Adagbo Onoja
6 April 2005
column
More grease to President Obasanjo's elbows but the current Hot Pursuit phase of the President's anti-corruption campaign appear to derive its rationality from the conclusive testament on militarism by the German Philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche's clincher was: "You say that a good cause justifies even war. I say unto you: a good war justifies any cause". If the President's sacking of two ministers and causing to be published the list of alleged property grabbers had preceded the anti-corruption comments of super cop, Nuhu Ribadu, on former President, IBB, there might not have been a basis for this comparison. The aspect of the EFCC boss' comments on the former President which said it has checked on IBB all over the world, hadn't found anything because the man is very crafty but yet declared that it did not mean "he will escape" has so deeply worried many people. They read it as the eve of totalitarianism in Nigeria. It means the regime could say that about any other Nigerians at the appropriate time.
Viewed in the context of the possibility of totalitarianism, the question has been whether the current anti-corruption moves can be taken on the face value? And what is the basis for suspecting totalitarianism instead of an altruistic Obasanjo?
I should be happy that I said in my piece "The Guardian Angel and the 'Iron Law of Oligarchy' (See Daily Trust, March 27, 2005, back page) that the issue was not what Ribadu said or did not say about IBB. Less than two weeks after the piece in question, I can gloat that I have been proved right that the issue we are dealing with on this anti-corruption campaign are the limits of the ideology of Guardian Angel, the idea that an alienated, unpopular and lonely President Obasanjo can purify the polity all by himself, mostly through the methodology of anti-corruption.
It is in this context that theories have sprung up in respect of the anti-corruption card, characterized so far, by the publication of the list of the alleged grabbers of the government houses for sale in Lagos, the eventual commencement of the trial of former IG of Police, Tafa Balogun, the sack of two ministers all in connection with corruption as well as the immediate ex-senate President, Adolphus Wabara. As noted earlier, the hot pursuit was inaugurated with Nuhu Ribadu last month with the comments on IBB that many saw to contain a persecution tone. One view is that the President now wants to shame people like Victor Olunloyo and Dangiwa Umar who have challenged him to move against the buccaneer capitalists and traders in his government or his anti-corruption rhetoric will remain hollow. The second view is that the President has only such a dramatic anti-corruption profile as the approach left to make history the way he understands it. Yet, there is the view that anti-corruption is for him to further ingratiate himself with the foreign patrons of his economic reform, particularly to secure the confidence of creditors towards a debt cancellation for Nigeria. A fourth view is that President Obasanjo never does such cataclysmic things unless as a way of getting out of catastrophe and that the catastrophe this time was a hit-back plan of some persons to leak that same list of land grabbing and inflict a deadly blow on the anti-corruption claims of the Presidency. The last one says that the President is just showing how adept organizer of totalitarian politics he can be, that he is merely using corruption to level the ground and, thereby, ready the political field for 2007, either for himself or some anointed fellow.
Those who argue this last point recall the interview of Senator Kuta almost a year ago, notwithstanding the prominence of anti-corruption agenda in the politics of this regime ever since. What the senator said on NTA's New Dawn on May 29, 2004 was that a time was coming when OBJ would open up on people's records, including publishing white papers on many probe reports after which those who will never rule this country again would know themselves.
Kuta said that OBJ would not only be in power but solidly so and, therefore, in charge of security, the electoral machinery and the money. So, it would be woe betide anyone who has ever, consciously or otherwise, put his hands in the till. It was on the strength of this interview that I did an article titled "2007: A Hand Grenade in Mid-Flight but which ThisDay newspaper (July 30, 2004, back page) published as "What Shape Would 2007 Take?" in which I was inferring that a massive corruption check is not beyond OBJ. In 1978, contestants had to get tax clearance, in 2007; they may need a corruption clearance certificate to contest. So, the suggestion is strong that this turn to his fellow elite is an anti-corruption move that has obviously been planned and timed.
But the lesson of history in other anti-corruption campaigns show that it can be problematic where there has been no mobilization of a fall back force of either the middle class or the broad flank of those that have been the victims of corrupt governance. These are the forces that will rise in defence of the regime in the event of any backlash. Ordinarily, they are the ones who should have been the object of a reform in terms of shifting resources away from the elite to them as peasants and the working class. But Obasanjo's reform has concentrated on cutting off the lower classes from the allocative justice potentials of the Nigerian state, actions for which he is not liked across the country and for which he has no redressive responses.
