Anatomy of Corruption in Nigeria(1): Everybody involved in public sector corruption -Adebo, former CCB Commissioner

Dr Ademola Adebo, a former Federal Commissioner in the Code of Conduct Bureau, CCB, is a former Ford Foundation Merit Scholar, holds a B.A degree in Sociology from the University of Maryland, USA; M.A, and Ph.D degrees in Political Science from the Atlanta University, USA; an M.A degree in Corruption Studies from International Anti-Corruption Academy, Laxenburg-Vienna, Austria; a Postgraduate Diploma in Anti-Corruption Studies from Hong Kong University, Hong Kong; a Postgraduate Certificate in ‘Practice and Science’ of Anti-Corruption from International Anti-Corruption Summer Academy, Laxenburg-Vienna, Austria; a UNODC/World Bank training Certificate in ‘Income and Asset Declaration and Management’; and a Professional Certificate in ‘Corruption Investigation and Enquiries Techniques’ from The Re’ch Centre, London, UK.  He is currently a Research Fellow at Atlantic Anti-Corruption Research and Resource Center, Abuja, Nigerezezia, and a Visiting Professor of Political Science and Anti-Corruption Studies, at West Africa Union University, Cotonou.

He has just come out with a book, HOW CORRUPTION WORKS IN NIGERIA: Institutional Failures In A Culture Of Corruption.  In the 531-page book, Adebo provides the intellectual, social, economic and political context of corruption and its consequences.

According to Adebo, corruption in Nigeria is systemic, pervasive and organized and it is not merely a deviant behavior, it is a product of Nigeria’s governance context or social allocation mode.  As a social allocation mode, it determines who gets what, where, when and how. In other words, corruption is the determinant of everything – power, wealth, influence etc.  Due to the functionality of corruption as the fastest means to primitive accumulation, political power, state capture, the sustenance of Nigerian crony capitalists, the promoters of severe poverty and underdevelopment, it cannot be cured through selective prosecution or jail terms of few governors or public office holders.  To control corruption, that is, to change the corrupt social order in Nigeria would require that the powerholders commit political and class suicide to embark on deep reforms of the governance context that facilitates and promotes predatory corruption.  Will Nigeria benefit from an elite consensus in fighting corruption

How would you describe corruption?

In general terms, I will argue that corruption has become the norm, it has become the acceptable way of doing government business and corruption has become so systemic, such that it has become the determinant of who gets what, where, and how and it determines everything in today’s Nigeria.  Corruption is the dominant social order that determines and influences the economic system, that determines the sharing of goods and services and also who has access to opportunities and who will not have access to opportunities.

However, as a working definition in my book, I define corruption within the context of Africa’s political economy as a social order that uses the control of politics and power to capture the state and impose extractive institutions and clientelism as the default mode of governance. This enables the predatory ruling elite to subvert the social contract, appropriate public resources undermine the rule of law and foster particularistic factors coalesced into a social cleavage that blocks development, which in turn, breeds poverty, inequality and instability. Acquisition of wealth legally is not corruption.  But whatever you do that is abhorrent to the laws, ethics or morals in the process of that acquisition is corruption.  

No society where the dominant culture is corrupt has been able to make any substantial progress.  The dramatic progress that was made was made before 1966 because corruption wasn’t the dominant social order as it is now.

To the man on the street who simply sees corruption from the prism of just stealing in government, he may not relate with everything you have just said. So, how do you explain to a man who is also part of the problem that corruption goes deeper than that, and that the misunderstanding of its far-reaching consequences, of how society has been turned from the values that should entrench good governance, moral standing, ethical values, is what continues to make it thrive; that it is not just about stealing money, that it involves the electoral process, appointments and all those things that generally break the law?

It is going to be very difficult for the layman to understand that corruption is not about stealing and misappropriation alone – those are simply aspects of corruption and I argue in the book that those are simply the drivers of corruption. And we must see corruption as a social system.  Look, in every society, there has to be a social order that governs the lives of the people, that governs how they do business, and how they relate to one another. And it is good for every system to have a dominant social order and other subsystems.  In Nigeria, the dominant social order is corruption.

I give you an example, what determines political power in Nigeria? It is not democracy, it is not elections or voting, it is electoral corruption, in the sense that you have the money, and regardless of how you accumulate the money you will acquire political power. So the primary determinant of political power is corruption. The primary determinant of riches and wealth is public sector corruption. The major determinant of poverty, why the majority of the people are poor is corruption. And the reason why public officials openly misappropriate national resources without protest or mass revolt is because the national norm supports it.

