The recent survey released by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) rating the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) as the most corrupt institution in the country must have sounded like a broken record to close watchers of the security agency.
In the report entitled “Nigeria: Corruption Perception Survey”, the body listed high levels of corruption in public institutions in the country since 2015. Other public institutions identified as corrupt were the judiciary, education and health ministries.
According to the survey carried out between September and December, last year, the level of corruption had not changed in the last five years. Mr. Akin Oyebode, the chairman of the panel that released the report, said “A bribe is paid in 54 per cent interactions with the police.
In fact, there is a 63 per cent probability that an average Nigerian would be asked to pay a bribe each time he or she interacted with the police. That is almost two out of every three persons.
“Bribery experiences were interrogated and recorded in the key sectors of the police, judiciary, education, health and power. Data analysis was conducted under five different and interrelated variables.
The likelihood of bribe in the power sector stood at 49 per cent. The chances of encountering bribery at the judiciary, education and health services stood at 27%, 25% and 20%, respectively.” The police were the most adversely ranked on the indicator.
For every 100 police interactions recorded, a bribe was paid in 54 contacts. The prevalence levels stood at 37% in the power sector, 18% in education, 12.7% in the judiciary and 14% in the health sector. In fact, the 2017 World Internal and Police Security Index rated the NPF as the worst in the world.
The report further said, “From the analysis of the anti-corruption legal and institutional framework in Nigeria, the following cross-cutting issues emerged: there is lack of political will to consistently enforce the different anti-corruption laws; inadequate funding for the various anti-corruption agencies; weak public support and/or ownership of anti-corruption initiatives; poor clarity of roles between various anticorruption agencies and public perceptions of politicisation of corruption arrests and prosecution.”
The SERAP report is coming on the heels of a similar disclosure by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) that about N400bn is spent on bribes each year in Nigeria, indicating how endemic the corruption has become in the country.
In its report entitled, “Corruption in Nigeria, Bribery: Public Experience and Response 2017 Survey’’, posted on the bureau’s website in Abuja, the bureau stated that it took into account the fact that nine of every 10 bribes were offered in cash. And they involved mostly public officials spread across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
The survey was conducted in April/May 2016 in all the 36 states and the FCT of Nigeria. It was conducted as part of a technical assistance project on corruption funded by the European Union (Support to the Anti-Corruption War in Nigeria) and was implemented by the NBS in partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
The survey also pinpointed police officers as constituting the largest number of bribe receivers in Nigeria. It further explained that of all adult Nigerians who had direct contact with a police officer in the 12 months prior to the survey, about 46.4 per cent paid that officer at least one bribe.
While corruption is endemic among the elite in government, bribery is prevalent among the commoners. Where bribery holds sway, compromise becomes the norm. Consequently, merit is supplanted with mediocrity; justice is denied; criminality is enthroned, and national security is imperiled, among others.
It is public knowledge that criminal elements easily buy their way from justice; security operatives on the highways collect peanuts to give passage to offending motorists and other escapee criminal elements; driving licences are issued to unqualified and untested individuals, including the physically challenged and unleashed on the roads to endanger other motorists.
Successive police leaderships should be very concerned about the ebbing image of the force as a result of the activities of their corrupt personnel. There is always the tendency to give up on the very important patina of our security system as far as the issues of corruption are concerned.
It is even more pathetic that police personnel fight among themselves openly over sharing formulae for bribes they collect or waste the lives of commercial drivers they are paid to protect for refusing to give bribes. We advocate the imbibing of the culture of honesty among Nigerians as a weapon to attack the evil of bribery by refusing to bribe public officials.
It will also not be out of place to encourage whistle blowing on bribery. Gone were the days when marked money was issued to those asked to give bribery. It was because the lesser evil called bribery was not tamed that corruption has grown to become a hydra-headed monster that is now difficult to curb let alone destroy
