Why Buhari's Anticorruption Campaign Rhetoric Will Not Work
Moses Ebe Ochonu
Why Buhari’s Anticorruption Campaign Rhetoric Will Not Work
By Moses E. Ochonu
Here is why the corruption and anti-corruption rhetoric of President Buhari’s campaign has fallen flat so far and may not stick to PDP candidate, Atiku Abubakar. To be sure, it's partly because the many corruption scandals of this administration has neutralized corruption as an electoral issue; so that, when it comes to corruption, it’s now a wash between the APC and the PDP. But I'd argue that there is something deeper and more fundamental going on.
There has been a clear, decisive shift in Nigerians' perception of politics and in their expectation of what leadership in an electoral democracy should deliver for the populace.
For decades in our postcolonial political history, corruption alone occupied the space of blame and alibi for our multi-fanged problems. Nigerians felt that every problem in the country conduced to corruption, was traceable to graft, and would thus be solved by eradicating governmental malfeasance. Corruption was the overarching explanation for everything that was wrong with the polity and anticorruption was advanced as a cure-all.
This leads us to the expectational realm. If corruption was seen as the causative agent in Nigeria’s problems, Nigerians expected their government's major preoccupation to be the fight against corruption. In their eyes, this was the preeminent duty of government — to fight graft to a standstill.
There has been a shift of attitude.
It is difficult to precisely date when this perceptual and expectational shift occurred but I'll tentatively date it to the second Obasanjo administration when Nigerians seemed to make peace with the inevitability of governmental corruption and consequently seemed to trade their seemingly unrealistic expectation of the eradication of corruption for a more realistic quest for immediate benefits and social goods euphemistically and colloquially called "dividends of democracy." Some of this “dividend” is funded by governmental corruption.
If the economy was growing visibly, new economic opportunities were being created, governmental corruption was democratized and its proceeds trickled down the socioeconomic food chain, then Nigerians decided that corruption, inevitable as it now appeared to them to be, didn't matter to them as much as a widening net of opportunities that built and expanded a middle class.
In fact, Nigerians generally expect those who go into politics to reap its illicit rewards. They therefore tolerate corruption within limits. In Nigeria, corruption is thus a matter of intense moral relativism. This is one of the reasons why corruption in Nigeria is always something that people outside of one’s social and filial circles engage in. It’s the reason why a Nigerian can be unequivocally and vehemently against corruption in all forms in the morning and then rationalize and minimize it in the evening when someone he is fond of becomes the accused.
So, corruption per se is not what Nigerians hate. What they hate, at least in the period after the psychic shift under discussion, is 1) the volume and flagrancy of the corruption; and 2) the toxic mix of corruption and incompetence.
If the corruption is discreet, measured, travels through the capillary of the economy and, more crucially, is married to competence, they do not seem to mind it, given that, as I stated, Nigerians generally believe that politicians need to take care of their clients and supporters through illicit access to public funds, and given the concomitant mitigating folk wisdom encapsulated in the pidgin saying: na where man dey work na there man dey chop.
Why did the shift occur? Why did Nigerians make peace with corruption besides the fact that they saw a robust, expanding economy despite the corruption of the Obasanjo administration? It is probably because Nigerians saw, after 1999, the democratization of the stealing field, the ways in which politics at all levels was lubricated by illicit money because of poverty, illiteracy, and traditional systems of patronage, and how this web of shady financial flows was, whether one liked it or not, the lifeblood of the economy.
This is precisely why Obasanjo’s administration has been largely rehabilitated in Nigerian political lore as the gold standard of democratic governance post-1999 despite the mind-boggling corruption that occurred during that administration.
No one could accuse Obasanjo of incompetence, of being indecisive, of being confused, of mismanaging the economy, and of being slow to act. I was probably one of his harshest critics, writing tomes to underscore his hypocrisy, corruption, political intolerance, and pettiness, but even I never accused him of incompetence. I didn’t like his neoliberal economic policy direction and his slavish devotion to the Bretton Woods orthodoxy of economic management, but I could never accuse him of not governing, of sleeping at the proverbial wheel while the nation burned, or of dividing the nation with his utterances and actions.
