Ken,
Lest I forget, since you have not mentioned him: sssssssssomeone to rave about and highly to be recommended ( I'm reading it just now and – pure nostalgia, as he carries me back to Port Harcourt :
Jowhor Ile : And After Many Days !
On this second day of Shavuot, taking in Trump's reaction to the massacre in Orlando and bearing in mind Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair's words,
"Heedfulness leads to cleanliness; cleanliness leads to purity; purity leads to abstinence; abstinence leads to holiness; holiness leads to humility; humility leads to fear of sin; fear of sin leads to modesty; modesty leads to piety; piety leads to the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit leads to the Resurrection of the Dead; and the Resurrection of the Dead comes through Elijah blessed be his memory, amen" ,
Ken made me tremble just now by hypnotic suggestion and by remotely beatifying me and my conscience with the prospect of purity, personal purity of the kind that does not bribe a cop (no never) but conscience nevertheless may wink or blink at a wench - one of the reasons that makes me very uncomfortable with Jesus saying that even if you just look at her, you have already committed adultery in your heart, when perhaps you were merely appreciating beauty , as in "beauty is truth , truth beauty" and "a thing of beauty is a joy for ever."
Please excuse my saying so , but the fact is and Teju Cole makes this clear in his "Every Day Is For The Thief": rampant corruption has become all-pervasive and inheres in the fabric of society , unfortunately it has grown to becomes part of the the woof and the warp of naija culture. The oxygen of the entrepreneurial spirit I wonder if Donald Trump could do business in Nigeria and survive without it.
Fact is that there are still a few inspirational stories such as this one and there are many Corneliuses in Nigeria even if we are vastly outnumbered by super-predator, bribe-taking Nigerian cops, not to mention thieving bank managers. So far I have about five great stories to tell about corruption in Nigeria. My first encounter was when I gave my wallet containing about £1,500 to Sonny Orlu an acquaintance ( working for AGIP) to keep for me, as we set off from his home to enjoy a night out in Port Harcourt; I didn't want to carry that amount on me, and in the morning (at his place ) he returned a very thin wallet - my heart sank when I saw it – he said that someone must have stolen the contents which he had hidden somewhere. On my next visit he had bought a new fridge and a new sound system etc. and I became suspicious, but we remained friends.
If it was bad then, back in 1984, when Buhari took over and together with Tunde Idiagbon started to implement one of the solutions known as WAI ( War Against Indiscipline) and it was in the middle of this War Against Indiscipline when the Nigerian Naira was still pegged at the £1 sterling rate of exchange that the Savannah Bank Manager was not afraid to request that I give him £3, 000 sterling, so that I could take out my gratuity money as per my contract with the Rivers State Government; what could it be now – how bad, now that it's 283.26 Nigerian Naira to the British £sterling and foreign exchange is even much harder to come by? I could have reported him to Mr. Effebo ( Deputy Commissioner of Police or to the then Chief Justice of Rivers State who I first met at a party in my second week in Nigeria and who two days before leaving Nigeria, wanted me to take a suitcase of his as my personal baggage and to deliver it to a relative of his who was living in Göteborg - I didn't even mention the débâcle with the bank manager to him because I believed in the bank manager, that if I didn't give him £ 3,000 it only meant that I wouldn't get my money immediately, and that it would take " a few months"...
China has Confucius , the US still largely has the protestant ethic , Northern Nigeria has the Quran and Sunnah, our Yoruba have Olodumare whilst the Igbo brethren with whom I broke bread for more than three years , they have Chukwu and Jesus of Nazareth, but I must inquire further from Ogbeni Kadiri who often lectures me on Yoruba morality (that in the olden days the world's oldest profession did not obtain in Yorubaland etc.) how corruption has been able to make inroads in the ancestral Yoruba sections of post-colonial Nigeria.
In Sierra Leone in the early 60s of the last century Sue Spencer an American Peace Corps volunteer was deported because of a postcard that she had written and which appeared in her book entitled "African Creeks I Have Been Up " in which occurred the statement " Every Sierra Leonean is a potential thief"
I think that in the early years of Independence, when British influence still lingered probably because of some of the reasons given by Bernard Porter here, "the withdrawal of the 'discipline' that British imperialism provided."etc., Sierra Leoneans were more nationalistic than they are now. At Independence it was less of a rat race since it was two leones to the British £ Sterling. It's now 5611.74 Leones to the British £Sterling.
Your thesis that it's inevitably part of the global economic system , it's genesis in Chomsky's What We Say Goes // Saint Augustine's story of Alexander and the pirate again, IMF imposed structural adjustment programmes currency devaluations, etc. impacting on the domestic , and causing mass poverty etc. We know that the predator cop returns home to his wife and family of five at the end of a day's work only to be greeted by the witheringly look from his wife, the same story , money palaver - so he changes into his evening work clothes traffic police uniform and stops the first car being driven by some foreign looking bloke, at Mile One (driving licence, brakes, insurance lights, and so, to collect five naira and by midnight he has collected maybe fifty , enough for tomorrows family meals, school clothes, school books, school fees, ) and so in his own defence – and man must survive, like the pirate, he says ( in the words of Mr. Chomsky):
"That reminds me of the story of the emperor Alexander and his encounter with a pirate.
