I have always suspected there was something fundamentally wrong with the longest running battle in the land. I refer, of course, to the so-called war against corruption. The late Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu drew national attention to corruption as a disaster wrecking our country and making it “look big for noting.” It was to rid the country of this monster that he and his fellow young officers exchanged the bullet for the ballot box as the path to political power.
And so, for 49 years, the eradication of corruption has been more or less the number one priority in the political, social and economic programmes of all those who were God sent to deliver us from the hands of this one ageless Pharaoh. But corruption is a strange social disease. The more you tackle it with medicines, ancient and modern, the stronger it waxes. There must be something wrong. Indeed, there is.
Now I know why the war would never be won. This momentous discovery came to me during President Jonathan’s last media chat. I owe him one. The president, ever scornful of those who believe corruption was steadily destroying the country, said the problem really is that when we talk of corruption, we do not know what we are talking about. He said, and he was right, that no Nigerian tribe has a word for corruption. What we know is stealing. The president has been consistent in his view that our problem is stealing, not corruption. In other words, since we know stealing in the vernacular and not corruption, we should talk of fighting stealing and quit wasting our breath on wrestling with a long English word that we do not understand.
The man was right. I have tried to find an Idoma word for corruption and finding none, awarded myself an F. I am lucky. Were my parents alive and I was required to tell them why the EFCC has just herded a former state governor into jail for corruption, I would have a hard time making them understand me. I could not find the right word, there being none, and I would be forced to tell them that the stupid man stole public funds. What you do not know does not exist. When you find logic standing on its head, it calls for introspection, not laughter.
Nigeria is said to be the third or fourth most corrupt country in the world. Every year, Transparency International issues its annual index of corrupt nations. It gives an honoured place to Nigeria. This is important. The most populous black nation in the world with the biggest economy on the African continent must be impressively big in everything.
To ride on the crest wave of the presidential logic, if you have no name for something in your native tongue, it is at best a nebulous concept. Corruption falls into that category. What does not exist cannot kill us and our country. Therefore, let us quit believing that corruption has shackled our national development. If our country is shackled, we blame not corruption but bad workers and bad workmanship. We should no longer expect our leaders to fight corruption because it is foolish to expect a leader to fight what has no name in his native tongue.
I think the Hebrew race had the same problem. Moses, their famous lawgiver, brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai. The ten dos and don’ts from the almighty himself warn the people: thou shalt not steal. Nothing about corruption in that Holy Writ. Our laws recognise stealing or theft, not corruption. Have we been fighting the wind all these years? I fear so.
I do not have the courage to suggest that the old man had problems with the word corruption too. Job, famous for his patience, said “corruption, thou art my father.” If the iconic figure of patience chose to call corruption his father, then it cannot be true that corruption is evil. It gets complicated, right?
I have always thought that we made a fundament mistake when we enthroned English as our official language. It put us in this mess about stealing and corruption. The native English speaker knows can cleanly separate corruption from stealing. Not the Nigerian, despite his love for big words.
Nzeogwu defined the corrupt, not corruption. He said the corrupt was a ten per center. It means anyone who pads a government contract with ten per cent is the ugly face of corruption. But he was actually referring to stealing under the table. Contract padding was the easiest way then to dip one’s hands into the common purse without many people knowing. Politicians and civil servants stole money in small percentages because there was something called the rule of law – and family shame too then. That was long ago in the analogue age. This is the digital age in which everything tends to be larger than life. To define corruption in percentage terms is to miss the tremendous progress this troublesome word has made here since Nzeogwu and his fellow young majors used it as an airy excuse to shoot their way into power. Contracts are no longer padded with a miserable ten per cent. Sometimes, if not all the time, the contract sum is 1000 times lower than what is padded unto it.
But no one, not even Transparency International, ever said that corruption was all about contract padding. My take is that having failed so far in the war against corruption, we should now turn our attention and that of our leaders to the real problem: stealing. Stealing is an easier problem to deal with because all the tribes in the country have a word for it. Everyone understands when the Yoruba man shouts ole! Corruption is a moral consequence of stealing. In nations with living and throbbing conscience, of course. Should we continue to fight the consequence?
Officially waging war on stealing absolves our leaders of responsibility. Under our laws, catching thieves is the statutory responsibility of the police; not of the president. Jonathan can rest assured that we shall not judge him by the progress that stealing made under his watch. It is not his business to stop thieves.