Many Nigerians similarly cut Obasanjo slack because they look back and can remember a functioning, growing economy at a time when the price of crude oil, Nigeria’s main export, was less than half of what it now is and when fuel was relatively cheap. They look back and remember an economy that opened up new opportunities and expanded the middle class. Some of these opportunities were actually connected to illicit streams of finance traceable to governmental graft. Nonetheless, because the economy worked under Obasanjo, the perception of him as a competent leader has endured and hardened in recent years.
And this is why Nigerians now largely overlook Obasanjo’s personal corruption, his political and judicial overreach, and the colossal failure of his signature intervention in the power sector, remembering only the evenhanded manner he dealt with national crises, and the strength and agility with which he governed.
Some people today point to Obasanjo’s establishment of the EFCC and the ICPC as the reason he is now being favorably reevaluated. I disagree. The EFCC and ICPC under Obasanjo had, at best a mixed record and were used largely to fight the political opposition, setting a precedence that has continued to date. The reason Obasanjo’s administration has emerged in a new light is because Nigerians remember him as a competent leader despite the corruption that festered in his administration and despite his failure to deliver on the all-important electric power sector. This perception has, of course, solidified in part because subsequent administrations proved less competent and less capable of managing the affairs of a complex nation.
Some people may fault my thesis by pointing to the popular anti-corruption angst that plagued the Jonathan administration and ultimately partly caused its defeat. It is true that the old perceptual consensus on corruption being the preeminent challenge of Nigeria seemed to make a comeback during Jonathan’s administration, but that conclusion is possible only if one reads the surface political visuals and ignore the underlying dynamic. It was not the corruption per se that brought Jonathan down. It was the extent and in-your-faceness of it. More importantly, it was the fact that Jonathan was perceived, fairly or unfairly, as weak and incompetent.
It was the intersection of excessive corruption and perceived incompetence that did Jonathan in. I would even go further to argue that it was the narrative of incompetence, more than that of corruption, that caused Jonathan to lose power, setting aside other factors such as the fracturing of the PDP and the regional political (re)alignment of the North and Southwest. Had Jonathan been corrupt and competent, the campaign message of the then opposition APC would not have worked. The opposition successfully cast Jonathan as a weak, incompetent leader incapable of protecting Nigerians from the ravages of Boko Haram and that if he continued in power, Nigeria’s sovereignty would continue to be breached with impunity. That message resonated with Nigerians because the Jonathan indeed appeared weak and incompetent in the area of security.
This is similar to how Nigerians perceive Buhari today — as an aloof, incompetent, slow, weak, indecisive, and divisive leader, whose words, silences, actions, and inactions threaten not just Nigerians’ livelihoods but also the very existence of the country. If Jonathan struggled with Boko Haram, Buhari’s arenas of incompetence are many — the comatose economy, unchecked herdsmen terrorism, kidnapping, intensifying disunity, an unwillingness to take action against erring officials in his administration, and a resurgent Boko Haram.
Nothing grates Nigerians more than the marriage of corruption and incompetence. You can get away with corruption if you’re competent but not with a combination of incorruptibility and incompetence. In other words, Nigerians would rather have a corrupt and competent leader, as long as the corruption is discreet, moderate, and democratized, than an incorruptible and incompetent leader. The worse combination is this: a leader who presides over a corrupt administration while professing a fictional integrity and while displaying a seemingly congenital incompetence.
These dynamics are the reasons the Buhari campaign will have a hard time making the corruption argument stick to Atiku, not to mention of course the fact that the same Atiku funded Buhari’s 2015 election campaign and was lauded then by the APC as a patriot and as an asset to the party.
The aforementioned dynamics are also the reason why, if my good friend and preferred candidate, the incorruptible Omoyele Sowore, becomes president, his incorruptibility is unlikely to impress Nigerians unless he is a competent, proactive president. Unless his anticorruption is accompanied by competent, result-producing governance.
In the current climate, no leader is going to be judged by how incorruptible they are. Thanks to the psychic shift I explained earlier, competence and problem-solving capacity have leapfrogged anticorruption as the preeminent expectations of Nigerians.
The 2019 presidential election is going to be fought on competence, capacity, and cosmopolitan ethos, not on the overplayed and duplicitous rhetoric of corruption.
