The Governorship Debate: Enough Said?

            

For many Lagosians, last week’s governorship debate hosted on Channels TV would not have gone unnoticed. For those of us who are Lagosians in spirit, we had to wait till the videos had been uploaded unto the World Wide Web before we could dissect and discuss the performance of the five candidates.

There is little precedent for open forum debates for aspirants to high political office in Nigeria, so the organizers of the event must take credit. They established a reasonable format, chose a good venue and got the participation of the main contenders in the race. That said, they may have let themselves down with the choice or the size of the audience that was allowed into the Muson Centre. The audience was often disruptive and distracting and at one point the frustration in the very capable host’s eyes was obvious.

Right from the get-go, in their opening statements, the candidates occupied the archetypal roles of Nigerian Politics. There was the proverbial ‘old man’, JK Randle of the SDMP, who set out his stall as a man of great experience and of great political heritage. There was the self-professed 'revolutionary', Yomi Tokoyan of the ANPP, his opening statement was steeped in political theory and jargon and throughout the debate he continually made reference to political theory and the concept of revolution.  There was also the ‘everyman candidate’, Dr. Adedbola Dominic of APGA, who (with no offence intended) looked and sounded more like the average Lagosian than his counter-parts, he attempted to move away from the abstract and talk about the problems of Lagos in real terms. There was of course ‘the incumbent’,Governor Babatunde Fashola of the ACN and ‘the challenger’ from the PDP, Ade Dosunmu.

There has been much written about it in the last few days and so there is no need for your humble writer to dissect the entire debate, the general consensus is that Fashola kicked ass and one can be fairly certain that this will be confirmed by the poll currently being run on CP-Africa.com. However, there are some things that caught my eye that most people have failed to acknowledge. Firstly, APGA’s flag has a cock (a chicken) on it and ANPP’s flag has something looks a lot like a cock on it (NOT a chicken).Secondly the host of the debate looks a lot like star of ‘The Wire’- Idris Elba. Lastly and slightly more importantly the debate was skewed in favour of Mr Fashola.

I can hear the glasses crashing as they slip from your grip and I understand I must move forward with caution and so first let me make it clear that I am neither alleging nor do I believe that either His Excellency or the good people of Channels Television were engaged in any sort of scheme or plot to affect the outcome of the debates. However, the way the debate was structured, the way it was carried out and crucially the conduct of the other candidates on stage turned the whole event into the Babatunde Fashola show.

Anybody who watched the event would have realised that there was a huge time pressure, which was to be expected as it was a live television event and the aforementioned audience was doing their best to make a nuisance of themselves. Despite this the Governor was always allowed to over run a little bit, he was always given the ‘discretionary’ right of rebuttal and somewhat oddly he was the only one given a chance to reply to a question on women’s inclusion put forward by Mrs Ransom-Kuti of the SDMP. Although I haven’t measured it, I can say with some confidence that he was on the screen more than any other person. I reiterate, I don’t think that this was done intentionally or maliciously. It was more akin to how a referee might give a soft penalty to a Manchester United player who goes down in the box at Old Trafford, there is no suggestion that the ref is cheating but he is perhaps intimidated not to give it in front of the roaring crowd at the theatre of dreams.  After all Mr. Fashola is the first citizen of Lagos State and Chamberlain Usoh (the host who looks like Idris Elba) is just another Lagosian, who on the whole did very well on the night. The one-sidedness of the debate was not purely due to the organizers though.

Normally being the incumbent in a political debate is a mixed blessing. On the one hand you have a bag of achievements and a wealth of information that you can draw on to back you up at any time. Conversely, you are responsible for every continuing problem, every missed target, every broken promise, every complaint made in or against the state – there should be an endless stream of missiles to launch at the candidate. However, it seems like the opposition candidates made no real attempt to go for the jugular, they failed to clearly identify any failings of the ACN government that Mr. Fashola could not brush aside with ease. When they were helped out by a question that directly asked about the governor reneging on a campaign promise from 2007 again the opposition candidates failed to take the bait.

When given the chance to question anybody on the stage they all chose to question the Governor, which all things considered was a poor choice. Tactically speaking, it is going to be harder than drawing milk from a bull to steal any votes away from the ACN in Lagos; the other candidates would have been better off trying to discredit the ‘weaker’ parties and their candidates. That said Fashola in his responses showed the guile of a court room veteran and the mercilessness of a battle rap MC. Most cutting of all was the put down of JK Randle in response to the latter’s question, which left the SDMP man so hurt that he refused to shake His Excellency’s hand at the end of the debate.

