Despite government anti-corruption initiatives, Nigeria’s endemic corruption remains the biggest threat to the country’s stability. This raises concerns about the capacity of Nigerian institutions to combat corruption. According to Transparency International’s study on the 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index, Nigeria is the 154th least corrupt country out of 180.

Corruption remains a priority of concern to the Nigerian Government and People. It drains billions of dollars a year from the country’s economy, stymies development, and weakens the social contract between the government and its people. Nigerians view their country as one of the world’s most corrupt and struggle daily to cope with the effects. Corruption affects all aspects of public life, continues to undermine the social, economic and political development of the country and is a major obstacle to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals.

A report by the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) calculates that the country haemorrhages between $15 billion and $18 billion annually to illicit financial outflows. The figure for the continent is $50 billion. According to a 2020 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, Dubai’s property market attracts “tainted money” from “corrupt and criminal actors from around the world,” including Nigeria.

The scope and complexity of corruption in Nigeria are immense. Corruption is rife across the country’s economic sectors: petroleum, trade, industrial, agricultural, infrastructure, power sector, banking, and environmental. Together, these forms of corruption erase billions of dollars from Nigeria’s bottom line and prevent it from realising its great human and economic potential.

Nigerians view corruption as an externality that siphons public resources and converts them to private use. is has been the bane of Nigeria from the colonial days to the Coker Commission of Inquiry to the Fourth Republic. Corruption in Nigeria is primal: directly stealing public funds through proxies.
It could also take the form of diverting resources from the public purse or using the procurement system to deliver over-invoiced contracts. Another common form of corruption is the self-award of bogus pensions to political office holders, illegal allowances and security votes to parliamentarians amongst others. Corruption thrives in opacity, weak institutions and injudicious exercise of discretion. Corruption does not exist in isolation: it requires a chain of persons and weaknesses in systems to thrive, and that is why it has evolved into a culture because it is now a way of life.

One must align matters of public corruption with market ideologies and sociocultural nuances to fully grasp what actually transpires. Corruption is mainly about two competing interests in an economic activity—the public interest to optimise scarce resources for its development and a few concentrated interests who have taken a state’s treasury as no more than a transactional outlet. This tug of war lies in how public resources are spent. Corrupt officials usually employ the means of opaque transactions, unremitted funds, overvalued contracts and overhead expenses to divert funds. These are the vehicles through which private interests override public interest. If a state has lean resources and these private interests are skimming resources for patronage, there will always be less for the primary business of developing society. Nothing retards development in a country faster than corruption and in its wildest form, the corruption that emerges shamelessly from the shadows to reward incompetence. My three examples are from countries with far higher development indicators than Nigeria, and we can see how seriously they take the deployment of their public nances.

Because this tug of war between the people and their government over state funds will remain with us forever, we need more citizens properly informed, asking questions and demanding accountability. Left to their own devices, politicians are more interested in their personal comfort, preferring to renovate government houses, buy new, over-priced SUVs for their long convoys, pay prayer warriors and marabouts, visit fancy beach resorts, buy private jets for shuttling around and treating the public treasury as though it was a private bank account. It must also be noted that politicians already possess a huge advantage, as the coercive power of the state is given to them, with the consent of the majority at the polls. They can, and will often therefore, use such powers to hide information from citizens. Therefore, it is left to the citizens in larger groups to organise their interests and ensure that every single penny spent is in the interest of the public, which is what should obtain in a democracy. This we can only achieve if our politicians decide to, or are forced to, accept transparency and accountability as norms, and not the exception. What makes this an uphill task is that citizens do not understand the powers they wield.

Sources: CFR, CEIP, HRW, Existential Questions