A Way Out of Corruption

By Ogiri John Ogiri 

This may sound uncomfortable but corruption does not originate in the boardroom. It originates in our individual corrupt tendencies with the bedroom as an epicentre. We see these corrupt tendencies at work when we do businesses with people, sell or buy things in the market as well as in our personal relationships with others.

Acts of corruption in boardrooms in both public and private institutions are merely a climax of our individual propensities towards corruption hatched in the inner recesses of our minds but first operationalized in our bedrooms. Generally speaking, Corruption follows a hierarchy that flows from bottom to the top. In other word, it is a bottom-top chain of command thing. After all, if charity could and should begin at home, we cannot and should not excuse its opposite not to equally begin at home.

Therefore, to kill corruption at the top, we must first make efforts to extricate from the minds of our citizens those tendencies that favour the breeding of corruption in those minds. Do you notice that the loudest voices against corruption come from those yet to have access to the national cake? 

Having done that, perhaps through a genuine value reorientation advocacy and programme, we can now begin to dismantle those endogenous structures and conditions that usually push the individual towards corruption. Some of those conditions can be itemised as below:

1. The current minimum wage which is grossly inadequate to qualify for a living wage.

2. The nauseating impunity with which people steal and graze our common national treasury to baldness. Lack of serious consequences for acts of corruption in Nigeria has emboldened the resolve of many to steal and to plunder without mercy for the masses.

3. The current convulsive payment patterns suffered by retirees of Public and civil services seem to encourage those in active service to plunder at the slightest opportunity to prevent uncertainties of the rainy days after retirement.

4. Sale of job slots by some government employees. This is already sufficient to enfeeble any spirit of honesty and patriotism a young job seeker may have before buying such a job slot, that is if he or she can afford it.

5. The commodification of services by salaried government officials, who place emphasis on a disturbing philosophy of "money for hand, back for ground" . The dangerous implication here is that, many have now come to accept as part of our belief system that, with money, one can do and undo and get away with it. To fit into this kind of a system therefore, many people can do anything including taking to corruption just to become rich and join the league of those who call the shots.

The list inexhaustible and I cannot hope to exhaust them in this piece. 

By way of conclusion, I make bold to say that corruption is still one of our major undoings as a country. It, therefore, becomes imperative that current efforts at ending or alleviating corruption must be steered away from cosmetics and bent towards a more pragmatic approach that integrates the problems with the solution for better outcome. 

May Nigeria succeed!

-Ogiri John Ogiri.