There is one thing that ought to be addressed, perhaps it was simply the YouTube link that I saw (although it was posted by the channels tv user) and it was not the same for people watching live in Lagos, but every time the debate went on an ad break the first advert that was shown was a political campaign advert for ACN and the incumbent governor. The point of the debate is to help undecided (and some fickle) voters decide based who they would vote for based on the issues put before the candidates, this as an exercise is rendered fruitless if one candidate is given the opportunity to showcase his achievements with visual aids and a catchy song and no one is given a right of rebuttal. I assume that the people in the Fashola camp thought it would be the most beneficial time to air an advert as they are guaranteed to hit their target audience. While perhaps the other parties were simply slacking by not buying the ad space, for the sake of fairness the Good people should not have run that advert during the debate – they certainly should not have run it more than once.

All said and done, one gets the feeling that Governor Fashola was always likely to win in a debate against his opponents. He won and he won pretty. He expertly dealt with the questions and his opponents and at the same time did a good job of painting the PDP as the enemy of Lagos and the enemy of Nigeria.  Not only has he put himself and his party in good stead for these gubernatorial elections, but he has also bolstered the stock of the ACN nationally. I think the time has probably come for people to stop seeing him as Tinubu’s apprentice and come 2015 I will be surprised if his name is not in the mix for the Presidency. He appears to be a new type of politician- well educated, well spoken, well presented and not old – and it appears that this is what Lagosians want.

On another note the popularity of these debates has overwhelmed this writer and I’m sure it has overwhelmed the candidates themselves. It is practices like this that will not only ensure the competency of our leaders but will create a real democracy - not just a country that celebrates ‘democracy day’ every four years. The Nigerian public is clamouring for real accountability at every stage of the democratic process and it is with that in mind that I urge people to get involved with the ‘What About Us?’ Youth presidential debates scheduled for the 25^th of March. So please ‘donate’ your status/profile picture on any social network and/or messenger that you use to the ‘What about us?’ logo and let’s try and change Nigeria. Watch this space.

Enyinnaya Emmanuel Chukwueke

Corruption Part 1: Scale and Causes

Corruption is something that Nigerians regularly experience, complain about and ultimately partake in. It exists in both private and public spheres of life, for the sake of this discourse however, analysis will be limited to the public sector. This is not because the problem of private corruption is not important but rather because while not excusable, it is understandable in an under-regulated or under-policed business environment for people acting in their private interest to act in a way so as to advance their own interest. For the sake of this analysis corruption shall be looked at as the abuse of public position or power for private gain. In aid of simplicity corruption in Nigeria should be seen as having three principle forms: Bribery, patronage and embezzlement.Also important is to distinguish between high and low level corruption where the level reflects the level of public officials involved. While the division is quite arbitrary and the two levels are undoubtedly connected, it is useful in highlighting different aspects, causes and consequences of corruption.

In the Nigerian context it may be important to distinguish between bribery and the ‘tradition’ of gift giving, but this is a very contentious issue. It will be generally accepted and indeed expected that a public official should receive numerous holiday hampers from all manners of businesses but then there may not be general acceptance if a public official were to receive a more substantial gift, say a car, from a business person or even from another public official. The point here is that the distinction is very subjective as such it is not worth arguing as to where the cut off lies, but rather we should distinguish between them on the level of secrecy and the idea of reciprocity. As a rule of thumb a gift is something that is given openly where both giver and receiver are willing to make the nature of the gift public and that the gift is not giving as payment or in anticipation of a favour. That said, because something falls short of either aspect of the test doesn’t automatically make it a bribe but it should at least raise suspicions.

Political patronage refers to the use of state resources to reward individuals for political support. In the context of Nigeria, patronage takes the forms of political clientelism, pork-barrelling, nepotism and cronyism. Different levels of patronage are seen as acceptable in different polities, in order to decide on the what the acceptable level is for Nigeria the discussion needs to be had and the rules of the game need to be agreed on accessible to all. In general however, it should be agreed that merit is the best basis for selection (the most qualified and/or experienced should get the job) and state resources should be allocated according to need.