Salimonu Kadiri
This is reminiscent of what Moses Ebe Ochonu posted on this forum last year under the hashtag *Bring Back Our Corruption.* His argument then was that if corruption was allowed to flourish, the corrupts would spend part of their treasury loots which would eventually trickle down to road-side pepper sellers. Now he is making his personal views on corruption in Nigeria as that of Nigerians whom he claimed have shifted attitude and are now pro-corruption. Why? Moses Ebe Ochonu explained, "If the economy was growing visibly, new economic opportunities were being created, governmental corruption was democratized and its proceeds trickled down the socioeconomic food chain, then Nigerians decided that corruption, inevitable as it now appeared to them to be, didn't matter to them as much as a widening net of opportunities that built and expanded a middle class." Nigerian officials who steal public funds are euphemistically referred to as corrupt officials. When Nigerian public officials steal monies meant for building primary schools and employing teachers to teach children how to read and write, what trickles down to the children is mass illiteracy and proliferation of ignorance. When public officials steal funds set aside to build hospitals and buy drugs, what trickles down to the masses of Nigeria is untimely deaths from curable illness and child-birth deaths. When public officials in Nigeria steal funds meant to maintain roads and construct new ones, what trickles down to Nigerians is mass deaths in pit holes on Nigerian roads that are big enough to swallow a trailer. When funds set aside to procure weapons for Nigerian soldiers to fight Boko Haram are shared between politicians and Staff Officers of the Nigerian Armed Forces, what trickles down to Nigerians are deaths from Boko Haram insurgents, over two million Internal Displaced Persons (IDPs) and occupation of 50,000 Square Kilometres of Nigeria's territory by Boko Haram. The list can be made longer, but let me take a pause to ask if the parents of Moses Ebe Ochonu were middle class in Nigeria which enabled him to acquire education to the level he is today?
Moses postulated, "If the corruption is discreet, measured, travels through the capillary of the economy and, more crucially, is married to competence, they (Nigerians) do not seem to mind it,.." Discreet corruption as it is being inferred by Moses Ebe Ochonu can be related to a part of the broadcast of Major Patrick Chukwuma Nzeogwu on Radio Nigeria, Kaduna, at 12 : 30 noon on January 15, 1966 while explaining to Nigerians why he and his fellow Majors struck. He said, "Our enemies are the political profiteers, the swindlers, the men in the high and low places that seek bribes and demand ten per cent; …//… those that have corrupted our society.." The corrupt people who Nzeogwu and his comrades wanted to flush out of office only added 10% to the cost of producing goods and services for Nigerians as their own kick backs. However, public utilities were functioning even though at a higher cost than it ought to be. What we have nowadays is direct stealing by public officials of the total amount of funds earmarked for projects and services which are supposed to serve the people. There is nothing discreet in public officials collecting fuel subsidies of millions of US dollars for unimported fuel while Nigerians are dying on ques at petrol stations. The typical way for the educated Nigerian elites and public officials to demonstrate their powers and competence is by making their citizens suffer to death. Consequences of stealing of public funds by educated elites and public officials which are meant to produce goods and services to Nigerians are seen everywhere in the country and are not discreet. Evidence before the whole world is that educated Nigerian elites and public officials are competent in unleashing hardships and deaths on their citizens who they are paid to serve.
Having declared Jonathan as weak, corrupt and incompetent, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote, "This is similar to how Nigerians perceive Buhari today - as an aloof, incompetent, slow, weak, indecisive, and divisive leader, whose words, silences, actions and inactions threaten not just Nigerians' livelihoods but also the very existence of the country." Just as I searched in vain for what makes Buhari corrupt as Jonathan, Moses wrote further, ".... Buhari's arenas of incompetence are many - the comatose economy, unchecked herdsmen terrorism, kidnapping, intensifying disunity, an unwillingness to take action against erring officials in his administration and resurgent Boko Haram." Saraki, Atiku and others that returned to PDP from APC a while ago accused Buhari of not carrying them along in the share of oil money. It is, therefore, not surprising that he who believes in trickle down economy of stealing public funds (corruption) will declare the economy of Nigeria under Buhari's three years old regime as comatose. The other side of the unchecked herdsmen terrorism is the unchecked cattle thieves which are often referred to as cattle rustlers. As of today, Boko Haram is not in control of any land area in Nigeria as it was under Jonathan. Buhari may be incompetent according to Moses Ebe Ochonu, but he is not corrupt (a thief).
