Nuhu Ribadu's "War" on Corruption

A publication, The Nation, claims Nuhu Ribadu, the former boss of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commissionwill form a new political movement with Nasir El-Rufai (theformer FCT boss), retired General Theophilus Danjuma (one of those officers who have been at the heart of Nigerian political events since 1966), Ken Nnamani (a former Senate President), Bello Masari (a former Speaker of the Representatives) and others. No other publication has corroborated this news; the only other mention has been from a Daily Trust columnist who cited The Nation as his source. I don't really trust The Nation, but the suggestion of Ribadu entering politics does open the door to comment.

Ribadu is a hero to the mainstream Nigerian media and the online commentariat who between them have created this image of a warrior against corruption, brought down by pro-corruption forces. Debate on whether this image is supported by reality is not permitted; to even suggest such a thing is to draw massed condemnation from what is not too far from becoming a personality cult.

The arrests of Diepriye Alamieseyegha, then the Governor of Bayelsa, and Tafa Balogun, Inspector General of Police at the time, definitely caused a sensation in the broader Nigerian public. Debate on whether these stunts actually achieved anything concrete in terms of combatting corruption is another thing that is not apparently open for debate or disccusion.

To question conventional wisdom is to be ostracized and castigated, yet if you study our history you will find that many of the most popular people, concepts and ideas ultimately failed to achieve what was promised. Usually when this happens, people blame an oft-repeated set of criticisms ranging from corruption and mismanagement to tribalism, marginalization, a lack of a maintenance culture and so much more. Criticisms that fall under the collective banner "the Nigerian Factor".

What is never considered is the idea that the thing in question was never as good as advertized in the first place. That the thing in question was bound to fail, because it was inappropriate, inadequate, poorly thought-out, badly constructed, or was just plain wrong. That perhaps we invested great amounts of mental, physical and spiritual energy, not to mention scarce public resources, on something that was bound to fail from the get go.

Almost the only thing people do question is the existence of Nigeria itself. But then again, the idea that all of our problems were caused by the Amalgamation, and that we would be so much happier if the country broke up .... is one of those bits of conventional wisdom that prove to be nonsensical when subjected to any kind of serious, objective scrutiny.

But lets not digress. Lets stick to Ribadu.

All my life I have heard Nigerian VIPs in government and the private sector hailed, praised and lauded for "great achievements", but aside from their skill at acquiring great personal wealth, I have struggled to isolate and identify what exactly it is they substantively accomplished. If you try to inquire, you get slapped down with a "bad belle" or "PhD (Pull Him Down)" yabbis, as if it is your divinely ordained duty as a citizen to join the praise-worship even if you do not see any concrete reason for doing so. And depending on who you are criticizing, you might even be told you don't like him because of his ethnicity or religion, which is amusing because the so-called "great men" from my region, religion and ethnicity are as bereft of substantive accomplishment as any other.

No seriously.

Take the great leaders of the First Republic. Now I say this with the greatest of respect, but if they had been "successful", we wouldn't have had a civil war, decades of dictatorship, a continued lack of substantive democracy, and a near-50-year history of misgovernment at all federal tiers. "Success" in the immediate post-Independence 1960s should mean laying a foundation for continued, sustained, progress on all of the indicators; "success" in the First Republic would have meant we would now be celebrating 50 great years built on the achievements of the first post-Independence governments. But we don't define success this way, do we? Nor do we critically examine why it is we ended up going in the wrong direction; if we did we might just find that the decisions made and actions taken by the great leaders during the 1950s negotiations with the British and the 1960s First Republic played a decisive role in propelling us towards electoral rigging, corruption, misuse of security agencies, and civil war.

I am not trying to offend anyone. The problem isn't really with the leadership, but with we the people. The so-called "leaders" are cups of water drawn from the lake that is the wider society. We have got to change the way we think about things ... about everything.

