Against the endemic problem of corruption and graft in Nigeria, political economist and management expert, Prof Pat Utomi, xrays, dissects and proffers solutions to this social malaise in this interview with SEGUN OLATUNJI. Excerpts:
With the ongoing probe of the Chairman of EFCC, Ibrahim Magu and the House of Reps probe of the NDDC as well as revelations of monumental sleaze and malfeasance from the manner these agencies are being run, how do you assess the anti-corruption war of President Muhammadu Buhari?
Our country is in deep, deep crisis. One of the things that clearly comes out is that the political class has not managed to define its mission. If it managed to define its mission, we’ll not get to the stage where everything that we seem to be seeing suggests that politics is not about serving the Nigerian people, but the advance of the personal interests of people who have come to political positions. It’s now the one that, therefore, the fight for political office has become do or die because it is the path to plunder. Once you can grab position, whether you actually win election or not, we are in the race of state capture and when you capture the state, the thing is you use it to plunder.
So, the fact that we don’t even have any understanding whatsoever of ethics, the political class does not understand the meaning of ethics, you have a conflict of interest where people who are supposed to have oversight then go to seek benefits from who they are supposed to oversee. That is unacceptable level of conflict of interest.
So, if we are serious about the war against corruption, any member of the National Assembly or even the Executive branch, who is directly or indirectly or in any way that can be established, is related to a business venture that has taken the contracts, should not only resign, they should be tried because it’s against the laws of the country. And we know how this has gone so far. It’s now almost impossible to get a job in Abuja, anything in government, if there is no note from somebody in the National Assembly or very powerful in the Executive branch. Indeed, in all the government parastatals, even in the universities, merit has been thrown out because chief executives, vice chancellors even, can’t even promote people or hire people except there is a note, without collecting notes from politicians. It has reduced Nigeria to a government of politicians by politicians for politicians.
Some critics believe that Buhari’s anti-graft policy is founded on sentiments, lacked transparency and comprehensive definition of what amounts to corruption. Do you share this view?
Well, from even what we are seeing, I’m beginning to wonder how that policy is defined. I saw a video of Atiku Abubakar, may be about two years ago, where he was saying that General Buhari does not understand the meaning of corruption. It is possible that there is an emotional unhappiness with graft, but there is no systematic approach. I like to approach corruption more from preventing it from happening than catching thieves. If systems are completely open, today, we have technology. Block chain technology has its strength in the fact that everything that is happening is known at the same time by all the stakeholders. That is going to make transparency a norm, if we are serious enough to move towards such technology. It is the information asymmetry that exists that you have some information that somebody does not have that allows for the graft and games that are played. So, we need to go to systems that make it very difficult, if not impossible, for people to apply graft. Many years ago, I was a member of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industries and a group which, by the way, has as its chairperson now Vice President Osinbajo, a group led by Soji Apampa, the group is called Convention on Business Integrity (CBI), and a team from that group led at the time by Ibi Sopekun, chose to make a presentation to the Council of the Lagos Chamber and I was a member of the Council at that time. The idea was to get companies to make a public declaration that ‘I will not give, I will not take.’ I think if I remember correctly, it was only Dr. Kolade, who was then MD of Cadbury and myself and maybe one other person, were prepared to do that.
I think we must get to a situation where everybody who is entering public life, becoming a permanent secretary as a civil servant or director as a civil servant or becoming a politician, will publicly say ‘I will not give, I will not take. If I do, I’m ready for the consequence.’ And anytime anybody in public office is seen to engage in such an act, the first consequence is public naming and shaming. Then the person goes to trial or whatever. There is a short video going around of a fellow talking about how Singapore dealt with corruption. How a minister went on vacation that was paid for by a company, as he was arriving the airport, he was arrested and sent to jail. And after that, no big man will go near anything corrupt. We need to do a few dramatic things like that because after a while I didn’t want to watch any more of these videos of National Assembly probe. My personal sense of worth was crushed and killed by humiliation. I don’t know how people feel, because my sense of Nigerianness was damaged. I felt we are just an object of ridicule and laughter everywhere.
Public life is about sacrificial service. I said it in a webinar last Sunday organised by NIDO, Nigerians in Diaspora in America, unless public life is made unattractive, if you win election people know you’re about to fall into poverty; unless that happens, it will be impossible to get this country to make progress because it is now the people who see it as business enterprise who are pushing into the arena and that’s not how public service is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be where you go to seek fulfilment of sacrificially giving for the good of the society.
Now, Prof, if I get you well, are you saying the problem of endemic corruption in Nigeria is that of institutions?
