TEMA 5. MANIOBRAS
5.1. TIPOS DE MANIOBRA
Every successive administration in Nigeria has always articulated and adopted the war on corruption as its national policy and, as such, this is the cardinal objective of such administrations (Adebanwi, 2010). This discourse seeks, therefore, to deconstruct these wars by analysing the administrations of ex-presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, Umar Musa Yar’dua and Goodluck Jonathan, in order to assess the success(es) or otherwise of such attempts at corruption, Nigeria’s bane in development.
In pursuit of the principle of Section 15(5) of the 1999 Nigeria Constitution, the Obasanjo administration, initiated the Bill to establish the ICPC as an instrument for executing its war on corruption and, in 2000, the Bill eventually became an Act of the Nigerian Parliament. In 2002, due to observed contradictions in the ICPC Act of 2000, and the challenges against an effective execution of the war on corruption, the Economic and Financial Bill was initiated, and this culminated in 2002 with its enactment as the EFCC Act by the National Assembly. The ICPC Act 2000, as an anti-corruption warhead of the Obasanjo administration, started on a sure footing by the appointment of Justice Mustapha Akanbi (retired), the erudite activist judge, as its pioneer Chairman.
However, the effectiveness of the Commission was constrained by the same government through under-funding and subtle intervention in its operations. This led to frustration for the Commission and the eventual disinterest of the retired judge in remaining as the Chairman of the Commission beyond his first term of appointment. Lamenting his frustration, Akanbi noted:
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It is the government that frustrates the anti-corruption fight. The same people that should ordinarily assist you in making progress are the ones who, at your back, work against you to ensure you don’t succeed. It was a very bad experience that even those in your team would do all manner of things to stop you from making progress. I never knew that even some members of the team were not willing to work, but saw the appointment as their way into political offices and benefits (Akanbi, Daily Sun, Tuesday, November, 27 2012).
What the retired jurist was saying, in effect, is that the nomination of politically exposed persons as members of the anti-corruption agencies in Nigeria is a serious challenge to the anti-corruption war in the country. Social critics believe that Obasanjo’s government did not screen those nominated onto the Board of the ICPC, while others believed that appointment to political offices in Nigeria was generally seen as an avenue to either “compensate” or “rehabilitate” a supporter.
While it may appear that the ICPC was being frustrated and decimated by the same people who ought to nurture it, paradoxically, the EFCC, which came into existence as an institution of compulsion, due to the insistence of the international community, was somehow intentionally allowed to flourish momentarily. This unintended benevolence of the administration to the EFCC ultimately led to some major achievements from this anti-graft agency. In 2007, the late President, Umar Musa Yar’Adua also maintained the position of his predecessor on the war on corruption, although he demonstrated transparency by declaring his assets openly, unlike Obasanjo and later Jonathan (Adeniyi, 2011).
Under the Yar’adua government, the legal and administrative instruments of executing the war on corruption were rendered totally ineffective as the Attorney-General attempted to take over the prosecutional duties of the two anti-graft agencies, but was forced to drop the idea due to massive public opinion against doing so. He, however, succeeded in removing the pioneering Chairman of EFCC from office, and he installed his own person, Farida Waziri (Zero Tolerance, 2013:64).
The same could be said of the Jonathan administration, which appeared to be confounded on corruption in the polity. One of the staff of ICPC in this study interviewed asserted:
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Obasanjo, notwithstanding his weakness as ordinary mortal, is deeply committed to the anti-corruption war. His commitment to the campaign to reduce corruption cannot be compared to that of Yar’Adua or Jonathan. Obasanjo has a principle which guides his anti-corruption stand, once you are caught, you will face the music. Baba will never support you again. This is the simple reason why you see that most people charged with corruption in the last 14 years were Obasanjo’s friends or aides. The reverse is the case under Yar’Adua and Jonathan, even when you are caught, they will still use the system to protect you if you are close to them. So, to me, the zeal with which the war against corruption was fought under Obasanjo is different now (Interview 2013).
In fact, Obasanjo (2013) expressed worry over the high incidence of corruption under President Jonathan’s watch. He noted that ‘when the guard becomes the thief, nothing is safe, secure nor protected in the house’ (p:10). The zeal to bring corrupt people to justice has reduced drastically. In 2005, for example, Nigeria moved from No.2 on the Corruption Perception Index table to No. 45, but the country had come down to No. 36 on the table, as at 2015 (TI 2015 reports). It is simply a fact that Nigeria is losing the battle against corruption. Indeed, during the Yar’ Adua era, there was general perception that anti-corruption campaign was pursued with less vigour, with suspicious exoneration of high ranking suspects previously charged under the Obasanjo administration. Adeniyi (2011:10) noted that the implementation of the war against corruption during this period became ‘dysfunctional and diabolical’.
Worried that the incidences of corruption were on the increase, scores of Nigerians, for the first time in the history of the country, staged a peaceful protest in Lagos in January, 2012, saying “No to Corruption” and yet scandals involving government officials continued to make the headlines of all the dailies.
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Figure 4.2:
ICPC Annual Reports 2000-2015
The chart, above, shows that petitions have continually been forwarded to the ICPC since its inception on 13th September, 2000. This clearly indicates that Nigerians put a reasonable level of confidence in the anti-graft agency, but the agency is constrained from carrying out its three-fold mandate of Enforcement, Prevention and Public Enlightenment/Education. Despite this wide mandate, the ICPC had achieved only 72 convictions since its inauguration in 2000.
339 418 295 415 570 777 752 998 1008 1117 1017 708 1058 1016 1518 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
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4.2.5.1 Comparison of Cases Filed in Courts and Convictions Secured Since Inception Figure 4.3:
ICPC Annual Reports (2000-2015).