As much as we the people complain about misgovernment, waste, corruption and social/political/economic underperformance, deep down in our hearts too many of us secretly dream of getting a chance to join in the looting; indeed, the looters (be they politicians or police at a checkpoint) are citizens like the rest of us, who are using the small or large bit of "power" they have to milk as much as they can, the same way many of the rest of us citizens would do if and when we get access to so much as a drop of authority. It sort of stops us from fighting to change things, because people don't want the tap of illicit wealth to be shut off until after they have drank enough for themselves.

I am digressing again. Lets get back to Ribadu.

One of my childhood chores at home was cutting the grass in the backyard and clearing weeds from the small garden. At primary and secondary school I was subject to Friday afternoon manual labour, a period when the school used us students as free labour to clear the ever-encroaching tropical bush. There was no lawnmower or herbicide; I worked with the strength of my right arm, a machete and/or a hoe.

My father taught me to uproot the weeds/grass in the farm and backyard, to bring the whole thing up out of the ground, leaves, stems AND roots. You could make it look like cleared space by cutting the stem from the ground, but if you have left the roots in the ground the grass grows back faster than it otherwise would. You can not stop the grass permanently (nor should you want to in my view), but by uprooting you cut down on the number of times you had to come back out to clear the grass.

At school, older students initially taught me how to tackle the portion -- the stretch of tropical bush bordered by invisible parrallel or V-shaped lines that was assigned to each student for manual labour. You start at a specific point A, and work to another point B, leaving cleared ground behind you and "wilderness” in front of; you could stop at any point and anyone could tell what you had done and what you had left to do -- and if a new person were asked to take over that portion, he or she would know where to start and what to do next.

At school or behind the home, swing your machete so the cuttings fall from uncleared space into the cleared section; if you did it the other way round, you increased the weight your arms had to contend with as you tried to move forward with your work.

With this simple childhood system in mind, examine Nuhu Ribadu's EFCC.

Be honest. At best, he wandered around a vast, uncut wilderness, mostly not doing anything, occasionally picking up a brightly coloured wilderness flower and holding it up for public viewing. The public was so astounded at the delicate beauty of each of these flowers, so surprised to see someone actually pick a flower up, that it did not seem to occur to anyone that randomly picking up a half-dozen flowers does not in anyway diminish the thickness of the forest of corruption.

Would the level of "economic and financial crime" in Nigeria in 2009 have been any greater or lesser if we had never heard of Ribadu? Did he make any difference?

Our federal republic presently comprises 811 juridictions -- one federal government, 36 state administrations, 1 territorial entity, and 774 local government areas. Which of these 811 "portions" was substantially cleansed or even just marginally dusted in the Ribadu era? Did he cut the levels of graft anywhere? Break the power of a single godfather/oligarch?

All I see is a continuous stream of corruption that started in the colonial period, continued through the First Republic, the Oil Boom, the Babangida years, the Abacha period, and into the second-coming of Olusegun Obasanjo. The waste, corruption and mismanagement between 1999 and 2007 was probably the worst in our history, with the least in the way of institutional or informal/voluntary checks.

Corruption and economic crime are pervasive in Nigeria, more than one man's life's work to combat. The first mistake of the emerging Cult of Ribadu is one many Nigerians make, that of looking for a "superman" to save us all, the so-called "good leader" mythos. In truth, as I said earlier in this piece, corruption, waste and other social ills will diminish only when 100+ million Nigerians change their way of thinking and their expectations of themselves and of their society, and only when they follow this up by forcefully demanding and participating in the creation and sustenance of change. As courageous an individual as the late Gani Fawehinmi was in life, he never changed the substance of Nigeria; we the people are the substance of Nigeria, and as long as we remain as we are, a thousand Ganis would not change anything. Standing by the sidelines apathetically clapping for Gani does not help Gani achieve the fulfillment of his life's work.