Public embezzlement can be broadly defined as the misappropriation of government resources for private use by public officials. For the purposes of Nigeria, this definition may be considered by many too broad as it would include for example the use of government vehicles for private purposes like taking children to school, or the use of sirens to avoid traffic when on none-government business. While some may consider this sort of behaviour to be deplorable, for the sake of this analysis the definition of embezzlement should be limited to the misappropriation of public funds, i.e. money.

Before going any further it is important to note that the problem of corruption is vast in scale and in scope as is the literature and existing discourse on the subject. With that in mind this is neither meant to be an exhaustive nor prescriptive discussion. It is the job of the politicians to come up with solutions.

Scale of Corruption in Nigeria

Corruption is a difficult thing to measure partly because of the difficulties of defining what constitutes corruption but largely because of the secretive nature of corrupt acts. The most widely used measurement of corruption is the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) as compiled by the NGO, Transparency International. The organization defines corruption as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain and its CPI seeks to measure the degree to which corruption is perceived amongst public officials and politicians on a scale of 0-10, with 0 being perceived absolute corruption and 10 being no perceived corruption at all. Nigeria scored 2.4 in 2010, which makes her the 130^th least corrupt country in the world. To put into perspective, that is the same level of perceived corruption as Libya, less corrupt than Somalia (1.1) and Zimbabwe (2.2), but more corrupt than Benin (2.8), Jamaica (3.3) Ghana (4.1) and miles behind the least corrupt country New Zealand (9.4). The problem with this measure is how it measures perceived corruption; it is largely reliant on surveys carried out by and for international experts i.e. not the Nigerian public. It may be useful as a measure of how the world sees Nigeria, but it neither tells us how Nigerians see corruption in their country nor the true level of actualcorruption.

The true scale of corruption is available for Nigerians to see in their day to day lives. Low level corruption is evident in the public’s interaction with the police and other arms of the civil service. A bribe is required in order to avoid harassment or to gain the basic services that the institutions were set up to provide. Tales (if not the full details) of high level corruption fill the news media, at the time of writing the country’s anti-corruption agency has just released a list of over 100 persons suspected of corrupt practices, with the value of their corruption put in excess of 1.2 Trillion Naira. While it must be noted that these cases are in different stages of the legal process and many of these cases are by private individuals or firms. It helps to expose the scale of corruption in Nigeria. Corruption in Nigeria exists in the three aforementioned forms as there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of bribery, embezzlement and patronage. Though the extent of these things is hard to measure, they clearly exist at both high and low levels of public life.

Causes of Corruption in Nigeria

To begin with, there is a view expressed in the literature as the ‘Moral superiority’ view which asserts that the some societies (non-western) are for reasons of culture, religion, ethnic diversity amongst others more prone to corruption. In essence the argument is that some societies are just intrinsically corrupt of which Nigeria is often a cited example. This view must be rejected out of hand, as it has historically been an excuse for western companies to partake in corrupt practices and for Nigerian individuals to be complicit. If there is a cultural cause of corruption then it must be found and addressed in its own right without belittling the people and culture of Nigeria. What is clear is that the deep rooted nature of public corruption in Nigeria has a multitude of causes; these causes can be loosely grouped into historical, social, economic and political categories.

The post-colonial legacy further entrenched corruption, and the role of foreign investors cannot be underestimated, the lack of regulation relative to their parent countries and the myth of greater cultural acceptance of bribes mean that foreign firms come into Nigeria willing to throw bribes at eager public officials. Government interference in the private sector has been linked to increased levels of corruption, there is anecdotal evidence for this in Nigeria as can be seen with the petroleum, power and telecommunication sectors when they were still wholly state owned enterprises.

There is evidence to show that countries that were colonies in the last 100 years are more likely to have high levels of corruption. This argument certainly fits in with the historical narrative of Nigeria: during the period of colonization in Nigeria, there was little or no effort made by the metropolitan power to build authentic instruments of state. There was heavy reliance on the coercive power of money, often money taxed from the general population, to influence and control the local elite. The elite in turn used these resources to consolidate their position. The failure of state and nation building in the colonial era sowed the seeds of corruptions in all its forms: it created a situation in which the elite in public office saw embezzlement as their right or even their obligation, in which the access to these lucrative public offices became deeply political and in which bribery was the only means of access to state power and authority for those outside of public service.

