How Nigeria corrupts Nigerians – TheNigerialawyer

Abimbola Adelakun

On Monday, Justice Ijeoma Ojukwu, the judge presiding over the
“treasonable felony” case of Omoyele Sowore, convener of
#RevolutionNow, expressed concern that Sowore and his co-accused
person had not perfected their bail conditions of October 4.
Justice Ojukwu, who had initially set Sowore’s bond at an
unattainable N100m, slashed it to N50m. Olawale Bakare (aka
Mandate), Sowore’s co-accused, had his too cut to N20m from
N50m.

We should thank Justice Ojukwu for her concern over Sowore’s
welfare, but if I were her, I would be more worried about how my
sense of judgment may be contributing to the culture of corruption
in Nigeria.

Only the Almighty – and perhaps Justice Ojukwu – can explain how
she expected a journalist and his 21-year-old co-accused to have
friends who can pony up such amounts. If any journalist (or
student) in our part of the world walks within a cohort that can
guarantee such sums for bail, they should be placed under scrutiny.
About 95 per cent of Nigerians cannot – and will never – honestly
earn that bail bonds in multiple lifetimes. Who has that money
lying around to stake on friends who might jump bail?

Some commentators have compared Sowore’s bail requirements with
that of Nnamdi Kanu, the IPOB leader. He too faced a similar
plight, but he was bailed out by the only sub-set of people in
Nigeria who can risk such sums because they get access to easy and
cheap money – an elected politician. When Kanu jumped bail, even
his sureties did not merely reach for their chequebook. They filed
an appeal challenging the order of the court that asked them to
pay. That is too much money for anyone to throw around.

The ease with which the judge herself put a hot knife through
the sum and cut it into half shows that there was never a rational
basis for setting the bail bond at that high rate. How do you
discount N100m by 50 per cent if the logic of the amount was
thoroughly worked out before it was announced? I think Nigerian
judges that make bail conditions so difficult that they become
unattainable should consider that they may be mocking the law with
their high standards. If they have determined through the
instrumentation of the law that an accused person is deserving of
bail, they do not need to tantalise the person with the temporary
freedom the law has granted them. Such judges merely subject the
accused to preemptive punishment even while they remain innocent
before the law.

Justice Ojukwu’s vacillation on the bail bond also tells a
larger Nigeria story: our entire society is built on such tendency
for disproportionality. In a country where the minimum wage is an
equivalent of $50, how do you garner a bail surety of $276, 000?
Take Sowore from the equation, and you will find the same story
everywhere. That is why Nigerians cannot help but be corrupt.

Government bureaucrats in Nigeria just set figures without
consideration for corresponding reality. Each time they do it, they
confirm the self-evidential truth that there is no value to the
naira. We are a society where people conjure ginormous figures from
the air because there is no link between actual productivity and
earned income. If rewards were calibrated on the tangible work that
people do, there would be more respect and value for the naira.
Every figure set by the Nigerian government – passport issuance, ID
cards re-issue, driving licence costs, this and that tax, multiple
bank charges- has no correspondence to what people earn
legitimately. You have to be corrupt to survive Nigeria.

This problem of lack of balances is not limited to government
bureaucracies. Even with private enterprises, you encounter the
same issue. For instance, real estate in Nigeria is one of the most
expensive in the world. You pay so much for nothing. Try buying a
house in some of the so-called upscale neighbourhoods in Lagos
where everyone is one flood away from homelessness. They will give
you a sum almost equivalent to buying a mansion in some of the most
expensive locations in the USA, places where you have enough
infrastructure to live with the dignity of a king. It does not make
sense that Lagosians pay so much, and they cannot even breathe
unpolluted air.

Zeroing on Lagos with its roads that resemble bomb craters and
barely vehicle-worthy, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu set some of the
most illogical rates for traffic offences. You have to wonder why
Nigerian politicians are so inherently sociopathic. It is not
enough that they cut through your flesh by failing to provide basic
amenities; they also drain your blood. Most of the offences for
which Lagos set fines ranging from N20,000 to N100,000 are
consequent of the lack of infrastructure bedevilling the state.
Rather than for the government to deal with the complex problems of
poverty, material hardship, and inefficient bureaucracies, they opt
for the cheap solution of further taxing impoverished people.

A lot of offences carry punishment higher than the basic minimum
wage, and which means that most people cannot legitimately afford
them. If you are a civil servant with a household income of
N200,000 per month, you are likely to have to feed a family, clothe
them, house them, and send your children to school. While you are
yet struggling to make those ends meet, you still have to come up
with humongous money to pay Sanwo-Olu’s fines. How can people
balance all those ends without resorting to some get-rich-quick
schemes?

With the level of poverty in Nigeria, no traffic offence should
be higher than N1000. It has to be proportional to people’s earning
power; otherwise, it will lose meaning and encourage corruption.
Government officials need to get rid of the idea that imposing
heavy fines on people deters misbehaviour. No, Lagosians do not
violate traffic rules in Lagos because they have a pathological
problem that can be attenuated with higher taxes; instead, they do
so because what passes for roads in Lagos are not even navigable.
It is Sanwo-Olu that should be paying Lagosians for the time they
waste on Lagos roads and for the damage the roads do to their
vehicles, not the other way round. The government should focus on
easing life for people, not ramping up pain and punishment.

The same lopsidedness between what people earn legitimately
versus the number of superfluous taxes imposed on them is endemic
in almost every aspect of our lives. It leads to what
anthropologists call the occult economy – that is, the belief that
money can magically appear without anyone doing any actual work for
it. We see it in Nollywood films where they promote ideas like the
efficacy of money rituals. We see it in churches where prosperity
preachers claim we can give to God and get back in thousand folds.
In the case of Nigeria, the biggest purveyor of the propaganda of
the occult economy is the government. They first spread the myth of
easy means of making money such as the Vice President, Yemi
Osinbajo, did when he claimed someone invested N1.5m in a business
and made a whopping N1bn just two years later. Then, they proceed
to tax Nigerians based on this mythology of easy money they have
created.

All these harsh means of extracting money from the public is one
of the ways they facilitate the culture of corruption. People
cannot help but hustle and steal just to stabilise their lives. It
is a problem that is rife in every aspect of the Nigerian public
life. From the judge that asks a regular Joe to source a bail bond
of N100m to a government that will bill you N100,000 for exceeding
the speed limit on decrepit Lagos roads, it is about pushing you
into the habits of corruption.