In other words, there is a huge attraction in making all those who corruptly enriched themselves to account for their actions. But as the Nigerian chapter of Transparency International has commented, corruption in Nigeria is not an occasional ailment affecting a few isolated public officers but an endemic epidemic whose cure must be systemic and systematic, not ad hoc, asymmetrical and episodic. Transparency International further argued that 'the driver or catalyst of the movement for transparency and accountability is not and cannot be a President that preaches and punishes… The imperative for systemic reckoning with corruption is borne out by the fact that this is not Obasanjo's first cracking at corruption. He and Murtala had been at it before. The fact that he is back at it again shows a failure of the previous one, arising certainly from a superficial analysis and superficial solution.
The point is that since independence in 1960, formal political power passed into the hands of three ruling groups namely, the rural or traditional ruling classes, the new men of 'business' that is, the bourgeois class, and the bureaucracy, the last a powerful quasi-independent servant of the former two.
The economic activities of these groups was defined by what has been called primitive accumulation of a capitalist character and is marked by great turbulence embracing graft, embezzlement, opportunism, philistinism, mendacity, chauvinism, jingoism and violence in the intra class competition. In Nigeria, this reality of primitive accumulation has been aggravated by the phenomenon of "nurture capitalism" which means the use of the state by the dominant social forces to promote a certain kind of capitalist development in which public enterprises were central.
This is the architecture that Presidents like IBB and Obasanjo claim they wish to dismantle through the policy framework of structural adjustment vis-à-vis the problems of corruption, the privatization and personalization of power and associated cronyism, and the rent-seeking culture generally. All the evidence shows that it has been a disaster. And this is because the sense in which these Nigerian leaders understood and practiced the concept of state withdrawal from economic processes as the core of structural adjustment has been a permanent provocation to corruption.
For example, this same government that is fighting corruption has gone ahead to advertise a flat at the All Africa Games Village at the selling price of 14 million naira. And they are selling these to civil servants, the highest paid of whom hasn't got more than a 100,000-naira monthly salary. So, by what magic would the civil servant find 14million naira to pay for this flat without engaging in pilfering government resources or hoping to re-sell the flat to make more money for him or herself?
Now, the highest paid civil servant in the country's conventional bureaucracy is the Permanent Secretary. Their monthly pay is hardly more than 100,000 naira but we know that many Permanent Secretaries have afforded Prado Jeeps all over the place when the cost of a tyre of the Jeep is around 50,000 naira and its fuelling double that amount on average in a month. So, where do they get the money to maintain this type of cars? Or to pay for 14 million naira flats! They have to get it from government somehow especially as the wage structure is so primitive that it just cannot sustain even the most minimum standard of living.
The contradiction is, thus, not in the specificities of corruption or the corrupt activities of particular persons as such but in decrying corruption or being scandalized by it as to jump to an ecstatic anti-corruption war after having institutionalized it in the political economy of reform.
Taking the list of property buyers as a case study, it is all very easy to see the contradictions of OBJ's Guardian Angelness. I would, for space reasons, take just one such manifestation. The President has all along maintained that he has a team of incorruptible technocrats supervising his reform programme, the pillars of which are supposed to be transparency, accountability and due process. But on the list of the alleged buyers of the houses in Lagos are the names of almost all these so-called reformers, ranging from their prophetess, Ngozi-Iweala to Oby Ezekwesili, Professor Soludo and other loquacious travelers in that caravan. Assuming that it is true that they did not actually seek to buy the houses allocated to them, which the Aso Rock Chief town crier, Fani-Kayode had pooh-poohed before the Presidential apology to the Vice-President and few others, the question is why was it their names that entered the list and not those of some other people. Their names entered there because whoever put it there knew that these are the men and women of the moment and that protecting their interest is part of the tradition, campaign or no campaign against corruption. It is safe to assume that this one is being denied because the big man himself has spoilt the show by ordering its publication.
The other side of the issue is: when the President says the process has been flawed, does he think we should take him as saying anything new? Many things about the regime have been flawed. It would be a miracle if that of sharing of the houses alone were transparent.
It is only just unfortunate that our understanding and way of doing things has ended up destroying the Finance Minister, for example. For, even with all the emergent refutations and 'corrections' on this house buying scandal, the damage has been done. Within the context of the World Bank, she is, of course, a Nigerian ambassador who should not be destroyed. It is only when she comes here to preach and practice privatization of our enterprises that we fight her. Why was it not possible to ask her to go, especially after having fundamentally compromised her from the start with paying her in dollars even as a political appointee on the service of the Federal Government of Nigeria. Must we destroy everyone for a cause as unclear as this anti-corruption?