Well, it goes with a variety of things. Institutional weaknesses is a good part of it. It includes also the fact that you can have money and everybody knows it’s stolen and nobody says to you ‘my friend, where did you get the money?’ and you even get celebrated.
The press has a duty to scorn people who may be in positions of power, who cannot explain how they made their money. Anybody who is going to go into public life, must a public declaration of their assets, not private. Public! And if there’s any change in the size of your assets that you cannot explain, you should be scorned. Even if there is no evidence to send you to jail, it should be pointed out that this man became governor and he was worth N20,000, five years later, he’s worth N2million. The public can then have the right to hold you in contempt. But we have been playing games with thieves because it seems like almost all us want when it’s our turn, we’ll do the same thing. Our country will not make progress, I can assure you because most of the things that we should do, we are not doing it because people are blinded by selfishness.
Buhari’s anti-corruption fight has been dismissed as lacking transparency, maybe due to this haphazard manner of investigation and confiscation of assets by the different anti-graft agencies. What’s your take on this, Prof?
It goes back to the same point I was making. Any transparency initiative must have transparency. It should be open. I don’t know why, when you’re about investigating somebody, you start announcing he has stolen money. That’s not transparency. I think one of the tragedies of Nigeria is that the innocent is more likely to be publicly convicted when the real thief gets away completely with it. That is the tragedy of Nigeria. So, there must be a system that must be transparent.
By the way, I don’t know if you know that when Obasanjo became President he set up a huge committee to look into the institutions of transparency in Nigeria and I was chairman of that committee. Committee for the Review of Institutions in Transparency and Integrity. Then he had a special assistant or adviser on corruption matter, Ambassador Emeka Azikiwe, and myself as the coordinator of the Committee’s work. It has a broad membership, which included Transparency International Nigeria leader or Executive Secretary, General Ishola Williams. Even Soji Apampa; President of NACCIMA that time, Ukoha Okeke; Deputy Inspector General of Police Wushishi, the lady and even somebody from Transparency International in London and three or four major business leaders. It was that committee that actually more or less suggested the structure for the EFCC and all of those. But what we had hoped from the work of our committee was that it would be a fundamental requirement, even though I don’t think government ever published any White Paper. After we submitted the report to General Obasanjo, I think that was the very last we heard of it and it was a very expensive committee work because it took us more than six months. And for most of those six months, most of these people coming from all over the place were staying in Hilton in Abuja, from Lagos, from Abroad. I can’t imagine how many billions the work of that committee cost. It pains me personally to have put in so much of my time from 1999 to 2000, put in so much time, efforts into that work and not to see anything from it, shows how transparency is static in government. So, it’s a personal thing in many ways for me.
I see very clearly from what we are seeing that there really hasn’t been serious structuring of efforts besides chasing thieves, and transparency is much more than chasing thieves. As I said, for me, the first thing is to reduce discretion. Most of the problems we have of corruption is because there is too much discretion. Procurement law came because of corruption itself. Instead of reducing corruption, the bureaucracy of the procurement process made the process more corrupt than transparent. So, we have to be honest in introducing systems. For example, you’re going to give a contract to build, let’s say a road, we know the Nigerian Society of Engineers, ask them how much does it cost to build one kilometre of road in similar terrain in Kenya, in US, in Singapore, we know there are differences between countries, but when you put it down, we know this is the average of what it costs. I have a school mate from the University College, Ibadan, who went abroad, worked for Siemens in Germany, he has a foreign name, even though he’s Nigerian, his family name is one of those kind of English names; so when he was posted from Germany to South Africa, then from South Africa to Nigeria, then somewhere along the line, he forgot that he’s a Nigerian. After he came to Nigeria, he was on a flight to Abuja one day with me, and I was excited to see him and we started talking. He said that he feels pained that what his company charges Nigeria for a job is like four or five times what they charge Kenya, I’m not talking about 10 per cent. I mean four to five times what they charge Kenya and that he feels so much pain that he doesn’t know if he can survive doing this job for long. I’ve not seen him now for years. I’m sure he went back to Europe. This has direct consequence. If Kenya can do five times as much as we did with the same amount of money, you can imagine that we only make more progress than we are making.
So, there are so many ways with the prices of doing these things. Comparative prices are all over the world, the process this thing go through. But we don’t do these things, we just allow so much discretion and then we begin to do variation and variation so that people can abuse the process. That’s on the procurement side. But the one of politicians awarding contracts to themselves or harassing people they superintend to give them contracts, it’s just even a no-no. If we were a serious country, we’ll say Akpabio you are accusing these people of being the ones, we want the name of every legislator who has ever got any contract and then the constituents begin the recall of all of them whose name appear on that list. That’s not what they went there to do and then we tell the prosecutor to prosecute them.