But even by this standard, Nuhu Ribadu is not what his cultists portray him to be. His EFCC should have isolated a specific "portion" to clear, with a defined "Point A" opening act, a method to the swing of their machete, and a target "Point B" at the other side. He should have focused the EFCC's scarce resources (and time) on up-rooting as much of the portion as possible, slicing stems and leaves only where the roots are too strongly embedded. We should have been able to empirically identify the cleared space behind the Ribadu EFCC's actions, and the wilderness still lying ahead; his successor would have known exactly where to start from and what the next line of action was.

And the portion the Ribadu EFCC should have chosen is the Nigerian Police Force!

The first step of any War on Corruption (or Crime in general) is cleaning up and transforming the Nigerian Police Force! You would instantly add HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of new workers to the anti-crime, anti-corruption workforce, each with a portion, all the individual portions addinig up to more than Ribadu and his EFCC cohorts could ever have hoped to do alone.

By failing to do their jobs properly, the criminal investigation services (police, FIIB, etc) abet the commission of financial and economic crimes. And the judiciary if these services were to provide the judicial branch with sufficient evidence for convictions. Importantly, those police officers with direct or indirect, formal or informal linkages to the political criminals they are refusing to properly investigate should be liable (under a new law if necessary, or a Sharia law if must be) for aiding and abetting.

I had a depressing experience a few years ago (during the Obasanjo/Ribadu years) when I escorted a cousin to meet his employer (a businessman) at an exclusive social club in one of our biggest cities; the employer (being as boastful, extravagant, ostentatious and conspicuously consumptive as Big Men tend to be), took great pride in pointing out to me that he joined the club because judges, police commissioners, administrators, regulators and others are members -- and because, he told me, all sorts of things are "resolved" by members within the club (what Obasanjo would call an "internal family affair" a la the Uba/Ngige wahala).

There are all sorts of "connections" between decision-makers and action-takers in Nigeria (and by the way, elections are not rigged by brute force, but by various actors in control of various machines and structures putting those machines/structures to work on behalf of whomever); if we do not break up those that link judges and police officers to the perpetrators, we are not going to go anywhere with any fight on crime. Quid-pro-quo is the name of the game among Nigeria's social, economic and political Big Men level; the police look the other way either in exchange for something positive, or for fear of something negative.

The EFCC could have championed a law to give something like 15% of funds that were stolen-but-recovered or would-have-been-stolen to whichever police unit or team of investigators cracked the relevant case (and perhaps another 10% for the police pension fund). If they lack capacity, the EFCC could have set up seminars to train self-selected investigators in all the state/area commands to conduct financial forensic audits and other investigative techniques for "white collar" crimes.

The assault on corruption would then be wide-ranging, reaching down into the most remote of local government areas, with few places to run or hide for the criminal elite. As opposed to the waste of setting up new resource-consuming agencies like the EFCC and the less-glamourous Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), just to superintend the continuation of a warped and crooked system.

Systemically reforming the criminal justice system in its entirety is not an easy task, nor one that could be completed in a day, a week, a month or a year. It would take time, effort, focus, resources, courage and political will. It would be possible only with the effective, involved and participatory support of the population at large; if we cannot scare the political leadership into believing we will force them out of social/political/economic power if if they don't reform the system, they will never do anything about it. It is not in their interests to do anything about it. Until their survival instinct is directly linked to their performance on reform, we can wait from now till eternity and there will be no reform. As I said earlier, they don't take the demands of the citizenry seriously, because they know that deep down inside most of us citizens dream of an opportunity to join them in the chopping. Indeed, most of these so-called Big Men are just regular citizens like the rest of us, who happened to get and seize the chance to sit at the table to chop.

Until there are changes in the fabric of society itself, the leadership will only ever give lip service to like "War on Corruption", "Food for all by the Year Blah", Vision 20XX, and (significantly) democratic elections. The EFCC is and has always been the public relations arm of this lip service, the agency set up to make people think something productive was being done. And Nuhu Ribadu was not a pawn in this process -- he knew exactly what he was doing.

