Corruption is a Nigerian

By Joseph Edgar…

My friend when told that his mother was a witch causing his joblessness almost 20 years after graduation retorted by saying, ‘’what do you now want me to do, I cannot fight my mother, if she thinks that the best thing to do to her first child is to bewitch him so be it.” This is my current stance regarding corruption. How can we fight something so ingrained in our DNA and expect to win?

Corruption is Nigerian and Nigeria is corruption. We are a country blessed with corruption and any attempt at eradicating it would mean wiping out our total culture. We can continue fooling ourselves, voting in clay footed demagogues on the plank of fighting corruption only to see these saintly evil men get even deeper in the pool of corrupt mess.

Corruption is so ingrained that even at child birth you begin to see the essence of corruption being played. From the child registration down to when he is buried, he is bathed with corruption, trained in it and showed just how to be a Nigerian. We are all corrupt. Simple! The whole 180million of us, not one person can beat his chest and say he has not been involved in one corruption or the other. From the big pastors to the thug at the bus stops, everybody is a thief or has stolen and is still stealing. The politicians are only just glaring because they are stealing collective wealth.

When the policeman stops you on the road, you thank God for corruption for you know it is just a call for negotiation. Have you seen the rare politician who goes home back to his bungalow after serving meritoriously? Have you seen the way he is derided and not respected as compared to the one who has stolen to the hilt and throws out largesse at the people? Do you see the chieftaincy titles that follows him and the adulation?

Please let’s stop pretending, we are corruption and corruption is on us. We do not want it eradicated. It is impossible.

Corruption comes with its own good sides. It leads to prison decongestion as you negotiate your way out, it sends people to school or how would someone after working in the civil service for over 20years and is earning less than N200,000 per month afford university education for his children or the big politician able to offer scholarships worth millions to whole villages?

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My people, the truth is that if you wait for government and don’t collect bribes or steal you will die and vultures will eat your carcass, your wife will leave you and your children will suffer on the alter of piety.

All we want now is for a level field. Let be legalised so that we can openly seek for it. Just like some societies have legalized prostitution, we should legalize corrupt and charge a fee for it. This fee would go into government coffers for the provision of communal service.

This is far better than where the whole collective wealth are corralled and left for only a privileged few to feed off and dispense to the rest of us in pittance. Please open it up, deregulate corruption and let’s democratize it.

Let me give a small example. There is a media house that has not paid salaries to its workers for the past ten years. But the staff are some of the best paid people in their industry. When you ask, they say they have been given a platform so to get things done, you have to bow to the forces of demand and supply.

So in the same vein, if you need International passport, you go to the immigration office and negotiate. Government should stop paying those ones salaries for they are even richer than some state governments. I do not know any soul that has paid the actual government recommended fee and gotten a passport. So you scrap their salaries and the huge allocation diverted to agriculture or something and let the passport officers pay a percentage of their daily takings to the government and keep the rest. You will see that there will be no corruption again since it has all been legalized.

Please, I beg who has ever secured bail for free? Right under the sign in every police station that bail is free, you are negotiating. So my people, let us give up. Corruption is real. Let’s embrace it .

For me, any candidate that campaigns in 2019 on the back of eradicating corruption will not get my vote. He is a liar. Lets look for candidates that would embrace corruption and ride with it to deliver the best for us. Corruption is real, we are corruption.

 

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