Ademola Araoye

Corruption is manifest in bribery, misappropriation, underhand transactional processes outside the established due process, and all other related forms of non-material gratifications, including demands for and solicited and willful offering of sexual favors, as well as stealing of public funds. Corruption includes the use of otherwise legitimate institutional mandates, such as the Legislature or a political party, to orient the formulation of public policy away from the objective public interest in the direction of outcomes for private dividends and or parochial gains. Also, corruption may entail the implementation of policy in a manner that detracts from the overall public good to advance parochial interests of the direct recipients, their complicit constituencies or institutional actors. Institutions, including political parties and state organs such as the Executive, the Legislature or even the Judiciary, can therefore be corrupt. Despite popular understanding of corruption as the outcome of clandestine interaction between individual actors, corruption often entails open interactions based on or implied tacit public partnerships. Partisan state capture and the corruption of the state space begin with electoral fraud.

The logic of systematic and systematized corruption is founded in its utilitarian function as a political instrument and as an organic, even if illegitimate, glue to a negotiated political settlement among like- minded corruption directed dominant elites who thrive in the context of and in the contest for the struggle for ascendance between entrenched institutions for the advancement of the validated parochial loot and who decimate bureaucratic structures put in place for the non exclusive public good. The national project in this case rests on a permanently fragile political settlement that incorporates in an atomistic fashion, in contradistinction from an integrated manner, the collectivity of prominent national villains who are legitimated in their local constituencies by virtue of their capacity to advance a parochial loot at the national level. They partly do this or project that they are bona fide actors on behalf of their constituencies that are co-terminal with communities. The national villain is thus validated by his credentials as a local hero.

There is therefore no consensual moral center to prosecute the pre-eminent local heroes advancing the partisan interests as a national villain. Impunity results from the character of the national processes founded on a political settlement based on discounted national values and ethics. Impunity reduces the perceived cost of corruption. As former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Dahiru Musdapha, observed in a keynote address at the SERAP’s 9th Roundtable conference in 2012, the risk that corrupt activities will result in imprisonment and accompanying public humiliation is minimal. He surmised that the gains of corruption are therefore not discounted and there is thus, little reason beyond personal integrity not to engage in corrupt acts.

Corruption, especially endemic across all strata of society and national communities in Africa, is the most expressive public articulation of an upended ethical and normative system and a deformed spirituality of the community. This may lead to psychological mass defection from the idea of the centrality of the state as the defining political realm or of the notion of the nation as a determinate community. In this context, statesmanship is reduced to activities designed in actuality or may be construed or perceived as the partisan agenda to exploit the subject putative state, the nation and community. Notions of the rhetorical national project, like the character of the concrete myth of these kind of states, acquire fictional character in what essentially are entities that perpetually struggle to consolidate themselves as concrete and legitimate realities.

Corruption is thus a complex phenomenon entailing an equally complicated network of actors internally and externally. That complexity also involves understanding the structural linkages of domestic level national villains in the context of a subsisting political settlement while simultaneously defining the relationships of local proxies with their conniving external hegemonic state and institutional collaborators. The internal political settlements that validate corruption at the highest levels in less developed political systems are also integral to formal and informal engagements with external interests and partners as informal state policy in pursuit of their sovereign interests. Corruption in African countries can therefore be analyzed at two levels.

At the first level is the anatomy of corruption in the domestic and national setting. At the second level is the nature of the murky external environment, political and legal, that facilitates corruption in, paradoxically, a reversed structural dependence of powerful international forces on corruption in underdeveloped political systems in the Southern hemisphere to oil their respective economic and political machineries. A sane political environment, including good governance, and a corruption free Africa may not be perceived to be in the interests of the developed and elite state actors. Period. In the case of Nigeria that was largely founded on the contempt of the people by the British who cobbled the state into being, their founding lies and deceit, including historic manipulation of its critical demographics, put the country on a shaky pedestal that had to be sustained. Corruption, a major derivative of lies, was inevitable as a major currency of national transactions.

The struggle for the absolute partisan appropriation of the totality of the state space by individuals such as Sassou Nguesso in Congo Brazzaville, Obiang in Equatorial Guinea, accounts for significant incidence of corruption in the post colonial state. Corruption is thus integral to the process of and struggle for partisan appropriation of state spaces unleashed by the unconsolidated and unpacified nature of the state and potential nation spaces in their post-colonial settings. In fact, the dominant governance paradigms in post colonial or post liberation entities rest on corruption. This is abundantly manifest whether in the context of the many derailed messianic military interventions or intrusions in public life that predictably ended up spawning moral monstrosities governing through opaque and unaccountable standard operating procedures in regimes of bold thieves in uniforms or even in the post military ex-military dominated successive odious instrumental democracies exemplified by Nigeria.

They are also manifest elsewhere in patrimonial administrations in One Man States (OMS) as in Obiang’s Equatorial Guinea or Togo under the Gbasingbe Eyadema and his dynasty or One Party States in Angola’s MPLA (OPS). In the post-Cold War era associated with enhanced cognitive sensibilities in relation to governance in the global environment and the associated demands for transformational democratic leadership, corruption remains endemic in neo-patrimonial systems in the post One Man State or post One Party States (POMs/POPs) or even represented in the emerged post revolutionary decay of post liberation and post settlement regimes depicted by South Africa, Zimbabwe, Guinea Bissau and Angola.

Transparency International notes that Nigeria is a neo-patrimonial state, where power is maintained through the awarding of personal favours and where politicians may abuse their position to extract as many rents as possible from the state. Nigeria is thus exhibits the pathology of neo patrimonial governance paradigm that is the expression of a mad pursuit of partisan appropriation of the totality of the state space. Everything else, including corruption, nepotism, cronyism, sycophancy, hypocrisy, etc flows from that.

• Ademola Araoye is a former Nigerian diplomat and a retired official of the United Nations. Currently a Visiting Professor associated with the SARCHi chair on African Diplomacy and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg, Araoye is author of critically acclaimed books including Cote d’Ivoire: The Conundrum of a Still Wretched of the Earth and Sources of Conflict in the Post-Colonial African State. He is a regular contributor to TheNEWS magazine