By Chinweizu
“If you can’t understand it, you can’t change it” –Eric Evans, Software Design Technologist.
Two of the peculiar aspects that make Nigerian “corruption” intractable derive directly from Shariyaland. (a) The encouragement and protection of “corruption” by the Constitution; and (b) the attitude, among officials, that it is right and proper for officials to loot the state.
The umbilical link of the Nigerian “corruption” problem/disease to Shariyaland is twofold: constitutional and philosophical. Let’s now examine them.
The constitutional link:
This link was made through Shariyaland’s generals, and especially through Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, who decreed the 1999 Constitution into effect without consulting Nigerians or seeking, let alone obtaining, their consent.
Shariyaland thus devised and imposed on Nigeria a Constitution that breeds “corruption”. It breeds corruption in two main ways: an immunity clause that, in effect, invites the highest officials of state to loot, thereby setting a bad example. (These are The President, Vice President, Governors and deputy Governors).
This invitation is reinforced by an ouster clause which, by making its Chapter II, nonjusticiable, makes it impossible to enforce the Constitution’s own provisions against corruption.
The philosophical link:
This is through the feudalist philosophy of government of Shariyaland’s Caliphate.
Corruption and the Caliphate
(Excerpt from “Caliphate Colonialism: the Taproot of the Trouble with Nigeria”.)
The average Nigerian who is opposed to corruption is hardly aware of the historical roots in Caliphate colonialism of Nigerian-style “corruption”.
Nigerian-style corruption is actually lootocracy – the brazen looting of the public treasury by an official. What secularist Nigerians regard as looting of the public treasury is no such thing in the feudal ideology of the Caliphate. Under feudalism, the wholesale appropriation of state/public property by an official is not considered theft, but simply his entitlement as the holder of a fief/feudal office!
That’s what one is granted a fief for in exchange for loyalty and services to be rendered to his monarch/feudal lord who appointed him to feudal office.
Under Caliphate feudal ideology, a public office is a fief for the life-support of the official and his retinue of relatives and retainers, provided he renders the prescribed allegiance and services to his overlord.
If one were sent to administer the Customs or NEPA, one would be entitled to commandeer or embezzle its funds to the best of one’s ability and greed. Hence the Caliphate-derived Nigerian practice where, once salaries are paid, and even before they are, a department’s budget allocation is treated as
being for the responsible official to put in his pocket.
Which is why the Caliphate-serving 1999 constitution institutionalizes and protects this entitlement with an immunity clause that encourages a Governor to seize and export his state’s budgetary allocation, hence the flagrant and rampant moneylaundering by Nigeria’s state governors.
After half a century of unpunished practice, lootocracy has become entrenched as the norm in Nigeria and is imitated by all and sundry; which is why officials, down to the policeman at the checkpoint and the messenger sent to get a file, brazenly extort money from the members of the public that they are officially paid to serve. Nigerian officials have become addicted to lootocracy even though a significant and vocal segment of the population is opposed to it and decries it as “corruption”.
But calling lootocracy by the name “corruption” is a gross misnomer and the error should be rectified: it is like calling a bank robbery that empties the bank vault by the name ‘pilfering’; or calling by the name ‘pick-pocket’ a bank robber who has made away with millions; or describing an act of mass murder as a case of assault and battery – a crime of doing bodily harm to somebody.
So let’s take to calling it lootocracy and not corruption. And we should recognize that as long as Shariyaland remains part of Nigeria, this Caliphate-introduced custom of lootocracy and the Caliphate sponsored attitude of condoning it will be difficult to eradicate.
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For full historical essay go to:
Caliphate Colonialism.
http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/caliphate-colonialism-the-taproot-of-thetrouble-with-nigeria.html
http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/caliphate-colonialism-the-taproot-of-the-troublewith-nigeria-part-2
http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/caliphate-colonialism-the-taproot-of-the-troublewith-nigeria-part-3
http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/caliphate-colonialism-the-taproot-of-thetrouble-with-nigeria-part-4.html
http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/caliphate-colonialism-the-taproot-of-thetrouble-with-nigeria-part-5.html
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So, how should we go about uprooting Nigerian “corruption”?
Let’s look at the word “corruption” as used in Nigeria. In Nigeria the term covers a wide range of crimes, from a policeman at a checkpoint taking a N2 bribe, to a state governor appropriating the state’s budgetary allocation of billions of Naira and money laundering it into his private bank account abroad, under protection of the immunity clause of the 1999 constitution.
This latter crime goes far beyond corruption and is actually looting.
Since the 1999 Constitution, with its immunity clause and its clause ousting its Chapter II, is the godfather of “corruption”, any anti-corruption talk is just rhetoric unless it is combined with an insistence that the 1999 Constitution be abrogated.
If Nigerians really want to get rid of “corruption”/lootocracy, here are two ways they could go about it. Consider the case of a man who is complaining about the flies disturbing him in his bedroom. But it turns out that he has put a shit bucket under his bed. If he wants to be rid of the flies he has two options: carry the shit bucket out and bury it far away, or leave it in his bedroom and take a fly whisk and swat each and every fly. If he insists on swatting each and every fly, he will just work himself to exhaustion without getting rid of the flies. But if he seriously wants to get rid of the flies, he needs to carry away the shit bucket.
The method preferred by Nigerian “anti-corruption fighters”, such as OBJ, seems to be to swat individual flies. That’s what the EFCC and verbal assaults on individual cases of “corruption” amount to. However, a hundred incorruptible EFCCs, even with the best will in the world, cannot hope to catch half the lootocrat officials in Nigeria – lootocrats that are encouraged and protected, and thereby generated daily, by the 1999 Constitution itself.
The EFCC and verbal castigation approach to fighting “corruption” is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Getting rid of the1999 Constitution is the equivalent of carrying away the shit bucket and burying it far away.
Nigerian anti-“corruption” crusaders should join the SNC campaigners for a new constitution if they want to be taken seriously as being anti-“corruption” crusaders.
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