Nothing grates Nigerians more than the marriage of corruption and incompetence. In other words, Nigerians would rather have a corrupt and competent leader, as long as the corruption is discreet, moderate, and democratised, than an incorruptible and incompetent leader.
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 neutralised corruption as an electoral issue; so that, when it comes to corruption, it’s now a wash between the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (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 corruption. Corruption was the overarching explanation for everything that was wrong with the polity and anticorruption was advanced as the cure for all ills.
This leads us to the expectational realm. Simply put, if corruption was seen as the causative agent in all our 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.
It is difficult to precisely date when the 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 expectation of the eradication of corruption for more immediate benefits and social goods euphemistically and colloquially called “dividends of democracy.”
If the economy was growing visibly, new economic opportunities were being created, governmental corruption was democratised and its proceeds trickled down the socioeconomic food chain, Nigerians decided that corruption, inevitable as it now appeared to them to be, didn’t matter 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 the same Nigerian can be unequivocally and vehemently against corruption in all forms in the morning and then rationalise and minimise it in the evening when someone he is fond of becomes the accused.
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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…
So, corruption per se is not what Nigerians hate. What they hate, at least in the period after the psychic shift in question, 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 belief 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’s probably because Nigerians saw, after 1999, the democratisation 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 crude price 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 endured.
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.
The 2019 presidential election is going to be fought on competence, capacity, and cosmopolitan ethos, not on the overplayed rhetoric of corruption.
Some people today point to Obasanjo’s establishment of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (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 power. This perception has, of course, hardened 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 consensus on corruption being the main concern of Nigerians seemed to make a comeback during Jonathan’s administration, but that is 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.
Nothing grates Nigerians more than the marriage of corruption and incompetence. In other words, Nigerians would rather have a corrupt and competent leader, as long as the corruption is discreet, moderate, and democratised, 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. They are also the reason why, if my friend, the incorruptible Omoyele Sowore, becomes president, his incorruptibility is unlikely to impress Nigerians unless he is a competent, proactive president. Unless his anticorruption disposition 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 the anticorruption disposition 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 rhetoric of corruption.
Moses E. Ochonu can be reached at meochonu@gmail.com.