Devotees of the Cult of Ribadu insist anyone who accuses him of political bias misses the point. They believe we should praise Ribadu for at least trying, for at least arresting SOMEBODY rather than nobody. They feel it is the best we could have expected under the constraints he was operating under, that it was a "start" we could have built on.

But if a person attacks one branch of the vast and sprawling corruption network with the deliberate intent of giving a political advantage to another branch of the same corruption network, of what use is that to the rest of us? One thief replaces another thief, and the system continues as usual, nothing gained. If this is all Ribadu was expected to do, why complain when he is sacked? By your own admission, even if he wasn't sacked, corruption would have continued at the same level, except carried out by people more acceptable to Ribadu's bosses.

The Ribadu EFCC is not the first public safety/security agency to be used as a pawn by the government of the day, nor the first to practice selective justice based on political considerations. The colonial police did it. The First Republic regional police did it. The defunct National Security Organization (NSO) did it in the 1970s, and the Nigerian Police did it in the Second Republic. The State Security Service (SSS) has been doing it ever since they replaced the NSO.

This is, unfortunately, the natural function of such entities in the context of the Nigerian social/political/economic system. You cannot claim "constitutional immunity" is stopping you from prosecuting governors, while prosecuting Diepriye Alamieseyegha and Joshua Dariye. And all of Nigeria watched in amazement as Chris Uba broke several of the federal republic's most serious laws, all to get his hands on the treasury (economic/financial crime) of Anambra State; did Uba have constitutional immunity too? The late Lamidi Adedibu?

Then-President Obasanjo initially tried to bury the report of his first Auditor-General, Vincent Azie, because it detailed the pervasive graft and waste in the federal ministries. He then sacked Azie when the Auditor-G leaked the report to the media. Next, Obasanjo emasculated the Office of the Auditor-General, which was non-functional for the rest of his term. After Azie, the next credible report from an Auditor-General came from Robert Ejenavi, two years after Obasanjo left office. And Ejenavi's report echoed Azie's report, which indicates the so-called "War on Corruption" had no effect on the federal executive.

Surely Ribadu had access to the Azie report? At one point, Ribadu was probably the second-most powerful man in the federal executive, so surely he had Obasanjo's ear. What did they use the Azie report to do?

At this point, Ribadu cultists usually claim there was a "plan" -- to prosecute the corrupt governors after they left office in 2007.

First of all, why is it necessary to focus all of your attention on governors? The governors are bright and shiny flowers that would not exist with the roots, stems and leaves of the plants that sustain them. The whole point of a War on Corruption is to attack the roots of it, the web of interlocking networks binding concentric layers of patrons and clients, godfathers and godsons, plutocrats and ex-securocrats; it is these networks that "annoint" governors, at which point the governors have to repay the favour, and not necessarily with "criminal" theft -- we lose so much more of our resources to wasteful contracts, security votes and assorted other "legal" methods of disbursing patronage to a vast number of parasites.

Secondly, how was it possible to take on Alamieseyegha and Dariye, but not possible to take on other governors?

Finally, and most importantly, this so-called "plan" had nothing to do with fighting corruption, and everything to do with securing Olusegun Obasanjo a Third Term by other means. The then-president's team of warriors executed what they called "do or die politics" with Nuhu Ribadu front and centre to lead the assault.

Devotees of the Cult of Ribadu cheered them on. The Ribadu fan club portrayed Atiku Abubakar as being far too corrupt to be allowed to be President. In truth Atiku is as corrupt as they say he is, but then Obasanjo as president was a product of networks previously beholden to Atiku -- they chose Obasanjo because they knew he would permit their corruption, which in fact he did, so what is the difference?

Ribadu cultists believed the outcome of an Atiku presidency would be so devastating to Nigeria that they threw their full support behind the "do or die politics". No matter what Obasanjo's minions did, no matter how criminal, how illegal, how anti-constitutional, how anti-democratic, they supported it. Atiku had to be stopped.

