By Oumar Farouk Sesay
Corruption is like cancer spreading in all the vital organs of State thus making interventions from Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) and Commissions of Inquiry to look like fly swatting or bandaging pus oozing sore for optical effect in lieu of chemotherapy.
Corruption euphemistically called “connection” by those with proximity to power has truncated the idea of a merit-based society to create a perverted state in which everything is for sale, including souls, to the highest bidder. Corruption dis-incentivizes people and erodes the credibility and integrity of state institutions. It caricatures the image of custodians of power; it radicalizes the vulnerable in the society, it steals dreams and hopes of the younger generation and paves the way for state fragility and its attendant security implication to thrive.
Corruption in all its varied forms poses an existential threat to nation-building; hence the fight against corruption must not be an infantile binary debate of the major political parties with their choreography finger-wagging performance of doom. It should go beyond the soul-numbing accusation and counteraccusation. So, to reduce the fight against corruption to a political tool will provide a fertile ground for corruption to thrive for generations till both eternities cross paths. To truth, a lie for political gain is itself corruption, and to recruit state institutions in the truthing of lies is corrupting the fight against corruption. When institutions and government agencies involved in corruption like the case of SARS in Nigeria, it tends to self-immolate a nation.
Corruption compromises sovereignty and gives imperialists an excuse to supervise and babysit us like toddlers. Tragically, corruption accentuates our incompetency and feeds to the white saviour complex narrative which Bretton woods institutions are using to rationalize the need for them to supervise us. Little wonder that we still have miniature Lord Lugards trotting the continent with their maxim guns firing ammunition of bad policies at us even after our so-called liberation.
Feasibly, colonialism was corruption, a kind of imperially sponsored looting of our wealth in the name of civilizing us. The nationalist movements like Mau-mau subverted and sabotaged the colonial agenda as a form of resistance. The mutation of that strand of resistance might have given us the twisted disregard for government asset and resources. We were conquered by a people whose principal objective was to steal our resources; all other benefits were accidental. After independence, we seem trapped in the psychology of the conquered so aptly captured by Ibn Khaldun, the Arab historian and sociologist when he wrote: "a conquered people imitate the conqueror…"
The imitation is so glaring in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) formerly called Zaire that it became difficult to tell differences between Mobutu and King Leopold except for the skin colour. In most of Africa elected leaders behave like conquerors looting everything in their path and the conquered people imitate the conquerors in pillaging the crumbs. As the saying goes, organized crimes at the top give rise to petty crimes at the bottom.
The biopsy on the national tissue has shown that corruption as cancer is metastasizing to every tissue and the nation will soon be in a hospice awaiting palliative care if we fail to scale up our intervention to painful surgery. There was corruption in the previous government that does not require a lie truthing process to discern. There are acts of corruption in the present government, and there will be corruption even after this government is gone. The same systemic rupture of yesterday that gave rogues unfettered access to state resources is still in place. The same human impulses that fed Thomas Hobbes’ theory of so-called Hobbesian society remain unchanged. The dearth of people of substance to stand up for their beliefs rather than what put food on the table. The ever-constant supply of men of the law willing to sell their souls to appease those in power is still a reality. The same fleet management or mismanagement that created room for stealing of vehicle and fuel in the past is still in place. The same constitution that gave the President the power to appoint Judges who were obliged to remember the hand that fed them is very much in place. The same dark impulse to exterminate the opposition by means that gave the impression that the state belonged to the party in power is still with us. The same tendencies to use sacred state institutions like the judiciary to unleash judicial thuggery on opponents is very much in place, and yet we expect a different outcome.
Our post-election ritual is to shift and shuffle street-level bureaucrats to spots where they can hustle drivers and pedestrians like they did yesterday. We change the pundits, the buzz slogans, and increase the decibel of the noise, hoping to conjure to existence a new society with the ingredients of the old.
How do we break the spell of uniformity and usher in the type of change that could transform a nation from inside out like Thomas Sankara did in Burkina Faso?
How do we fight corruption without recruiting inept valuators tossing value on properties from the roof of jeeps if that valuation is crucial in the determination of pecuniary resources? Can we do better than bringing clowns to make comedy out of a tragic situation?
What do we do to restore the independence and credibility of state institutions in the fight against corruption to change the perception people have of them as tools of the party in power?
Every electoral season exposes the weakness of multiethnic people striving for national identity. Coupled with a winner-take-all mentality, it implies that all jobs, both statutory and political, could be shared among the winning party. Postings of judges and orderlies are determined by the outcome of the election hence depleting the credibility of state institutions and enhancing the perception of bias. The image of a State as an enduring entity is at risk since, after every five years, we dismantle and reconfigure the State institutions to suit the winning party. Against this backdrop, government action is exposed to suspicion; hence epitaphs like witch hunt find space in the discourse of discord dominating the debates.