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(Cuts in) That’s why I said corruption wasn’t the dominant social order as it is now.  It wasn’t that there wasn’t corruption at all, but the corruption was isolated and there was a sense of duty, a sense of commitment to the general good as against personal interest. 

Let me give you an example: The cabinet of the Government of Northern Nigeria took a decision to buy an airplane to add to the one it had.  But a junior officer through whose table the decision of the cabinet would pass for processing, looked at the cost of the aircraft, and minuted on the memo that they did not need an additional aircraft because the money that would have been used to buy that aircraft would have been able to build so many hospitals, would be able to provide several scholarships, would be able to provide services for millions of Northerners. 

In the end, they did not buy the aircraft because the norm then was different from what we have now.  Can a director or junior officer in the presidency or any governor’s office minute against the buying of anything in today’s Nigeria?  It is not possible. Not only would he encourage it, but he would be the one who would help in paddling the cost of the aircraft so that everybody would make money. The seller abroad will also make money.  That is how bad things have become

There is a study by the UNODC, and the National Bureau of Statistics which I discussed extensively in the book.  It was a private study by these two organisations. And they said, in a particular year from their survey, that Nigerians paid more than one trillion naira in terms of petty bribery, just to be able to access government services.

Just for an average poor Nigerian, to access government services, which ordinarily civil servants are being paid to deliver to the people, we have to pay to access. You have to pay to access a driver’s license, you have to pay to access government hospitals, and sometimes even the so-called elites like you and I will pay just because we don’t have the time.

My worry is that when President Obasanjo came to power, he said the Code Of Conduct Bureau – which  predated ICPC and EFCC – wasn’t good enough so he created those two institutions.  But for a man who claimed to want to fight corruption to be the one alleged to be trying to bribe members of the House Reps to remove their speaker and was also alleged to be involved in the Third Term bribery scandal, not to mention PTDF, how do we process that? A man says he wants to fight corruption but he is enmeshed in allegations of corruption. You can say the same of Buhari and Jonathan under whose watch very serious acts of corruption were either condoned or encouraged.

You know, most of the leaders, before they are sworn in there is always this declaration that ‘we will have zero tolerance for corruption, we are going to fight corruption to a standstill and all that’, it has no meaning. 

What happens when they get into power?  What happens when they settle down?  The political will to fight corruption will disappear entirely and that is because the system does not have the capability to confront the social order itself. To do that, there must be an elite consensus to fight it.  In the case of Obasanjo, he mischaracterized corruption as a prosecutorial problem, that if you have an organisation that can prosecute people and put some people in jail, then corruption will disappear. 

That also comes from his background, he was a member of the Executive of Transparency International before he became president so all that has exposed him to the fact that corruption is defined as deviant behaviour. There is a theory in sociology, psychology and criminology where they believe that every corrupt behaviour is a result of deviancy on the part of that person. So, it is believed that if a public officer embezzles N200 billion, it is because that person is deviant. But what we forget is the system that even brought that person to office or power: it was corruption that even enabled his appointment in the first place and not merit; it is corruption that sustained him in office and everybody is involved.  One person can’t be able to steal N200 billion without some other people in the system being involved. 

I was in the system, so I know what I am talking about.  I worked in the CCB and I found out that public sector corruption is not an individual thing, everybody is involved. So, all Obasanjo wanted to do to fight corruption was to have a specialised institution like ICPC, EFCC, that will jail anybody that violates the law. But it does not work like that; you can have ICPC, EFCC, CCB and so on all around Nigeria, what you will be doing will be only multiplying the centres of corruption.

From your own experience at the CCB, how does corruption work?

Corruption works because it is a social system, it is that conveyor belt that moves around the entire society and it is the same thing in CCB, and all governance institutions in Nigeria. What is so pathetic is that the CCB is supposed to be an anti-corruption agency so you will expect that it will be different.  But the CCB cannot be different because the members are also part of the social system. The people working there are part of the social system.

When Nigerians leave Nigeria, Nigerians work in Nordic nations, the United Nations, working all over the world. Many serve well, while just a few individuals who are involved in credit card fraud are isolated criminals, but the system there, when they apprehend them, they will deal with them, jail them and punish them. But here, most people who commit corrupt acts that break the law, get away with it because the dominant norm condones corruption. I was so surprised because I was expecting the CCB to be different because it is our anti-corruption agency. And I have found out that there was nothing so special about any anti-corruption agency. 

Let’s use your experience at the CCB – how some commissioners were removed contrary to the provisions of the law? 

