By Feyi Fawehinmi
Before he died in 2015, the late Professor
Stephen Ellis wrote his last book titled ‘This Present Darkness: A History of
Nigerian Organised Crime’. Going through this book left me with several
thoughts, most of them unpleasant.
It is a fascinating read covering, not just
organised crime, but the evolution of the Nigerian state (or maybe they are the
same thing?). At any rate, I want to share 8 random things I found interesting
in the book and I will leave you to draw your own conclusions.
1.
In 1947, late Chief
Obafemi Awolowo wrote that “Corruption is the greatest defect of the Native
Court system.” He complained that not only did judges take bribes, people used
their connections to enrich themselves and avoid punishment for their crimes.
He also wrote that in the north, a new Emir always removed all the people
appointed by the previous Emir and replaced them with his own people. He wrote
all these as a complaint against the Indirect Rule system favoured by the
British.
2.
In 1922, the Colonial
Secretary in London, one Winston Churchill, wrote to Nigeria’s Governor General
at the time, Sir Hugh Clifford, asking him to ban certain types of letters
called ‘Charlatanic correspondences’. This was because J.K Macgregor who was
Headmaster of Hope Waddell Institute for 36 years, had discovered hundreds of
letters written and received by his students ordering all sorts of books,
charms and even potions from England, America and India in particular. Most of
the charms were nonsense and the students were invariably asked to send more
money if they wanted more powerful ones. A total of 2,855 such letters were
intercepted by the Posts & Telegraph Department between 1935 and 1938.
3.
In 1939, a Nigerian
businessman based in Ghana named Prince Eikeneh, wrote to the colonial
government in Nigeria complaining about the number of Nigerian girls who were
coming to Ghana to work as sex workers. He said the girls were usually taken
there by a Warri-based Madam named ‘Alice’ who told the girls they were going
to learn a trade or get married. He concluded that the trade was very
well-organised and profitable for the ring leaders.
4.
In 1950, Abubakar Tafewa
Balewa said ‘the twin curses of bribery and corruption pervade every rank and
department of government’. At that time, the word ‘awoof’ was already being
used to describe how civil servants used their positions to enrich themselves.
In 1952, an anti-corruption campaigner named Eyo A. Akak complained that
Nigerians were abandoning farming for trade due to materialism and consumerism.
He said that every ex-serviceman now wanted to own a Raleigh bicycle before
going back to his village while every civil servant wanted to own a car. He
even blamed women (partly) for this because all of them only wanted to marry
rich men.
5.
In 1959, there were
60,000 school graduates in the Western Region. By the following year, the
number had increased to 200,000. However, this led to a now familiar problem.
By 1963, primary education was turning out 180,000 graduates a year but only
80,000 of them could find jobs, according to the Regional Minister of Finance.
The same minister also said he was ‘looking for a method to crackdown on school
principals who were collecting money from students for a variety of services’.
6.
In 1968, a Polish-British
sociologist named Stanislav Andreski coined the term ‘kleptocracy’ to describe
the system of government he found in Nigeria. He said ‘Nigeria is the most
perfect example of kleptocracy since power itself rests on the ability to
bribe’.
7.
In 1975, a report of the
Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the shortage of petroleum products found
that a lot of the petrol being imported into Nigeria (due to the inability of
the Port-Harcourt refinery to meet local demand) was being smuggled to Chad and
Niger Republic. As soon as NNPC was formed, people swarmed around it and all
sorts of people got crude oil lifting contracts. The US Embassy in Paris
reported in 1973 that a random American walked into the Embassy and showed them
a contract he had to lift 2 million tons of Nigerian crude oil. He told the
Embassy that ‘a great deal of under the table payments were taking place in
Nigeria to obtain crude oil’.
8.Around 1979, a British bank, Johnson Matthey
collaborated with the Central Bank of Nigeria to export huge amounts of forex
from Nigeria on behalf of politicians like Alhaji Umaru Dikko in contravention
of foreign exchange controls.
The bank later collapsed due to unsecured
loans to Nigeria and had to be bailed out by the Bank of England with £100m in
1984 – the first time the Bank of England had ever rescued a private bank in
British history. It also led to the passing of the Insolvency Act by Margaret Thatcher’s
government in 1986. One of the directors of the bank, Vasant Advani, ran to
Nigeria in 1986 but returned to the UK in 2008 for treatment when he was
diagnosed with cancer. In 2011, at the age of 67, he was sentenced to 16 months
in prison for the fraud that brought down that bank. No official on the
Nigerian side, to the best of my knowledge, was ever convicted.
What do these stories tell us? Is Nigeria
hopeless or cursed? Can things ever change? Have we always been this way or is
it a recent thing?
I have a simple answer to all of these
questions – we don’t take our problems seriously enough. None of our challenges
can withstand the power of sustained thinking if we really apply ourselves. But
we start by misdiagnosing the problems and then naturally applying the wrong
treatment.
As a result, the hand of history remains
strong on Nigeria.
·
First Published on Guardian, 07 February 2017
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