There are also a host of social factors that cause or at least aid corruption in Nigeria. There is a body of evidence that links the acceptance of bribes with low levels of education. People have sought to build on the work of Lawrence Kohlberg stages of moral development; to show how lower levels of education hinder the development of perceptions of morality which in turns makes people more likely to accept and partake in corrupt practices. With more than 3 in 10 Nigerians over the age of 15 being illiterate and with the average Nigerian only expecting 9 years of education, the argument certainly seem to fit the facts of Nigeria.

There is also the role that ethnicity has to play, particularly in terms of patronage. Many fall back ethnic affinities when trying to consolidate one’s position, giving resources or jobs disproportionately to those of their ethnic group and the problem is exasperated by the sheer ethnic diversity of Nigeria.

A possible argument can be made about the involvement of women in public service, the argument being that women are less likely to engage in corrupt practices that their male counterparts as such under-involvement of women at both high level and low level public service aids the perpetuation of corruption.

The most pertinent of the research relating the social causes of corruption is that on the culture of corruption. The evidence shows that a person who has paid a bribe at some point in their life is more likely, should the situation arise, to take a bribe themselves. This analysis has been extended to patronage and logically can be extended to embezzlement in that the fact that people have witness massive embezzlement makes them more likely to engage in such practices once in office. The culture of corruption is self-perpetuating as it raises the level of acceptance amongst the general public.

The political causes of corruption are far reaching and often difficult to isolate. The problem is also complicated by trying to establish lines of causality i.e. if the issues mentioned cause the corruption or if corruption causes the issues. The weakness of executive (the police) and the judiciary (the courts) in catching and punishing the perpetrators of corrupt acts reduces the disincentive to be corrupt. There have been several attempts and initiatives made by successive governments to install a virile anti-corruption agency. However, the agencies have often suffered from being (or at least being perceived as being) political in their targets. Prosecutions have been slow at best and the punishments have failed to be proportionate to the crime and make little attempt to regain misappropriated funds. All this has weakened the effectiveness of being caught as a deterrent to engaging in corrupt practices, if anything weak executives and judiciaries further entrench corruption as it merely adds further people who need to be paid off.

It has often been noted that over-centralization in a federal system that rules over a large geography and/or demographic (like Nigeria) is a cause of corruption. As power and resources are concentrated from the centre state governments are totally reliant on the centre. Political aspirants rely on lines of patronage to gain access to office and the centre is able to reward the periphery through pork-barrelling and outright bribery. It creates less accountability to the people as accountability is only to the centre, which gives the state governments more scope for making and taking bribes as well as embezzlement. It has also been argued that state weakness is directly correlated to levels of corruption as such Nigeria fits the bill, the Brookings Institute places Nigeria in the bottom quintile of States in terms of strength with an overall score of 4.88 (with 0 being the worst attainable) and a political strength of only 3.51.

The economic causes of corruption are more straightforward. Corruption is higher in unequal societies because there is greater opportunity and greater reward for it. Poor people are not able to monitor and hold the rich and the powerful accountable, enabling them to misuse their position. This partly explains how in Nigeria so much high level corruption goes unreported as it is easier (cheaper) to buy off lower level actors. A root cause of low level corruption in Nigeria is the insufficiency of public sector salaries. If a police officer didn’t have to harass the average citizen to make his/her ends meet, (s)he probably wouldn’t. The same applies all the way up the civil service even to relatively high jobs, in comparison to their official salaries the amount of money that individuals or companies are willing to offer is more than significant, couple that with the expectation of patronage from family and community networks and the incentive for being corrupt is clearer.

There is also a negative correlation between the ease of doing business and the level of corruption i.e. the more procedures and bureaucracy needed to legally set up and run a business, the more likely people are to engage in corrupt practices. The International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group measures the ease of doing business by compiling data on the ease of setting up a business, employing workers, registering property etc. The least perceived as corrupt country, New Zealand, is ranked 2^nd overall and first in terms of setting up a business, it takes 1 day and 1 procedure and costs 0.4% of the annual income per person to set up a business. Nigeria on the other hand, ranks 120^th overall, it takes 8 procedures and 31 days to start a company and it costs 76.7% of the annual income per person to set up a business. In this environment there is an incentive to circumvent the official processes and as such an incentive towards corruption.

Corruption in Nigeria is a horrible beast, corruption itself creates conditions in which there is more opportunity for corruption and more willingness to engage in corrupt practices. As the situation deepens so to does its cost to Nigeria and even more worryingly so to does the scale of the effort needed to break the cycle.

Sorry for the length of the post, but the topic was vast. So vast that part two will be all about the effects of Corruption in Nigeria.