It is on this same ground that I think one other person deserves our sympathy in the context of the conceptual arbitrariness of the guardian angel. He is Vice-President Atiku Abubakar. He was not quite one year in office when the idea that he is the most corrupt senior government official became popularized. And the propaganda bore the stamp of authority. What an irony! For, how could that be when both the President and his vice are products of a same party or in a set up in which the President can sternly warn his deputy to desist from such proclivity? Now, It has reached a point where the name of the number two man in the power structure has been published along with those of other alleged buccaneers and traders. But there is a comparative basis for tolerating Atiku, even if he were as corrupt as we have been told. Why not, in relation to the new creatures in government whose only heritage is that of the auctioning of state owned companies, people nobody heard about when the country was burning and who are strange to the barricade struggles of students, workers, urban poor, politicians and even peasants that contributed to shaping 1999? Aside from being part of the force that organized and imposed an exit date on Abacha at the constitutional conference, Atiku' s tendency gave the first real money with which the defunct Campaign for Democracy, CD, roared to life.
There is though something to blame people like Atiku, Buhari, Marwa, and Babangida in all these. This is in the sense that these are the people who have declared that they want power but are shy of coming out with their programmes and marketing such as vigorously as possible. General Buhari is no less guilty of this. He seems so satisfied that he has the image of Mister Clean among the lot. Of course, he has shown a nationalist seriousness, particularly when, in 1984, he went along with the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU against privatization in its generic sense, opting for commercialization instead. For whatever reasons he did this, it was patriotic. But he has this variant of Awolowo attitude that if you cannot see his purity, goodness and superiority, then that is your own problem.
Atiku and IBB, on the other hand, have great personal desires for power, for whatever reasons but think that only by playing along with President Obasanjo would they make it. Power is a lot more than scheming and caucus calculations. It is also about mobilizing people around certain values, especially now. Whether they will make it or not is a matter of balance of forces-individual forces, ethnic forces, class forces, the international interests in Nigerian politics and similar other forces. It will be more than what President Obasanjo wants or does not want.
Their point of departure at this juncture should be to learn a thing from Shehu Yar'Adua because Yar'Adua had the unique instinct of perpetually problematising Nigeria. This was how he moved out of the politics of ethnic-regional enclaves imposed on Nigerian politics by the British and the successor local elite as to become the one in reference when it is said that the northern chaps have transcended the politics of the Sardauna while this has not been the case in the other regions.
Shehu Yar'Adua was one of those who completely accepted the thinking popularized by Yahya Abubakar, a Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office in the mid 70s that the star of Nigerian politics would be the guy who saw as the most urgent issue in Nigerian politics the breaking down of these ethnic-regional enclaves instead of class struggle. More than any other person, dead or alive, he gave it life, for whatever reasons, including his desire for a return to power. Using his military professional advantage, he mobilized, convinced and recruited a core of dedicated supporters from across the heartlands of the northern oligarchy, Yoruba land, Igboland, Southern and the northern minorities.
He was obviously under the impact of the effect that the physical dimension of that framework had created under the 1976-9 Obasanjo regime in terms of mega projects like superhighways, a crosscutting road and pipeline network, heavy industries, etc that actually makes the country indivisible, at least, not along ethnic lines.
The theory of the primacy of horizontal integration to which everything should be subordinate was a deliberate attack on class struggle. To that extent, all its supporters like Yar'Adua could be reckoned with as conservatives but in terms of the task of making Nigerians out of Nigeria, that represented a progressive thinking, particularly in the light of contemporary dimensions of ethnic politics.
Yar'Adua's politic was, therefore, not just his money power but also paradigm based politics which enabled him to score many firsts, including constructing an alliance between his faction of the Kaduna mafia and the Awoists in 1983. That alliance was to prove correct the analysis in certain quarters that, no matter what, the Awoists and the mafia would have run an efficient capitalism. In fact, the opinion of somebody like the late Professor Claude Ake on this is that " the UPN would ensure a more rational organization of capitalism in Nigeria and it appears to understand the necessity for defensive radicalism. By its nature, it is more disposed to discipline, efficiency and productive capitalism. To this extent, it is more progressive. However, the UPN is ultimately a more conservative force than the NPN in so far as it is more entrenched in capitalist production and far more adroit in its defence of capitalism" Today, both the mafia and the Awoists are in intellectual, ideological and organizational disarray.
Which is what should compel the legatees of Yar'Adua and of every other tendencies to ponder. Society itself is not static and the theory of horizontal integration might have run its course without it being too evident. Politics of breaking down the barriers, yes, very important but so what! How would the idealism of unity not be challenged on the long run by the issue of substance of unity? In other words, has n't the debate moved to the question of development strategy, of poverty eradication, of the management of diversity, of inclusiveness, etc. This is the area in which the Yar'Aduaists are still silent in Nigerian politics and are thus without an ideological trademark. Just like their counterparts in NEPU/PRP and every other tendency and caucus in Nigeria. Having stopped thinking and problematising Nigeria constantly, they have no answers to give to the people out there, hence the disastrous over-reliance on mountains of naira as the guarantor of power instead of popular programmes. What a pity!
Onoja is a Member of Daily Trust Editorial Board.
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