Nigeria is gripped by the familiar anxieties of an
economy in distress. This escalating crisis has demystified a president
once thought capable of astute, if not magical, economic management. In
their desperation for respite, many Nigerians are now paradoxically
yearning for the corruption that they and their leaders blame for their
economic woes, but theirs is not a nostalgia for corruption per se but
for a period in which, despite or because of corruption, the flow of
illicit government funds created a sense of economic opportunity and
prosperity.
During a recent trip to Nigeria I sampled the opinion of various
segments of the Nigerian people to gauge their perspectives on the
troubled economy of President Muhammadu Buhari, which just entered
recession. One refrain I heard fairly regularly was “bring back
corruption.” It is not an entirely new rhetoric. For months, Nigerians
have been advancing this idiom on social media as a sarcastic rebuke of
what they see as Buhari’s narrow, obsessive focus on corruption.
“Bring back corruption” mocks the logic making the fight against
corruption the sole preoccupation of governmental while hardship stalks
citizens who previously occupied safe economic perches, and while the
government fails to ease the economic strictures and contractions caused
by the said fight against corruption.
When the refrain first appeared in Nigeria’s dynamic political
lexicon, its architects intended to use it to draw attention to the
tension between fighting corruption, which Nigerians believe to be
responsible for their economic predicament, and worsening economic
conditions. It was meant as an indictment of Buhari’s singular focus on
corruption to the detriment of sound economic management.
Many of those who invoke the refrain today do so half-seriously to
make two points; first, to illustrate the primacy of economic survival
and wellbeing above all else, including the fight against corruption;
and second, to yearn for a return to the imperfections of the pre-Buhari
era, when, in their reckoning, corruption was rampant but life was
easier, cheaper, more livable.
“Bring back corruption” is profound beyond the awareness of those
deploying it as an idiom of political critique. It underscores the
paradoxical, often unacknowledged political and economic utility of
corruption in Nigeria — the functional, instrumental entwinement of
corruption in statecraft as well as corruption’s capacity to mediate the
economic relationship between Nigerians and the state.
The Buhari administration’s feisty rhetoric on corruption ignores the
ways in which governmental graft has been democratized in the polity,
trickling down in the form of monetary flows, patronage, expanding
volumes of business transactions, and general liquidity. The Nigerians I
heard saying “bring back corruption” were not simply saying that they
preferred the corrupt but more prosperous era of former president
Goodluck Jonathan to Buhari’s less corrupt but leaner time, although
their rhetoric signals that order of preference. They were not endorsing
corruption either.
Without realizing it, they were making an insightful comment on how
corruption is paradoxically, and contrary to conventional political
rhetoric and anti-corruption jargon, the fuel of the Nigerian economy,
sustaining everything from major real state transactions to the
patronage economies of petty retailers. In Nigeria, the trickle down
effect of governmental corruption is enormous. Corruption generates
secondary and tertiary ripples and transactional economies that benefit
even the pepper seller in the market.
Rather than simply being a vice that has invidiously infiltrated the
institutions of the state, corruption has become integral to the
patronage networks through which politics and governance are conducted.
This is a controversial but important point to make. For decades,
corruption was at the very center of the state, politically and
economically. The circulation of illicit funds, which move stealthily
from government to the private sector and back again through a
convoluted loop in repeated circular flows, became the mainstay of the
economy.
Historian Steven Pierce makes the point eloquently in his book, Moral
Economies of Corruption, arguing that, to understand the history of
statecraft in Nigeria, one must understand how corruption, in its
various governmental iterations, has functioned as an arbiter in both
adversarial and productive political engagements. Corruption is the
recurring decimal in politics and governance. Rather than being an
anomalous virus of politics, what we call corruption, Pierce argues, is
integral to how the Nigerian state is constituted and reconstituted by
political elites.
The corollary to Pierce’s argument tacks back to the “bring back
corruption” meme. While corruption flourished unchecked in the previous
administration of Goodluck Jonathan, that corruption found its way in
trickles to all the consequential corners of the economy, lubricating
the sinews of an economy that depends, for good or ill, on the state’s
revenue mobilization, spending, and leakage.
Nigerians who secured jobs and livelihoods working in or tending to
the investments of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats didn’t care where
the money came from. They were happy to have a job or to partake in the
financial rewards of investments and projects financed by illicit
money.
The concept of an economy nourished by illicit financial flows may be
hard to grasp for many outside the Nigerian context but it is the crux
of the Nigerian economic dilemma: you may have to undermine the economy
in the interim by fighting the political graft that sustains it, in
order to ultimately save it.
In Buhari’s Nigeria, the avenues of leakage are being plugged and
corruption is being fought, however imperfectly, preventing the trickles
that traditionally lubricate the economy. This has trapped funds, which
usually circulate to power the economy, at the top of the
state-dominated economic food chain. The non-circulation of corruptly
acquired funds does not necessarily mean that corruption is not
occurring. Rather, it indicates that corruption is now restricted to a
small circle of people in government, who are too spooked and too
discreet, given the current anticorruption measures, to release their
illicit funds into the real economy.
Aside from sensational, multipronged investigations, high profile
arrests, and multiple, ongoing prosecutions of corruption cases, the
government has implemented a set of measures to keep illicit flows of
government funds to a minimum. The most important of these measures is
the Single Treasury Account (TSA), a policy instrument designed to
centralize and domicile the funds of all federal government agencies in a
single account at the Nigerian Central Bank, preventing the
proliferation of multiple government accounts that are difficult to
monitor, prone to abuse, and are the primary source of funds for lazy
commercial banks feeding fat on government deposits.
The result is a cash crunch never before seen, a squeeze that has
affected all sectors of the economy, and that, coupled with the
government’s import and foreign exchange restrictions, has led to a loss
of confidence and a drastic reduction in liquidity.
When Nigerians say “bring back corruption” they are thus decrying
this cessation of secondary and tertiary benefits from the pipelines of
official corruption. They are expressing a nostalgic longing for an
economy in which corruption may have been the order of things but in
which this corruption performed a functional, productive service to the
economy by loosening and oiling its crevices.
Once you shut down the pipelines of monetary flows with origins in
corruption, the logical outcome is an economy starved of its lifeblood.
This logical, unintended consequence of the war on corruption calls
for a loosening of other avenues of monetary and transactional flows,
such as the foreign exchange and import sectors, both of which, if
managed intelligently, can generate increased domestic trade and
arbitrage as well as patronage that would mitigate the squeeze caused by
the disruption of illicit financial flows.
This is one of the biggest blind spots of the Buhari administration.
In its righteous zeal to fight graft, the Buhari administration has not
reckoned with how corruption, like it or hate it, had become the
mainstay of the economy and how fighting it without easing restrictions
in other corners of the economy would inevitably generate self-defeating
outcomes and hurt the Nigerians the fight is meant to help.
Much of this failure to recognize a complicated, nuanced reality
stems from the government’s determination to live up to a mystique of
unflappable incorruptibility that Nigerians erected around Buhari, and
which the president and his party leveraged to dislodge Jonathan and the
PDP in last year’s elections. The elections are over. The president
needs to free himself from the burden of an election-time persona that
keeps him from governing realistically and effectively.
The “bring back corruption” meme illustrates the ways that
governmental corruption has become instrumental to the quotidian
transactional momentum of the Nigerian economy. It shows that serious
efforts to fight corruption without a corresponding set of ameliorative
and stimulative measures can be counterproductive, causing increased
hardship and turning citizens against anticorruption measures, no matter
how sincere the measures may be.
No comments:
Post a Comment