I don't know if it happened, but according to the account from Saint Augustine, a pirate was brought to Alexander, who asked him, How dare you molest the seas with your piracy? The pirate answered, How dare you molest the world? I have a small ship, so they call me a pirate. You have a great navy, so they call you an emperor. But you're molesting the whole world. I'm doing almost nothing by comparison.2 That's the way it works. The emperor is allowed to molest the world, but the pirate is considered a major criminal."
Perhaps a mass purge of the most corrupt elements in the land would set a blood-chilling deterrent that would have the desired effect on those who still want to steal billions of naira?
On Monday, 13 June 2016 15:34:38 UTC+2, Kenneth Harrow wrote:
again, this bounced earlier. a response to cornelius's heartfelt message
ken
cornelius,the solution to corruption is not purity, is not personal purity. there is a large-scale economic system in place that functions with the powerful making arrangements to suit their own interests; if you bribe a cop or not you aren't going to change that. whether what you did is right or wrong is between yourself and your conscience. i would not condemn you for it, by no means
ken
On 6/12/16 12:01 PM, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:
Just a peripheral aside, avoiding any frontal collision with any of the ogas and alagbas.
I know that Björn Beckman ( a personal friend) is very serious about Nigeria. We are of course, all on the same side. In my humble opinion, every atom of effort against corruption counts.
The money wheel,, the main currency of corruption , is still turning. Some people call it "dirty money". As far as I know, I have never given or taken a bribe - although on one occasion in 1981 travelling by road from Ahoada to Port Harcourt, Richard Nsiah at the wheel of his Nigerian assembled Peugeot , we were stopped by the traffic police and - it sounded like an emergency - Richard asked me sitting in the back seat if I had ten naira on me; I did, and handed it over to him and he handed it over to the police. Let the pastors be the judge. I thought he was going to ask the police constable for some change but he didn't. He later apologised and explained that in the circumstances – we would have been delayed endlessly so, it was the most practical thing to do - and refunded my money. In very similar circumstances , Mr. Prasad my Telugu neighbour at the wheel of his Volkswagen on the road to Ahoada from Port Harcourt was stopped by the traffic police. Mr. Prasad asked him, " Are you hungry?" and he replied , " Yes, I am hungry" whereupon Mr. Prasad opened the back door to and told him " hop in" which the policemen did. When we arrived, Mrs Prasad prepared a nice vegetarian dinner which we devoured and with great satisfaction….
Somebody – I don't remember exactly who - said that when Reagan wanted to recruit more Black People to join the army and to go fight his wars, it was then he would say, " We are in trouble" - and then could follow, "what have you done for your country lately?" and patriotic slogans such as , "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." In searching for his exact words, I came across this . Did Trump really say that?
Unless asked by the omniscient and omnipotent , such as when He asked Cain who had just murdered his brother Abel, " What have you done ?", the question is an irritant and is bound to rebound on the accuser – because it's an enormous question and we all know that with regard to corruption it's not a mere matter of scholarly research and erudite tomes that may eventually filter through to at least partially corrupt decision-making bodies and their judiciaries, in corruption-ridden countries - or some miraculously redemptive conclusion such as "or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them?" - or the second coming of Jesus of Nazareth (after the trials and tribulations of Hitler and the next anti-Christ - according to Christian and Islamic apocalyptic literature when the final showdown will take place at the Battle of Armageddon - the defeat of Satan and his apostles to be followed by one thousand years of peace and a world liberated from corruption. Until then, as the tribe of Shabazz would say, a luta continua !
In the political dialogue on a national scale it can sometimes be ironic, such as one non-corrupt person asking another non-corrupt person, or indeed asking a thieving chief of staff/ commander-in-chief himself, " What have you done and what are you doing to kill corruption?"
Like Caesar, some African president or the other could well say and mean it too: "Danger knows full well
That Caesar is more dangerous than he.
We are two lions littered in one day,
And I the elder and more terrible."Some of them the guardians and protectors of corruption.
Whereas Tom Ikimi decided to go on the offensive with the etymological approach – where did the word "corrupt" begin – the then President of Sierra Leone Ahmed Tejan Kabbah tried to dodge the question by pretending to be helpless. The question that Tim Sebastian asked him on the same BBC Hardtalk programme was, " People are saying that you are like a toothless chimpanzee in tackling corruption" - to which Kabbah replied - " You cannot eliminate corruption 100%!" Here's a partial transcript of that dialogue
The questions about corruption equally apply to other ECOWAS countries, including Kalabule Ghana and Sierra Leone, where significantly the current two term president Koroma campaigned on a platform of "ZERO tolerance for corruption" and won. Since then, some big heads have rolled , but if we are to believe Emerson, some sacred cows are still roaming free, along with rumours as to who is the king of corruption.
Kelfala Kallon : The Political Economy of Corruption in Sierra Leone ( 2004)
kenneth w. harrow
professor of english michigan state university department of english 619 red cedar road room C-614 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824 ph. 517 803 8839 har...@msu.edu
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