A DISRUPTIVE STRATEGY For fighting CORRUPTION

I reckon that about 90% of Nigerian institutions in the private and public sector have the words Integrity or Transparency listed as one of their corporate values, yet Nigeria is still listed among the most corrupt countries in the world, and if the recent statements of the President and the Vice President are anything to go by – we are very corrupt. So it means that I would be stating the obvious to say that most people just put up those fancy value statements to fulfil all righteousness, tick boxes or perhaps to even create the false impression that they should be trusted.
Another school of thought suggests that our values are not necessarily who we are just yet, but who we aspire to be, and that they refer to the things we are striving to live by. Regardless of whatever school of thought you belong too, something needs to be done urgently about the decaying values in our society, and I am not confident that the current “war” against corruption and the judicial structures that exist are enough, nor am I sure that the “change begins with me” campaign is exactly “weking” for us right now. So, something more DISRUPTIVE needs to be done

Some will argue that every society has their own corruption scandals and that perhaps fighting against corruption isn’t the issue. After all, many developed nations like Japan, South Korea, and Italy have had corruption scandals in the past, and therefore looking for a complete elimination of corruption is utopian and perhaps amounts to “chasing the wind”. Some have argued that corruption in Nigeria can only be dealt with when we give it the high prominence it deserves and when we acknowledge how pervasive it has been. Proponents of this school of thought argue that since corruption has become so pervasive, that every attempt to fight corruption will always have a political connotation – unless of course who ever is fighting is willing to cleanse the Augean stables of his own political party first – which in reality has never happened (and is unlikely to happen given our current electoral culture). Even when the military took over from civilians in 1983, it did not fight the corruption within the military with the same tenacity with which it fought the corrupt politicians, leading ostensibly to another coup in 1985 perpetrated by the corrupt elements that it had failed to flush out.

So, if corruption has been that pervasive, then may be the right response to it will be to elevate it to the status of a national disease and deal with it the same way other national diseases have been dealt with in the past a la apartheid  in South Africa and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or military dictatorship in Nigeria and the Human Rights Violation Commission (a.k.a. Oputa Panel) Perhaps rather than try to hunt down and persecute the seemingly never ending list of corrupt public officers and their private sector cronies and end up being accused of witch-hunting because they belong to the opposition, perhaps we should have a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission or Oputa Panel that exposes all the acts of corruption since Independence, gives perpetrators an opportunity to come forward and be forgiven after they have confessed to the public, returned the stolen fortunes and received the public humiliation they deserve. This will deliver a much bigger impact than the current cat and mouse approach that still ends up with plea bargains and plenty of “political” undertones that takes away the credibility of the exercise, and still leaves us with a national psyche that is not yet ready to do away with corruption. At least since 1995 in South Africa and 1999 in Nigeria, apartheid and human rights violations have been removed from the “national culture”. The approach used in both instances could seem absurd when it comes to fighting corruption, but it may represent the type of DISRUPTIVE strategy that we need, especially since the current approach of arresting and plea bargaining is seen to be “political” and “one-sided”, and the approach to moral suasion via ‘The change begins with me” doesn’t seem to be catching on, and is unlikely to catch on unless something truly DISRUPTIVE is done.

As with all strategies, we can debate the pros and cons, and there are those that will argue that this “soft” approach may not work or yield the desired results. They belong to the “Rawlings” school of thought and advocate a summary execution of corrupt public officers and their private sector cronies with the military alacrity as was done by Ghanaian strong man J J Rawlings. Unfortunately, we have gone beyond the years of military alacrity, and have embraced democracy with its inherent flaws, so at best we should be seeking the most genuinely democratic way of co-creating a culture of discipline in our country and killing the pervasive culture of corruption and indiscipline.

Overall, I do not think that we should pretend that corruption doesn’t exist and just focus on fixing our economy. When the economy gets better, the canker worm of corruption will destroy it again. So, we have some choices, let’s be DISRUPTIVE about corruption and everything else.