Our team, maybe because of the circumstances of our appointment, so we just felt like we were all motivated to insist on transparency and accountability and to say ‘look, this agency was set up for a purpose, you are supposed to be the watchdog of government business. So let us try to do that’. 

We know it is difficult but then, we discovered that some CCB  directors and powerholders in the presidency were not interested. It got to a point that the system became irritated such that it could no longer tolerate our insistence on accountability. So, they sent us packing.

You just spoke about the manner of your appointment.  What do you mean?

Late President Umar Yar’Adua made it clear and gave instruction that he didn’t want card-carrying members of political parties to be appointed into CCB. That was the instruction, so we were lucky to have been appointed on merit at that time.  But we met resistance even within the CCB itself.  So, when they removed us, they brought in those they wanted. 

The CCB can be an agent of anti-corruption but then they have to bring in knowledgeable people, people that understand what it was set up to do, and how to go about achieving those objectives for which CCB was set up. Obasanjo was one of the creators of the CCB but when he came to power, he abandoned it. He wanted to strengthen it, but the people there said no, leave us the way we are. Because CCB is constitutionally entrenched, he abandoned it and set up the ICPC. It took most of the functions from CCB and gave them to ICPC. But when that, too, did not achieve what he wanted, he then created EFCC. 

 Which group within the CCB are you referring to?

The group that I refer to is the Local Area Network of Corruption, LANOC, they started lobbing the Wide Area Network of Corruption, WANOC, to get rid of us and of course, when a new government came they felt that they were not going to tolerate us, they threw us out, unconstitutionally though. 

You and your colleagues were removed from office in breach of the law?

I don’t want to discuss that.

With due respect, you will because it ties in with what we are discussing. I heard about the court order restraining the government from removing you and your colleagues and I also know that Section 157 outlines how to remove members of statutory commissions from office.

Okay, a subsisting court order was served on the president and the attorney general. We went to court and the court said we should not be removed from office.  Section 157 that you referred to says that two two-thirds majority of the Senate must move to remove members of commissions or CCB after a committee has been set up to investigate them.  It is the report of the committee that the senators will vote on.  But that did not happen.   

The vice president, who was the acting president at that time, just removed us from office in 2017.  We went to court and the judge said we shouldn’t be removed but our removal was just announced on NTA news.  

Exactly the point I was trying to establish.  If the then acting president acted in breach of the Constitution, how do we describe that? Is that not corruption?

It is called abuse of power, which is the main driver of corruption. We went to the industrial court and the court restrained the Acting president, a SAN, he ignored the court. He appointed new people to replace us. So since that time, that illegality has built on other illegalities in CCB.  Almost all power holders in Nigeria observe the constitution in breach because there is generally no accountability in Nigeria.

We run a system where the National Assembly cannot hold the Executive branch accountable and it is the same thing with the judiciary.  It used to be that the Judiciary was the only arm of government that could hold anyone accountable in this country. But today, things are different.  At least a retiring Supreme Court justice made revelations recently.   Now we are at a point in the history of the country where no institution cares about accountability – both vertical and horizontal accountability. What is the difference between the executive and the legislature today?  Is there any difference? No! 

The only time that legislature attempted to check the Executive was when the Senate was headed by Saraki. He attempted to do that but they used CCB to persecute him, that was why I brought up those two cases in my book (Tinubu and Saraki) to say that whoever is in power uses CCB to persecute the opposition.  That was what happened in the case of the former governor of Lagos State now President, Bola Tinubu.  The persecution itself represents the systemic nature of abuse of power. And immediately they took over, that is, Buhari and Tinubu’s APC, they used the same institution to persecute the Senate President, Saraki, because he was not their choice for that office. 

In those two cases, power holders observe a loss in breach, that is what is referred to as state capture. What we have in Nigeria is typical state capture.

Why take Saraki and Tinubu as part of your case studies?  

I have never met Tinubu nor Saraki before. The book had been ready before the February general elections but its presentation was kept in abeyance to avoid being insinuated into the politics of that moment. The chapter shows how power holders use weak governance institutions to promote primordial interests.

As I said earlier the PDP weaponised the CCB to  persecute Tinubu, a leader of the main opposition party, the APC. When the APC came to power it also weaponized the CCB to persecute Saraki. Tinubu and Saraki were taken to the CCT for the wrong reasons. The argument in the book is that the CCB is empowered by the constitution to charge those in breach of asset law to the CCT.  But the Bureau knew nothing about the case. I said so at the time and it was reported by your newspaper.

Source : Vanguard