The chart, above, reveals the number of cases filed, and the convictions secured by the Commission since 2000. The generally low ratio of the number of convictions secured to the number of cases filed may be attributed to the slow judicial process, which is obviously not within the purview of the ICPC. From the chart, between 2006 and 2015, the number of cases being won by ICPC appears to be on increase.
4
10
14 13
11
42
50
43
24
41
27
26
57
60 60
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Figure 4.4:
Comparison of Cases Handled Under Different ICPC Leadership
From the chart, above, (2006-2010), when Ayoola was the chairman of ICPC, more cases were prosecuted if compared with those prosecuted under the first Chairman of the Commission, Mustapha Akanbi (2000 – 2005), while under Ekpo Nta (2010- 2015) the number appeared to be more, but the calibre of personalities convicted by the Commission is a concern to many Nigerians. The figures indicate that the Commission has yet to convict any VIP since its inception in 2000.
53
200
229
Comparison of Cases filed in Court Under different ICPC
Leaderships
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Table 4.5: Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) Charged by the EFCC
EFCC Zero Tolerance (2014).
From the chart, above, 2005-2008, more politically exposed personalities (PEP) were charged and brought to court under Nuhu Ribadu’s tenure. The number of PEPs, however, dropped when Ribadu was removed as Chairman of EFCC, and then picked up slightly when Waziri was appointed. EFCC, on the other hand, advertised in the Punch Newspaper of 10th February, 2014, to the effect that the Commission secured 117 convictions in 2013, but no single VIP was on the list published.
In-spite of the consensus among Nigerians that corruption is one of the major challenges facing the country, President Goodluck Jonathan has been postulating a corruption theory that says “Corruption is not Nigeria’s problem”. In fact, during his visit to South Africa in May, 2013, he asserted that corruption was not a major issue in Nigeria. He repeated this assertion in Switzerland
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when asked by reporters about the major challenge facing the nation. In March, 2014, in Namibia, he noted that corruption was over-exaggerated in Nigeria. Williams, in an opinion piece, “Nigeria is Corrupt: True or False” published in the Guardian on Sunday of 30th March, 2014, p. 21 noted:
The President is of the mind-set that the global rating of Nigeria as one of the most corrupt countries is exaggerated…. the President has entangled himself with a difficult assignment; he does not agree with the perception that Nigeria is down there on the ladder of world’s most corrupt countries. He said, pointedly, that the perception is louder than the true situation on the ground.
The newspaper reports on President Jonathan’s position on the problem of corruption expose the insincerity of the political elite in relation to the problem. Though the legal instruments to curb corruption in Nigeria appeared to be comprehensive, Nigeria occupied No. 142 out of 168 on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index for (2015), because heavy emphasis is placed on the role of law enforcement agencies, quasi-judicial bodies, prosecutors and judges, while neglecting the non-state actors, notably the mass media (Adeniran, 2008: 66). Opara (2007) offered two other reasons for the failure of the government’s efforts to curb corruption:
Past and existing statutory provisions have been ineffective because they target the symptoms rather than the cause of corruption in the country. Furthermore, they failed because of the time they were introduced by the regimes as a mere smokescreen and they therefore lacked the political will to enforce applicable law and rules (Opara, 2007:7).
Here, Opara’s viewpoint that the political will to fight corruption is lacking, and thus, no matter how the anti-graft officials strive, such efforts will be futile. Similarly, the 2011 report by Human Rights Watch revealed:
Many of the corruption cases against the political elite have made little progress in the Courts: there have been only four convictions to date and those convicted have faced relatively little or no prison time. Other senior political figures who have been widely implicated in corruption have not been prosecuted. At the time of this writing, not a single politician was serving prison time for any of these alleged crimes. Despite its promise, the EFCC has fallen far short of its potential and eight years after its inception is left
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with a battered reputation and an uncertain record of accomplishment (Human Rights Watch, 2011:1).
The Code of Conduct Bureau was deliberately excluded from this analysis because the Bureau had only existed on the books, rather than in action. Chapter Five will examine the various forms of corruption affecting the advocacy role of the media.
4.6 Summary
While it may be conceded that Nigeria had a bad colonial experience, as corruption, exploitation and other vices were introduced to the Nigerian socio-cultural and political environment by the colonial masters, this study reveals that it is rather too late to keep blaming colonialism for corruption in Nigeria 56 years after independence. Similarly, several efforts and initiatives by successive governments to reduce the menace of corruption in the country have not yielded the desired results, owing to a lack of the political will on the part of those in authority to fully implement the various provisions of the laws enacted to fight corruption in the country. Third, the legal instruments that have so far been enacted in Nigeria appeared to be comprehensive in order to reduce the incidences of corruption, but they have failed because the horizontal and vertical instruments of accountability have not been fully mobilised by the State. Since 1966, corruption has remained a dominant political narrative among the military and civilian leaders as a legitimate means of gaining and sustaining power in the country.
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CHAPTER FIVE
THE PRINT MEDIA IN THE ANTI-CORRUPTION CAMPAIGNS 5.1 Introduction
This chapter assesses the watchdog role of the media, both historically and through changing inter- disciplinary debates about democracy. It attempts to highlight the role of the media in the anti- corruption drive in a democratic setting, while interrogating the inability of the media to have a positive impact on transparency and accountability in Nigeria, despite the exposure of corruption in the media. In essence, this chapter sets out to outline the various forms of corruption within the media sector, from the global perspective, then to Africa and, finally, to Nigeria, the focus of this study.