My dear Prof.
I forgive you. Your long stay abroad in a society that is reasonably well run makes the appreciation of the Nigerian situation difficult.
Let me break it down to simple logic for you. Utopia was lost. Your holistic anti-corruption will never happen. The people like you who can make that happen are either happily engaged abroad or heading mega pente-rascal churches.
That leaves us with the only narrative we now have or no narrative while waiting for your Godot.
In a perfect world I would support you but in the reality of Nigeria any narrative of corruption is far better than no narrative. Your option of waiting for the utopian narrative is the worst possible option because it will never happen.
Cheers.Ibukunolu Babajide,So predictable, your response. What is my point? Read my original essay and my subsequent interventions. It's okay if you disagree with me, but what should one make of your designating yourself and others who support the single corruption story as nation builders and others like me who advocate a holistic, non-political anti-corruption strategy as fence sitters? Let me say this: I have always said that a politicized war on corruption is counterproductive. The evidence since 1999 supports my contention. Obasanjo tried it. Instead of corruption reducing, it skyrocketed. Yar'Adua stuck with the same template of making example of a few out-of-favor politicians. Corruption ballooned out of control, giving us the Jonathan era kleptocracy and impunity. In other words, the single corruption story hasn't worked since 1999, but you want us to continue along the same path. Okay, Kontinu, to paraphrase the former first lady. I guarantee you that in 2019 or 2023, if we continue along this path of prosecuting only politically errant people and sparing politically compliant ones, and if the Almighty spares our lives, we will be back to where we are now, and we will have a variant of this discussion again.--On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 3:46 PM, Ibukunolu A Babajide <ibk2005@gmail.com> wrote:Prof. Moses Ochonu,What is your point? We had impunity! We was raped to borrow a phrase. We endured and struggled and many of us are in exile because we braved the odds and refused to join the corrupt marauding hordes of heartless corrupt ones and we were able to identify corruption as the cancer that will kill Nigeria. Then we created a narrative around this cancer. Then with great effort we dislodged the most corrupt administration and we now have one corrupt big fish narrative.Instead of you to write your own narrative on how we will be able to catch and prosecute others you warn against the ONLY story that is a metaphor to impress on the masses in Nigeria that one by one all the corrupt ones will be brought to book.Your job and your role is not to warn. Yours is to be part of crafting the multiple narratives that will heal our soul as a nation and ensure that looting the public treasury does not pay.When you begin to do that, you would have become a nation builder and not a fence sitter.This one narration of corruption will be nurtured, and hopefully it will be a basis fr many others to emerge.Cheers.IBKOn 18 April 2016 at 16:41, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:--
The Danger of a Single Corruption Story
By Moses E. Ochonu
There is a danger in equating corruption in Nigeria with the infractions of a single corrupt individual. At different moments of our national life, we tend to narrowly and naively unload our anti-corruption angst on one individual politician. We then pummel this individual like a piñata while seemingly forgetting that Nigeria's political corruption is a group act, an orgy of theft involving whole groups of politicians and bureaucrats.
We inculpate some politicians while inadvertently exculpating others. We do so to assuage our emotional exhaustion at corruption's stubborn persistence, and its devastating consequences.
In the second republic the individual stand-in for corruption was Umaru Dikko. In the PDP era, it was James Ibori. In the unfolding APC period, that personification of Nigeria's corruption is Bukola Saraki.
To hear some people talk about Bukola Saraki one would think that the Senate President is the very embodiment of Nigeria's corruption problem and that his removal from office and/or conviction would magically banish graft and restore probity in the polity.
Reading and listening to some of these folks one would think that Nigeria's corruption virus originated with Saraki and would end with his conviction. You'd think that Saraki's ongoing trial was some seminal event in a revolution against corruption and that the reclamation of Nigeria hangs on its outcome alone.
Never mind that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu was charged with exactly the same offense as Saraki in a similarly politically charged atmosphere and that over 70 lawyers invaded the courtroom to defend him and eventually succeeded in intimidating the judge into acquitting him. Mr. Saraki is rightly berated for trying to wriggle out of an actual trial, for seeking to have the charges corruptly dismissed. But it's now a distant, rarely revisited memory that Tinubu, the architect and champion of change if you believe the hype, had used a mix of legal maneuvers, bully tactics, and other shady shenanigans to evade justice on multiple occasions when the late social crusader, Gani Fawehinmi, sought to subject him to an open court process. He, too, was afraid of a trial. Today, he issues periodic sermons about how corruption has hobbled Nigeria and needs to be defeated. Depressingly, many Nigerians cheer these sanctimonious pronouncements.
We are supposed to believe that Saraki is the only face of corruption in the APC, the lone compromised mole preventing President Buhari from articulating a coherent narrative of transparency, the internal APC saboteur of the president's battle against corruption.
Never mind that Tinubu allegedly did worse to/in Lagos State as governor than Saraki did in/to Kwara. Never mind that Saraki's reign of larceny was contained in one state while Tinubu has, as of this year, privatized and appropriated the resources and patrimony of five Southwestern states for at least five years (nine years in some cases).
