This is how Nigeria works…

You get a call from a Big Man who has a soft heart, or has been told remarkable things about you. You honour the invitation and there is a job offer. For you. No competition. No stated qualification. No test. “I just like you!” You hear. Just that!

In the past few months, three of such privileges came my way. And because I have a pending contract, I recommended ‘deserving’ friends – my own contribution to the corruption. God forgive me. None was considered. One response was classic: “Gimba, if I need just anybody I would’ve advertised this vacancy in a national daily!”

And this is the reason I get hurt anytime I read Nigerian public servants boasting about their exceptionalities, and what made them the best of a pack, in their memoirs and authorised biographies. Nigeria is a base of incredibly educated and talented people, and whoever makes it to the top should, at least for sanity’s sake, not romanticise such privilege or consider it as a proof that s/he’s the best. We have all benefited from the corruption of this dysfunctional country in ways we may never wish to admit in public.

Any attempt by a citizen to portray his/her rise as an act of incomparable genius makes me sick. This is the reason I’m yet to forgive Mallam  Nasir El-Rufai’s embarrassing masturbations in his terribly written memoirs. For a man who, before opportunism favoured and attracted him to public service, had never worked in an organisation where promotions are competitive – a man who, in a critical sense, may never pass for a technocrat – to have such audacity to boast is disquieting. We are all El-Rufais, local champions whose membership of, or fraternity with, a clique, ethnicity, religion and region, brings many good things.
But there’s always an understandable denial among Nigerians – most are quick to confess that they have never benefitted from the system.

This is understandable. Corruption is evil. And for fears of the strength of its destructive influence, we deny the benefits to protect our integrity.  What we do not acknowledge is, we’re psychologically prone to be flippant or disregard the law in a system where impunity is easily acquired. And you don’t need a Sigmund Freud to tell you that. Scientifically, it’s impossible to not, even if unintentionally, be a scofflaw where laws are not rigid.

Sometimes, as a law-abiding citizen, you find yourself in a fix where obedience is not even possible. You visit a federal ministry to have a document stamped and you’re told the officer in charge is not available. You return the following day, there’s still nobody to attend to you.

After many futile visits, you dial a relative who knows the man who knows a head of the ministry, and voila! Your misery ends, and the others who have no “powerful” somebody to intervene in their case, the others who have been frequenting the same ministry for similar purpose, remain frustrated by that institutional collapse. In a sane country, the next step, after weeks of futile visits, may be to report the said ministry or officer to a relevant authority.  But we know our system; heading to another government institution to report a dysfunctional one may be a more frustrating experience!

Sometime in December last year, a friend contacted me on Facebook, said flattering things about my column and that his father has all of my essays printed out. He gave me the dad’s number. The old man, in his 60s, called, and we discussed almost 16 of my articles on, and passing references to, moral corruption, corporate corruption, spiritual corruption and whatnots. At the end, he asked, “Do you fear that you’ll be corrupt if you ever find yourself managing public funds?”

“Yes,” I said. “The people are not the troubles with Nigeria, it’s the system. Our institutions are so slimy that even a saint won’t come out of one unstained. Our sensitivity to gaining impunity on mismanaging funds encourages corruption. It’s a system that has turned an average good Nigerian into a psychological criminal. We are humans and we have our needs, and the pressure is always high in a prebendal system. Every Nigerian is potentially corrupt in a system where due process is perceived as the ways of the politically naive!”

And I stand by those words: the only way to repair this country is by adopting and enforcing rigid laws, like say a functional judiciary and capital punishments for the heavily corrupt. It won’t be harsh to have a man who stole N100 million dangling from the hangman’s noose. And many of us, as my big brother once highlighted, may suffer the day Nigeria starts functioning. Like a decent nation of “upright men.” May God save us from us!