Date Published: 12/30/09

2010: WE MUST COLLABORATE AGAINST CORRUPTION By Maimuna Abubakar

Corruption is the perversion of integrity achieved through dishonesty, deceit, fraud, distortion, or another unethical/unlawful/evil means for the benefit of oneself or another person/group/cause. The reasons for such actions are typically to increase one's wealth or power, to cover-up incompetence, to keep one's job, and so on. Some will even delude themselves with the fallacy “The ends justify the means," which has been used by some leaders ruling Nigeria to justify their evil actions.

It does not matter whether the corruption of power is for financial gain, betterment of position, protection of job/status, cover-up of incompetence, or otherwise, because the unethical/corrupt abuse of such power against those the government is meant to look out for is unconscionable and evil. It is hoped that victims can find help, the corrupt will face justice, others may not have to suffer the same, and all of society will benefit.

There is no doubt there is visible and or glaring efforts on the part of the governments to combat corruption, example is the well-publicized trials of officials like the case of PDP leader Bode George who was convicted and jailed for two and a half years for money laundering on 26 th October, 2009. However, it is generally accepted that we all need to confront corruption in our daily life to defeat it.

The military intervention in national politics contributed in no small measures to the issue of corruption. The rule of law vanished and the private sector was deliberately annihilated by the military in power. The main source of money became the government. Since then, incentives to corruption have been at a peak.   

Over the five-year period of President’s Abacha misrule, an estimated US$3 to US$5 billion of Nigeria ’s public assets were looted and sent abroad. Five billion dollars is more than what Nigeria spent in 2006 on education and health. This money could have provided anti-retroviral therapy for 2-3 million Nigerians infected with HIV–AIDS for ten-years. A small fraction of this amount could have supplied insecticide treated mosquito bed nets for all pregnant women and children in Nigeria .

Instead it was laundered through a complex network of over 70 shell companies and 32 banks in major offshore financial centers ending up in the personal bank accounts of what Swiss courts labeled a “criminal enterprise.”

If the Nigerian government does take appropriate measure to do something urgently in combating corruption in the year 2010, more corrupt leaders will emerge and this country will fail and lose its respect among African countries. I pray that the US prediction , about five years back that Nigeria would be a failed nation in 15 years, should not be allowed to come to pass in 2010, not even in our life time, not forever. We must everything in 2010 to fight corruption in all fronts.