Never mind that Saraki's current judicial predicament stems not from any genuine interest in frontally taking on corruption in the ruling party but from his stubborn rebellion against the wishes of the ruling party's power brokers.
Let's be clear; I stayed in Ilorin for about a month last July. I have a lot of friends from Kwara State. I know and saw what Saraki did in/to Kwara State — what he continues to do to Kwara state through his handpicked successor and protege. It is not pretty. And, although his current travails emanate from his stewardship (or lack thereof) as governor, the man's thievery actually has a longer life span, dating back to his looting of depositors' funds from the defunct Societe Generale Bank, a financial institution controlled by his family.
So the man deserves and should get his comeuppance, which unfortunately in this case is only going to be the loss of his position as senate president and not the deserved time in jail. I'd wager my meager savings on this outcome. As soon as he resigns or is forced out, his CCT trial will slowly wind down and fizzle out. That is a sad, familiar pattern. But I digress.
My point here is that Saraki deserves all he is getting and more but that we need to put things in perspective. There are many former governors in the senate who did worse to their states but who are today the darlings of the APC leadership. My former state governor, George Akume is one of them. He cleaned out Benue State and has installed his two successors, including the disastrous Gabriel Suswam and his borrow-and-spend successor, Samuel Ortom.
Yet Akume, with the enthusiastic blessing of APC elders, including Tinubu, aspired to the position of Senate Leader before his and others' ambitions were scuttled by Saraki's leadership coup. Not only has Akume's corruption case with the EFCC remained in limbo, dead for all intents and purposes for about eight years, today he is one of the revered APC godfathers in my area and in all of Nigeria. Unlike Saraki, his relationship with Tinubu and the party elders is peachy, and that confers immunity.
This is not to suggest that Saraki should be ignored or released from his ongoing trial unless other corrupt people join him in the dock. That would be a terrible logic. Rather, I am gesturing toward a certain strain of hypocrisy, a blind spot that allows us to glibly condemn Saraki's vices while remaining silent about similar and worse crimes committed by a large coterie of former and serving public officials. There is some cognitive dissonance at play here.
Saraki is an easy, filthy, universally reviled target. He is expendable. It is easy for the APC to use him "to shine." It is easy to sacrifice a rebellious and corrupt member of the family while protecting and making way for corrupt but compliant members.
The APC leadership has been talking in recent days about sacrificing Saraki and about their preparedness to lose the senate leadership to the opposition PDP in order to make a statement about their commitment to change. What a load of bullocks! Saraki defied the elders and he is a threat to their interests because he knows where the proverbial bodies are buried. Getting rid of him is a perverse partisan priority, not a nationalistic sacrifice for change.
My larger is this: we tend to be seduced into a faux populist hysteria by the power games of the political elite instead of keeping our focus on the systemic nature of our corruption problem. When the politicians ostracize a tainted, disavowed member of their fraternity, they project all of Nigeria's corruption problems onto that individual.
On our part, we sheepishly and unthinkingly follow them to pour all our anti-corruption outrage into this individual. We then pretend that this person alone is corrupt among the political class or that he is the most corrupt member of that collective. We do it over and over again.
There was a time when this individuated symbol of Nigerian corruption was James Ibori. We created the fiction that Nigeria's corruption malaise inheres only in the corrupt former governor. He became the avatar of corruption in Nigeria, and his name became interchangeable with graft. That obsession lasted for about five years.
Ibori was eventually nabbed by the British judicial system and put away. One expected corruption to end with the removal of the godfather of corruption. Logically, if our narrative was correct, Ibori's demise should have signaled the demise of our corruption monster. Instead corruption ballooned in his absence, reaching its stratospheric peak during the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan. Corruption in the post-Ibori era threatened to beatify the former Delta State governor.
Then and now, the obsession with single corruption stories, with individual representative figures of corruption has the effect of shielding other equally corrupt and more corrupt members of the political class from scrutiny and recompense. The larger cult of corrupt officials obtains exculpation by cunningly redirecting our outrage from the entire corrupt political elite to a momentarily disfavored politician. We then soon discover that corruption does not begin and end with this individual. But we don't learn from this realization. We keep repeating the same error.
Saraki's "anointing" as a symbol of all that is wrong with Nigeria is shielding many of the corrupt people in the APC, including Tinubu, from justice. What's more, it is allowing them to position themselves hypocritically as champions of transparency and probity.
Earlier, our obsession with Ibori had the effect of displacing responsibility and culpability from the father of corruption in modern Nigeria, former president Olusegun Obasanjo.
We must be wary of single corruption stories that unwittingly give a pass to corrupt people and allow them to further afflict us with insultingly hypocritical and self-serving preachments about fighting corruption.
Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie alerted us to the dangers of perpetuating single stories about Africa. As in that case, single, individuated corruption stories distort and oversimplify our national narrative on corruption. They also undermine the quest for a non-politicized, blind regime of accountability.
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