"You can get away with corruption if you're competent but not with a combination of incorruptibility and incompetence," Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote. Here, readers are being told that Buhari is not corrupt but he is incompetent. Again, it is untrue that those corrupt persons who have stolen funds meant for buying transformers and generating plants for electricity could be regarded as competent even when the whole nation has been enveloped in darkness.
The 2019 presidential election is going to be about (corruption) those who have stolen public funds to enrich themselves and the consequences of their thieveries on Nigerians. Atiku says youths who constitute 60% of the population of Nigeria are marginalised and to end that marginalisation Atiku wants to be elected as President in 2019 when he would be 74 years old. If Atiku is a political paedophile with strong appetite to abuse Nigerian youths, he should have camouflaged his intention by mentoring a youth, like Omoyele Sowore, to become President in 2019. But Atiku, like many PDP politicians, worships money and power and not any noble, higher ideals of honour, principle, love, fellow-feeling, decency and accommodation. His belief is that others exist only to serve his greed. Atiku Abubakar was singled out by America's Senate in 2010 in a report on money laundering. The report said he had channelled substantial funds of uncertain origin into USA through proxy accounts. That is why he has never ventured to visit US since 2010. Now that the incorruptible Omoyele Sowore is the preferred presidential candidate of Moses Ebe Ochonu one can only hope that if Sowore should win, he is not going to operate trickle down economic policy of stealing people's assets which Moses love so much.
S. Kadiri
Skickat: den 17 oktober 2018 14:05
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Baba Kadiri,
You've said it all. Many thanks for concretely standing up against corruption.
About Atiku's Brother Jero, all I seem to remember is Soyinka's letter to him which appeared in one of the nation's newspapers : Obasanjo, Go! Just go!
Everywhere in Africa, when the presidential elections draw near you hear some of the pundits, the cynics, the professors the Besserwisser, the bishops and the prophesying pastors who know everything telling us that we have to choose between two evils and that we should always choose “the lesser” of two evils, whilst some of the wise ones caution us the ignorami , “ better the devil that you know, than the devil that you don't”. No longer can we talk about the devil that we don't know, since we can identify him on sight and we even have a beautiful Photoshop image of him.
If Brother Buhari was a dictator Ochonu would not have the gall to be telling us that Brother Buhari is “Weak”, whereas I suppose he should be weeping bitter tears later on should Atiku ever become his president , weeping by the bucketful as he paints a portrait of him as Nigeria's “strongman” in an article he would caption “ The devil I thought I knew” doing what's been recommended, the brand known as “discrete corruption”. Alhaji Atiku yoked to Peter Obi, corruption unequally yoked to competence.
For some of us the choice is between the recycled symbol of corruption and Muhammadu who wants to stop the haemorrhage.
More than two years later we still hear echoes from the August 13, 2016 piece written by Nigeria's Moses, in which he pleads please, “ Bring back our Corruption !” - and this was at the point when the price of oil had fallen from the $ 100 a barrel in the bad old days of Goodluck Jonathan, all the way down to a catastrophic $ 45 a barrel within the first year of President Buhari's administration.
Indeed, speaking on BBC Hardtalk about the various problems Nigeria was saddled with during the Goodluck Jonathan era , Rotimi Amaechi did tell us the shocking truth that Nigeria was losing “$1 Billion a month to oil pirates”, as you can well understand, a well-organised crime.
We should not like to hear the song that the corruption-riddled Jacob Zuma liked to sing, “Bring me back my machine gun”, indeed we can be more radical than that : surely it's time to sing bring back the death penalty, bring back the execution by firing squad. Understandably, the new Black leadership of Post-Apartheid South Africa was of course in a great hurry to abolish the death penalty , before the equally Black judiciary started taking the law into their own hands by trying and executing a few White people for their backlog of crimes against humanity...
It's not only avarice that consumes them, the child mortality and maternal mortality that you refer to is also reminiscent of the Moloch to whom they sacrifice. The future of Nigerian Youth and the importance of the electoral youth registered to vote is an outstanding demographic factor in this forthcoming election and that's where the opposition always has the advantage, can always make rhetorical promises such as according to Atiku's spokesman, Paul Ibe, it's a matter of “incompetence versus competence; cluelessness versus knowhow; joblessness versus employment; restiveness versus engagement; divisiveness versus unity; nepotism versus merit and bigotry versus inclusiveness.”