How do we move from this plight and create a fairer and just society that will deprive the villains of our community the chance to evoke the argument of victimhood?
Our elected leaders should uphold the law by resisting the temptation to compromise the law for political revenge. Security agencies must be above the reach of politicians to assert that the state is not the party in power. The Supreme Court should be nothing but supreme.
How do we fix the broken bureaucratic machinery that creates room for rent-seeking? How do we fight corruption without having to corrupt state institutions in the process?
We cannot leave that task to the discretion of politicians alone whose preoccupation, in most cases, is to stay in power. The much talked-about constitutional reform that will guarantee the independence of the judiciary in appointments and tenure must be probed with the seriousness it deserves.
Everyone who has solicited a bribe does so by selling time. For example, a driver offers a bribe to a police officer without being asked to avoid wasting time in the police station or courtroom. The road offences range from defective equipment to traffic offences and anything in between. If we have a schedule of the traffic offences and the consequences by way of fines displayed on billboards for public consumption, we would have succeeded in removing the veil from a somewhat opaque system that feeds the corruption we see every day. If we devise an electronic means of paying traffic fines to the state, we would have succeeded to put an end to the daily transactional relationship between drivers and police on our roads.
Similarly, a corrupt civil servant delays correspondence and other vital documents to solicit funds to a somewhat desperate businessman who has strict deadlines to meet. How do we monitor bureaucratic machinery made sloppy to exploit those who might need its services? We could introduce a document tracking system like they do in the UN and other efficient organizations to zero in on personnel who hold on to a document in the anticipation that the owner will come chasing with the dollar.
Ours is increasingly becoming a society in which the value system is upside down; we redefined wrongs and rights to suit time and purpose. The idea of might-is-right is displayed daily; hence our natural impulse is to bully those who are disadvantaged. The inclination of a truck driver on the highway is to drive in utter disregard of other road users. We condemned thieves not for stealing national resources but for not concealing the loot properly. Those taken to court for an act of corruption have to navigate through a corrupt system to buy their freedom hence it is natural for them to think that they are singled out as sacrificial lambs in the alter of optics.
What we are dealing with is not only corruption; it is about a failure of parenting, lack of sense of the sacred, upturned values and lack of commitment to national agenda. To think anti-corruption alone is the solution to the ills that confront us as a nation is not to think at all.
I once argued that anti-corruption owes its existence to the failure of the judiciary to live up to the ideals of the law. If we had had a sober judiciary over the years, there would have to be no need for anti-corruption. Ironically, ACC must now depend on the judiciary whose failure created it to succeed in their fight against corruption. Even before the completion of the appeal process, many people are calling for the crucifixion of those the White Paper indicted.
A mockingbird in parliament who dared to speak about corruption is now indicted in the court of public opinion. The standoff between the former President and the anti-corruption still speaks volume. The cries of the innocent and the guilty hang in the air like a toxic fog. The anti-corruption is busy fanning flies from a nation’s open sore even though the microbes are gnawing at the sore.
Between the White Paper and the argument of witch hunt lies the truth that only the law could exhume. Hence the nation has once again come to the doorstep of the law for salvation. We need the truth that is not shaded in the binary colours of our damnation as a nation. We need to know the innocent who might have been smeared for political reasons. We need to identify the guilty who are using political cover as an excuse. We need to know the villains who are claiming victimhood and the victors our ineptness might have soiled. We need to know, or else a pandemic plague will forever hover over the fight against corruption. The silence and complacency of the judiciary are in the TRC report. Yet a nation on the crossroads is looking for absolution in the courtrooms like they looked in vain yesterday. Yet a country hopes that the lessons of history would have created a different mindset in the new crop of judges.
The Interreligious Council and civil society have spoken but the voice that matters the most in a democracy is the one that is accompanied by a gavel. We gasp for breath as we wait for the voice of sanity to come from our courtrooms.
Benjamin B Ferencz, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial said “The conscience of humanity is the foundation of all law…” and that his case to the court on behalf of the victims of Nazi Holocaust was “the plea of humanity to the law”.
Ours is a plea of Sierra Leoneans to the law; we need men and women of conscience in the judiciary to handle the appeals without fear or favour to save a nation from self-immolation again. We pray that God gives our judges the wisdom and the courage to rise above the fog or else we hold our peace as we stare at a nation’s open sore.
Copyright © 2020 Politico Online
