economy and arguably the most affected by corruption, the breakdown of this
figure can only be imagined.
Fortunately,
the rank of the anti corruption army is swelling by the day. Outside all the
government agencies set up for the fight, civil society groups and religious
bodies are joining in the crusade by the day. But corruption seems to be
fighting back.
Recently
in Lagos, a human rights group, Independent Advocacy Project (IAP), announced
that it was planning a survey on corruption in the country, in which they would
collect data in three cities in the country, which will end up in the
publication of the Nigeria Corruption Index (NCI).
Babatunde
Olugboji, the chairman of IAP, said: “A key objective of the index is to
create awareness on the adverse effect of corruption on enjoyment of economic
rights in a democratic society and its effects on poverty levels.”
He
further added that corruption hinders development and prevents good governance,
eroding stability and trust. Despite all these, Olugboji said that despite all
the talks about corruption in the country, there is no empirical data to act on
for the fight against corruption.
In
a similar spirit, NASFAT, an Islamic group, organised a seminar in Lagos on
stemming corruption in the country. At the occasion, the former Head of State,
who was the chairman of the event, General Yakubu Gowon, stated the obvious:
“The
socio-economic implications of this cancer on our national economy are
staggering in all its ramifications.” He told the gathering that
corruption had wreaked havoc on the economy as well as threatening to destroy
the moral fabric of the Nigerian society.
One
of the discussants at the seminar, the Chairman of the Independent Corrupt
Practices Commission (ICPC), Justice Mustapha Akanbi (retd.), putting the
phenomenon in perspective, said: “Corruption means many things to many
people. In ordinary parlance, corruption means any dishonest or illegal
behaviour, an immoral behaviour, any conduct that smacks of cheating, indecency
and/or violation of normative values of society, like sexual abuse…Put
differently, corruption means the use of public office or power for private
benefit as, for example, when a public officer in the discharge of his official
duties collects bribe to enrich his own pocket or to show favour to a bribe
giver or bend the operative rules and regulations to gratify oneself or confer
undue advantage for a fee.”
He
therefore cited the effect of corruption on the society to include the
destruction of the socio-economic life of a society, the concentration of
wealth in the hands of the few, political instability, wide spread poverty and
large-scale unemployment.
Akanbi
added also that his commission had set a record in the anti-corruption crusade,
reminding the public that in the last 20 years, nobody, before the advent of
ICPC, was charged to court in the country for corruption, adding that his
commission had succeeded in putting 76 people on trial, including seven
permanent secretaries and two former ministers.
But
many observers have wondered whether the current campaign is a genuine effort
to rid the nation of corruption or just another part of the image project of
the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo, especially as there has been
more focus on the public sector in the country.
Last
month, the British and American subsidiary of ABB Ltd., a Swiss equipment
making company, owned up to committing the crime of paying $I million in bribes
to win oil contract in Nigeria. The company pleaded guilty at a United States
federal court in Houston. The company had paid the bribe to get confidential
bid information and the nod of some government agencies for the contract. The
American court slammed a fine on the company worth more than five times the
bribe value. While all these went on in the US, it passed in Nigeria like a
piece of foreign news. The response of the corruption-fighting organs of
government, especially the police to this matter is still being awaited.
Cases
like this underline charges of hypocrisy that Nigerians bring against the
anti-corruption posture of government.
An
observer cited a case during the first term of President Obasanjo when a former
permanent secretary in the Ministry of Defence, Mr. Makanju, was arrested and
tried for an offence of allegedly embezzling N1 billion, with the help of
others, meant for paying some villagers for land acquired from them. On the day
the judgment was to be pronounced, the then Attorney General of the Federation,
Chief Kalu Agabi, filed a nolle prosequi, a legitimate prerogative of the
attorney general to nullify the trial. And the case was eventually struck out.
And everybody, except the villagers, went home happy.
“When
Obasanjo came in, he promised that he would fight corruption, but I recall at
that time many people were very skeptical. There was a lot of cynicism. We
should not just think we could fight corruption through slogans or through
parrot declaration. Corruption is entrenched and should not be underestimated.
It will resist all efforts to fight it. It is endemic. There are no questions
that the fight must be won. The issue is all institutions that are needed to
fight corruption, are they ready to fight corruption? Are they strong enough to
fight corruption? Are they responding to the need to fight corruption?”
Abdul Oroh, a member of the House of Representatives, asked rhetorically in an
interview with Daily Independent, adding:
“How
much of tax is actually collected and paid to the government? It is difficult
to know. Some institutions will put it on paper that they have collected VAT
from you, but whether this VAT is remitted to the government is the issue. The
tax collection system in Nigeria is faulty and I think the finance minister
should look into that and ensure that tax violation is severely punished. That
is what is done in other countries.”
To
fight corruption, Obasanjo had set up the ICPC with an Act of the National
Assembly during his first term in office. The law ran into troubled waters
towards the end of the same first term when ICPC started to investigate the
Speaker of the House of Representatives of the time, Alhaji Ghali Umar
Na’abba, and the Senate President Anyim Pius Anyim. The National Assembly
sought to change the ICPC Act as it was popularly called. Though the commission
carried the day in the sense that the legislature did not succeed in altering
it, the investigation that was purportedly being carried out against the
principal officers of the legislature died with their tenure.