You talked about the kind of EFCC or anti-corruption body you and the others envisaged when you were doing the Obasanjo committee job. Now, there have been accusations that the kind of EFCC we have is politically motivated in its anti-graft war. Do you share this belief?
You know people will always talk. But let’s be fair. When Obasanjo started EFCC, people said the same thing that he wanted to go after his enemies. It may be true that it’s always easier to go after your enemies than your friends. I remember my own reaction publicly at that time was that, are those enemies of Obasanjo guilty? If they are guilty. Please, let’s first go after his enemies and by the time he’s done with his enemies, his friends would be available to be followed.
However, this is why civil society matters. Civil society watchdogs can then say ‘look, that man is enemy of Obasanjo or Buhari that they are going after, but here is a friend of Buhari, why haven’t you run after him?’ Then that’s where he would begin to get a broadening of the net. But to say he’s a friend or an enemy of Buhari, it would always happen. But when a politician publicly says, I hope it’s a lie, because I heard at a time that a party chairman said if you join our part, you’ll be forgiven. If it’s a true saying, I mean that party chairman should not be able to show up in public again in his life. The media should run him out of town. So, again, the media has a role to play in this. But sometimes we don’t play it well enough.
Now Prof, the whistle- blowing policy has not been enacted and also the oil sector does not have a legal framework yet, which is key to promoting accountability and transparency. Now, how do you see the alleged foot-dragging on the part of the government on these?
Again, I come back to my point on civil society, and the role which civil society must play to pressure the system to do the needful. 500 years ago, a man called Nicolo Machiavelli writing in The Prince said these immortal words: ‘Nothing is more difficult to bring about than the new order of things because those who profit from the old will do everything to prevent the new order from coming about and those who could profit from the new order do not do enough to make it happen because man is incredulous in his nature, not wanting to try new things…So, you find that those who need the system to change are not doing enough to pressure the system to change and those who are profiting from the current order will do everything to prevent change. So, it is not news to me when they says he’s foot-dragging. That’s not news. That should be expected. That’s the nature of things happening. But the system must then be pressured to make those things change.
Some critics have advised that the President should demonstrate his commitment to combat corruption by sacking ministers and aides who have serious corruption allegations hanging on their necks. Is this practicable?
He doesn’t even have to sack them, they should all resign on their own. I mean if you’ve been exposed this, even if you think you’re not even corrupt, but because you’ve been exposed in this manner, it’s an embarrassment to the government. Your dignity suggests that you should resign immediately. If you don’t, the President should sack you. That is normal, anywhere where there is civilised conduct in the world. After you’ve been purged of it, the President can reappoint you again. There is this British MP who was visually challenged. He resigned and he was reappointed more than three times. You know when there’s scandal or one allegation or the other against him, he would resign. If they want to show leadership, all those who have been mentioned should resign.
Many have said appointing police personnel to head EFCC has not really solved the problem of manning this agency…
(Cuts in) That’s part of the problem. You know the law, that’s part of the mistake in the law. The law says a person of the rank of assistant inspector general of police, even though they’ve not followed it to the letter, that’s what the law says. However, yes, I agree with you. Even the police itself should be reformed along the line. Look at South Africa, at one point when they were fed up with their police, went and appointed the chief executive of South African Breweries as the head of the police. There’s nothing that prevents us from going to appoint this Professor of Criminology, Odekunle, as the inspector general of police.
What’s your take on the demand for the separation of the office of the attorney general from that of the minister of justice?
I’ve always supported that.
How much will that assist in the fight against corruption and other ills in the society?
You see when there is a prosecutor-in-chief, solicitor-general, and there is law officer, you have separation of powers and it even provides some kind of checks and balance.
What’s can you say the country can do to get out of endemic corruption?
The country must make public office unattractive. Any politician that was not like a multi-millionaire before entering public office, who lives in any way that is ostentatious, is to be called out. And we should not even go for the multi-millionaires to go for public offices. We should go for school principal, we should go for retired professor. Politics should not be the arena of swaggering people. It’s an arena of service people and they should be paid very little. I do not think any Nigerian politician should earn more than a permanent secretary. Infact, they should only earn at the level of a federal director. It’s a service. If you don’t like the pay, please don’t come. No special allowance, nothing. We must make public office unattractive materially. Only people who want to serve gratuitously without benefits, without material benefits should go into public life. If you want prestige or wealth, be a businessman. We celebrate our businessmen, make money. A Ghanaian musician, Blacko, who says any society where politicians are richer than the businessmen is on the verge of collapse. This is exactly where Nigeria is, a verge of collapse, politicians are richer than businessmen.