The problem was, "do or die politics" in practice meant a continuation of the lawless, anti-constitutional, anti-democratic practices that have marked (and marred) the ten years of the Fourth Republic. Everything that made it possible for massive corruption (and election rigging) to happen without checks and balances. Far from fighting against these problems, the Obasanjo team was exploiting the problems for their own benefit, same as they did in 2003.

The 2007 "do or die" elections turned out to be the worst election in the history of Nigeria.

This is important, because according to Ribadu cultists, "the plan" was for him to prosecute the governors after the election.

But since the 2007 elections were even dirtier than the 2003 elections, they produced a new crop of corrupt politicians to replace the ones who had just stepped aside.

This is even more important, because the last thing any of these new politicians would want is to set a precedent .... a precedent that could mean they would be prosecuted themselves when they left office in 2017.

THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL THESE POLITICIANS WERE GOING TO PERMIT ANYONE TO PROSECUTE THE IMMEDIATE PAST STATE GOVERNORS.

The "do or die politics" (with its manipulated and rigged election) Ribadu was playing with Obasanjo basically guaranteed doom to any plan to prosecute anyone after 2007. Their failure to clean up the system, to enact any true and substantive reform or restructuring, their failure to transform politics because they were too busy taking advantage of it, basically made a nonsense of Ribadu cultists believe in a "plan".

What plan? I don't think there was a plan.

Any plan to prosecute corrupt politicians once their constitutional immunity ran out would have to have involved prosecuting Obasanjo himself; much like the rest of the political class, he had a vested interest in making sure no such precedent was started. Obasanjo had eight years to at least try to clean up the system, but aside from being a product of the system, and a man who enjoyed the privileges that came with it, he was also too busy trying to take advantage of the institutional weaknesses he was supposed to be fixing. The man created Transcorp as part of a plan to transfer valuable publicly-owned assets to himself and his cronies, with hapless Nigerian investors (seeing a chance of joining to chop) financing the whole thing with their savings (while the erstwhile Central Bank boss Charles Soludo motionlessly watched the banks give unsecured loans for these "investors" to pour into paper entities like Transcorp).

And it should not have surprised anyone when Umaru Yar'Adua turned on Obasanjo.

Nigerian political history is replete with godsons turning on their erstwhile godfathers. Among the most historically significant of such political schism was the break between the late Ladoke Akintola and the late Obafemi Awolowo. Arguably the assassinations in January 1966 of senior officers like Maimalari, Largema and Pam in by junior officers falls into this category of previous subordinates turning against their erstwhile superiors. And even if you rule out January 1966, you cannot rule out the events of subsequent decades, when a hyper-politicized Nigerian Armed Forces went through repeated coups in which godsons and juniors overthrew and/or assasinated their superiors.

In more recent times, nearly every Fourth Republic governor in Nigeria immediately embarked on dual wars as soon as they were sworn into office, one against their principal godfather and the other against their deputy-governor.

And then you have Obasanjo himself, who turned against his own principal godfather and his constitutional deputy, who were one and the same man -- Atiku Abubakar. But it was not just Atiku and his alliance of godfathers. You see, Obasanjo was not sure of his team of godfathers in 2003, so he used ethno-cultural appeals to get the support of the AD/Afenifere machine .... used them astutely .... and then promptly destroyed the AD/Afenifere machine so utterly that it ceased to exist as a worthwhile political force.

This is Nigerian politics.

Of course Yar'Adua turned on Obasanjo. Umaru might be mild-mannered, but he is also a scion of one of Nigeria's most powerful political families; his older brother, the late General Shehu Yar'Adua (along with Theophilus Danjuma) more or less made Obasanjo the presiden in 1976. Shehu Yar'Adua's political machine was powerful enough to have made him president as far back as 1993, if Babangida hadn't annulled Yar'Adua's nomination as the PDP candidate (and Adamu Ciroma's as the NRC candidate; and not to offend anyone, but I do not recall the late Moshood Abiola fighting against these prior annulments; not to digress or anything, but this situation is is sort of like Ribadu's -- if you know the game is rigged and you play the game because you think the rigging favours you, you cannot be surprised or shocked when the rigging turns against you; this is Nigeria, land of the everlasting backstabs). And it was Shehu Yar'Adua's machine that Atiku Abubakar more or less hijacked to become something of a godfather-of-godfathers for a few years after 1999.