“I
learnt more on this job about the nature of man than I did in 25 years on the
Bench,” Akanbi said.
More
recently, Nuhu Ribadu, chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission
(EFCC), another anti-corruption organ, got a reprimand from the Federal
Government for saying that many people in public positions are corrupt,
insinuating that they probably got so high up in the societal ladder because
they “excel in the art of stealing,” indicting the law enforcement
agencies in the country and the judiciary.
To
this, the National Conscience Party (NCP) responded in a press statement,
saying: “It could not be difficult to substantiate Ribadu’s
assertion. The singular case instituted by the Vaswanis against the EFCC
challenging their deportation showed how sections of the Bar and Bench,
government officials, security agents are collectively compromised in
perpetrating economic sabotage against the national economy.”
These
and other instances have begun to fuel suspicion that Obasanjo has been using
the anti-corruption agencies to witch-hunt his perceived enemies.
At
the NASFAT seminar, Governor Bola Tinubu of Lagos State in a welcome address
sent to the gathering said: “Matters are not helped by the Federal Government,
which publishes the monthly allocation from the Federation Account to states
and local governments, while keeping the public in the dark on monthly
allocations to its ministries and agencies! The cause of transparency will
certainly be better served if the monthly allocation to the federal ministries
and parastatals is equally published for the benefit of the public. In the
final analysis, the fight against corruption in Nigeria can only be won if we
return to the tenets of true federalism in the governance of the
country.”
Transparency
has been considered very vital in the fight against corruption. The head of the
Due Process Unit, an agency in the Presidency that ensures that contracts are
awarded and carried out in conformity with standards and judicious spending on
the part of the government, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, said in a recent paper:
“Empirically, it has been established that openness, transparency,
information, competition, sanctions, incentives, clear rules and regulations
that are strictly enforced are enemies of corruption. It is very easy to fathom
why this is the case. Corruption, inherently an activity that thrives in
secrecy, takes opportunity of unequal access to information by parties to
transaction or activity and becomes widespread where the cost of corruption
conduct is low but the profit is high.”
Oroh,
who would rather have a legislative framework for transparency, supported this.
Here
him: “I think we need a law like the Freedom of Information Act that will
allow us access to information. Access to information should be treated as a
fundamental right, which I think it is. We should eliminate the culture of
secrecy that makes it impossible for us as Nigerians to speak out when we see
wrong being committed. We should
even give incentive to people who are ready to speak out against corruption,
who are ready to give information to law enforcement agents, who are ready to
support the fight against corruption.
I think we need to create an open society, with an open government.
Because government business is done in secret, there is room for corruption. I
mean you don’t just publish in the paper asking for tenders. When the
tenders are received, you don’t hear anything about them. So if you collect tenders publicly, we
should have the opportunity and the choice to know who has submitted a tender.
We should be in a position to know how much they are tendering. The whole
process should be open and transparent. Once we see a more transparent
government at all levels: executive, legislature and even the judiciary or the
private sector, all governmental businesses, including the process of
privatisation would be transparent. So I think the press also has a role to
play, it has to have access to information. Without that, they cannot help the
system to be self-restraining. Openness drives democracy. If the system is not
open, then it is prone to corruption. And corruption undermines the system and
there is no meaningful progress.”
As
a step towards transparency in the fight against corruption, the General
Secretary of the Catholic Secretariat, Rev. Fr. George Ehusani, challenged the
federal government to make public all white papers on reports of the various
panels that have been set up over the years to address societal ills, including
the Oputa and Okigbo panels in order to prove its sincerity of its
anti-corruption campaign.
But
for Oroh, the fight against corruption is not one reserved for the government
alone. Like Gowon who told the Lagos seminar that “only when efforts are
concentrated on the individual can the process of ridding the society of
corruption truly begin,” Oroh said that the Nigerian specie of corruption
is such that has permeated the whole fabric of the society and therefore needs
all hands on deck for the solution to it. He offered some possible solutions.
“There
should be a lot of programmes like civic education because it has come down to
every level. Go to the universities you’ll see some lecturers awarding
grades to students for a fee or for sexual favours. It has gone down so deep to
every level of the Nigerian society. So there has to be a lot of campaigns,
there has to be a national reorientation of values. We have to reward hard work
and good work. We have to clean up the system, especially the civil service,
because right now, the civil service is not responding to change. The police,
the customs the judiciary. You can see through the election tribunals. There
are cases of judges collecting money.
So to fight corruption, every Nigerian must be ready to
cooperate,” he said.
In
this light, Akanbi said in Lagos that the ICPC was not all about prosecution
and investigations. He said his commission had been setting up youth clubs on
anti-corruption all over the country to ensure reorientation of the generation
of Nigerians who are still coming up. The fight against corruption is gaining
more converts everyday, but the impact is not seen in the polity. The fight is
one that depends so much on the judiciary and the law enforcement agencies. But
the agencies have proved over the years that they are the bedrock of corruption
in the country.
Apart from a reorientation of the polity, observers have
said there is the need to restructure all the agencies, especially the police
if the fight must succeed. It has also been advocated that all government
businesses should be done in the open to instill confidence in the people about
the sincerity of the government to fight the cancer of corruption.