Not a word about “restructuring”by which he aims to win votes from the oil producing areas.. and after which he intends to run the national economy on empty?
Hopefully in the midst of all the braggadocio we will at some time get serious about that one word that is anathema to the ears of the prosperous: a nation willing and able to make sacrifices , a resilient nation that can for example survive sanctions or a sudden drop in oil prices, and of course in all the upbeat talk about prosperity, the utter anathema of ever mentioning the word “ austerity”
Some reports about Nigeria mostly on the religion front, 2011- 2016
Cornelius Hamelberg
Good news : Nnamdi Kanu in Israel .Too early to talk about Biafra Referedum. Too early for Alhaji Atiku to talk about foreign policy, Boko Haram, Fulani Herdsmen...
In Nigeria, there's plenty of daylight during the day, so scholars can do their research, and many full moon nights too, but if we are to believe Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, since the sun does not shine on Nigeria 24 hours a day solar energy is no guarantee that there will be a continuous, uninterrupted supply of Newton's light at night, hence this his short lamentation from just a month ago ; “Scholarship in a World of Poor Electricity: The Nigerian Example
That was from Adepoju, holed up in darkness in down-town Lagos, leaving me free to ask, surely, this darkness at night cannot be uniformly spread over all Nigeria? Since the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, it should be interesting to hear from Samuel Zalanga how things are shaping up at the the other end of the country, at Nsukka , where he happens to be just now.,
This change of light between day and night probably explains these lines
“The change in the day that makes them rant and rave
Black Power! Black Power!
And the change that comes over them at night,
Otherwise, how to account for the rapid change in mood when it comes to Olusegun Obasanjo ?
As reported here, Obasanjo, when asked, in an interview with Premium Times, whether he will support Atiku’s 2019 presidential bid, had said: “How can I be on the same side with Atiku? To do what? “If I support Atiku for anything, God will not forgive me. If I do not know, yes. But once I know, Atiku can never enjoy my support,” he added.
And then Atiku's flippant and from my point of view rude and arrogant retort to Pastor Obasanjo who is a both a pastor and a lay preacher , “Go settle with your God, not with me !” This gives credence to some kind of religious conceit and disrespect on Atiku's side. And what he has been accused of being an “Ethnic Supremacist” and a “terrorism Enabler” is probably not without foundation , Atiku's whole bearing, the boisterous and aggressive nature that we see being expressed on video , is a far cry from the much milder and maybe frail, Gandhi-like Bother Buhari . A future tyrannical Atiku already arrogant enough will certainly not be described by Ochonu as ”slow, weak, indecisive” And may that day never come to pass.
Re – Atiku's Pharaoh-like ,”Go settle with your God, not with me !”
My understanding is that there are two types of sins, our sins against God and on the inter-personal plane, still down here on earth , our sins against our fellow man, which we must ask our fellow man to forgive. ( I am assuming here that Atiku thinks that Obasanjo's God is different from his, otherwise he would have said “Our God” ) I resist the urge to go into this matter properly - but - and it's true
“In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand at the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I'd become my enemy in the instant that I preach “ ( My Back Pages)
I should rate corruption as a sin towards both man and God. Is stealing billions of Naira to be forgiven by merely saying, “ I´m sorry”? Man has stolen,insists that he has never stolen and insists that he wants to be president of Nigeria.
But Obasanjo is not the only one to undergo an inexplicable metamorphosis, even if the inexplicable becomes explicable when we realise that money talks, bullshit walks ; there's the example of the late Senator John McCain who before he passed away expressly made it clear that he did not want his former running mate Sarah Palin to show up at his funeral. ( I think he wanted to spare even his corpse from having to listen to the kind of eulogy and the kind of prayers that she would be likely to pray over his dead body) and even dead would not like to hear any of that kind of drivel..
I'm curious at how the two contenders Brother Buhari and Alhaji Atiku and indeed the other religious leaders in the Islamic and the various other Christian folds react to the gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
Musical pilgrimage to the past
Sly and the Family Stone :
Fresh (1973)
Small talk ( 1974)