“…From the irredeemably grafting political class to the dishonorable Honorables of the Legislature, to the lawless law enforcement agents, corruption has become a routine in dealings between the government and private individuals or businesses”
In Nigeria, there are different ethnic groups with differing beliefs, languages and culture. Among these divergent ways of life, lies an identical lifestyle of high level wrongdoing and normalized moral degradation that has permeated it’s people.
It has become the people’s way of life.
Sometime in October 2002, I was an innocent lad still in junior secondary school. It was a bright and beautiful Saturday morning as I came out to do my usual chore of sweeping the front of our house.
Midway through the sweeping, I took notice of a black bulky nylon carelessly dropped beside my father’s 504 Peugeot salon car. Curiously, I picked it up to see what was inside. It was a huge amount of money carefully tied.
As I kept the money aside to continue my sweeping, I saw a woman running towards my direction. The despair on her face was like that of someone who had come face to face with an Alcatraz boar. The relief she had when I handed over the money to her gave me so much joy. It was a proud moment for me. It was the money she was supposed to spend in the market to restock her shop.
Few days later when I narrated the whole situation to some friends, their reactions made me sick. They made me believe that I was not a smart guy.
In fact, one said that I had wasted the bread God had buttered for me that morning. They made caricature of my goodwill.
They were convinced that I should have kept the money for myself. To them, there was nothing wrong in doing so.
Interestingly, those “smart guy” friends of mine were not alone in that way of thinking. It was and still remains “conventional wisdom” in the Nigerian setting— A Systemic, cultural and institutional level of corruption.
Systemic corruption exists in every facet of our country. It has eaten deep into the very fabric of the Nigerian society. An epidemic so pervasive that one wonders if there’s any form of hope. It has so much been entrenched in the heart of every Nigerian, that anyone who is not practicing it feels left out.
From the irredeemably grafting political class to the dishonorable Honorables of the Legislature, to the lawless law enforcement agents, corruption has become a routine in dealings between the government and private individuals or businesses.
Take the case of Ekweremadu’s ordeal and his eventual conviction in the UK for example. The genesis of his predicament was the paltry sum of money given to David, the boy that was supposed to donate his kidney to Sophia Ekweremadu.
David was promised a good life in the UK. School, good job and overall well-being after the planned kidney transplant. On getting to the UK, David found out that all of those things promised him was becoming a farfetched dream, then he ran to the police in an attempt to evade going back to Nigeria.
Ekweremadu actually agreed and paid 4.5 million naira for Dr. Obinna Obeta to pay to David. But Obeta only paid David N270,000 and pocketed the rest. That’s where ‘wahala’ began for the former Deputy Senate president.
If only Dr. Obinna Obeta had released the funds to David, the so called discrepancies in their application wouldn’t have been unearthed and Sophia would have no more business with dialysis.
As a people, we need ATTITUDINAL CHANGE!
Starting from each and every one of us, let’s kick out corruption from Nigeria or corruption will kick Nigeria out from the surface of the earth.