Of course Umaru turned on Olusegun.

Back during the "do or die" politics of the 2007 election, Ribadu cultists told us Umaru Yar'Adua was not corrupt. This was true. But of what gain is it to all of us Nigerians if an uncorrupt puppet is manipulated by a corrupt puppet-master? The point of "the plan" was to use Yar'Adua as a puppet, with Obasanjo controlling the strings. It was meant to be a Third Term by other means.

Ironically, when the supposedly uncorrupt puppet turned on his corrupt puppet-master, the Ribadu cultists were enraged. Turning their ire on their former puppet, they lampooned him as "Baba Go Slow". It is true, he does move slow (sometimes not at all), but what exactly did his predecessor do in eight years? Fix electricity? The police? The elections? Corruption? Anything?

In 2003, Obasanjo hedged his bets against his erstwhile network of godfathers by seeking out the AD/Afenifere. Four years later, Umaru Yar'Adua would hedge his own bets by expanding his base of godfather support beyond those loyal to Obasanjo -- by offering them Nuhu Ribadu on a silver platter.

Ribadu had been the second-most powerful man in the Obasanjo presidency. More importantly he had been Obasanjo's enforcer, the man who twisted arms, bullied and blackmailed, forcing Big Men to act like Small Sheep in service of "do or die" politics. Before his EFCC posting, Ribadu was "nobody" in the parlance of Nigerian Big Men; it must have chafed their pomposity to have to say "oga sir" to such a "small boy". Ribadu's power certainly annoyed his erstwhile superiors at the Nigerian Police Force, who were more than glad to embarass the man once his powerful backer was out of the way.

And so Ribadu is gone. Another day in "do or die" Nigerian politics. At no point was corruption even dented, much less damaged or even briefly inhibited.

I do not know if Ribadu is forming a new political organization. It would not surprise me if he was. That too is part and parcel of Nigerian politics; when the pendulum of favour swings against you, you either decamp to a rival party (in some cases, like Bauchi Governor Isa Yuguda, to return to your first party after returning to favour) or you form a party of your own (as Bola Tinubu and Orji Uzor Kalu did).

Nor would it surprise me if Ribadu, in forming said party, would associate with the sort of politicians he was supposed to have been investigating. Heck, this is a world in which the former superstar Central Bank Governor, Charles Soludo, is the gubernatorial candidate in Anambra State for the mega-corrupt Peoples Democratic Party. Unsurprisingly Soludo became the party's official candidate in a rigged, anti-democratic process; I don't know if to say he was imposed by decree or by fiat, but there was nothing even remotely democratic about it (nor will there be anything democratic about the February, 2010 Anambra State Election).

As usual the apologists for people like Ribadu and Soludo, and the rest of the so-called "progressives", "true federalists", "resource controlists" and "pro-demos" will tell us that you have to work through the system, that you cannot make change happen if you don't have power, that you have to play the game to get to where you need to go to do what you want to do.

Sure, whatever you say. Corruption is alive and well .... and those consolidated banks created a separate, internal Nigerian credit crunch that has nothing to do with the broader global credit crunch. The effort to tackle the "toxic assets" of Nigeria's post-consolidation banking sector have so far absorbed some =N=920 billion or US$6.2 billion in federal government and (Lamido Sanusi-led) Central Bank bailout funding.

There is no substitute for real, true, systemic and substantive citizen-led reform, restructuring and transformation. No substitute. The apologists continue to deceive the citizenry by convincing them to place their hopes in people, groups and ideologies that will never achieve the optimal outcomes we are all praying for.