One received ascription of the Ìkòokò is that he could crush meat and bone together with a fiery precision. It is why his faeces is cocaine-white. To fit this description, Yoruba curated a phrasal painting of him as “aje’ran je’gungun”. He was also a flesh devourer who cracked knotty flesh and cranium with his destructive incisors. In the process, Ìkòokò got decorated with a Yoruba honorific title of “Ìkòokò apanirun“. What stands him out is its ugliness and smell. Zoologists say the Ìkòokò, being a territorial animal, gets its pungent smell from marking and patrolling its territories. While doing this, he deposits on stalks of grass along his boundaries a strong-smelling substance produced by his anal glands.
In spite of the above fiery ascription and descriptions, the Ìkòokòhas a great sense of eerie humour. It makes a number of vocalizations that range from wailing calls, howling screams and a famous ‘laughter’ said to be audible for close to five kilometers. He laughs so rambunctiously to invite other clan members to a potential animal food.
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Now, I find some similarities in the Ìkòokò and the bilateral meeting between Nigeria and Brazil which took place in Brazil last Monday. Itemizing similarities between the two countries can be likened to the aphorism which says that if the farmer’s okra plantation is within his reach, his okra cannot become too ripe for harvest. In other words, finding the countries’ similarities is handy. As in Nigeria, corruption in Brazil is a canker-worm permeating all strata of both societies. You do not need a telescope to see it; it meanders in an open dirty pond. It involves the highest echelon of political power in the two countries, to the smallest municipalities.
Operation Car Wash, a landmark anti-corruption probe that took place in Brazil in March 2014 uncovered slimy crippling maggots in the Brazilian central government. It began from a seemingly unobtrusive investigation of a small Brasilia car wash on allegation of money laundering. Conducted by an anti-trust team of federal prosecutors headed by Deltan Dallagnol, proceedings revealed a humongous corruption scheme. Of greatest revelation was a combine of sleaze that involved state-owned enterprises. A judge, Sergio Moro, heard how government officials took pleasure in deploying the prerogatives of their public offices in pursuit of rent-seeking activities. These range from siphoning funds from state-owned corporation for individual gains, to brazenly stealing public money. Nigeria can see itself in this mirror.
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One illustrations of Brazilian corruption was also shown in The Mensalao scandal. Therein, in exchange for vote support in congress, taxpayer funds were hemorrhaged by government officials to pay monthly allowances to members of congress. As Nigeria’s NNPCL is a cesspit of corruption wherein president after president dip their hands into for personal and group enrichment, Brazil’s Petrobas, a state-owned and state-run oil company, is a paradise for maggots where uncountable small maggotry of the political elite and the private sector raise hundreds of millions of Reals to fund personal fancies and political campaigns. In Nigeria recently, a roiling mess whose putrefaction is comparable to a hyena’s excrement hit the airwaves. An NNPCL top boss allegedly mentioned a top Aso Rock official in an EFCC investigation. Nigeria has since moved on. No word since then and there is calm on the home front.
In 2013, a gale of protests rocked Brazil. Corruption was a major tinder of the fire. Like in Nigeria, Brazilian citizens are weighed down by a heavy laden of governmental corruption that affects citizens’ welfare. Despite Brazil’s huge oil earnings, there are dwindling investments in education, infrastructure, housing, security, health and essentials of life. There, as in Nigeria, in the words of Nigerian Reggae music group of the 1980s and 90s, The Mandators, led by Victor and Peggy Essiet, there is a rat race of economic inequality and social exclusion that has the rich getting richer and the poor, poorer. As we say in Nigeria that the “Nigerian factor” is negatively impacting growth, in Brazil, it is the “Brazilian way,” both euphemisms for ‘small corruption’. In the circus, citizens evade taxes, jump queues, steal cable TV signals, among a plethora of other macro corruptions. In a study by the Getulion Vargas Foundation in 2009, it was estimated that the Brazilian economic losses from macro and micro corruption are in the neighbourhood of one to four percent of the country’s GDP. In monetary terms, this is valued at over 30 billion Reals.
The same way Nigeria battles a serious challenge of violence and crime, Brazil wears same pair of sloppy shoes. It is estimated that the country witnesses roughly 23.8 homicide cases of robberies, kidnappings, muggings and other gang violence per 100,000 residents. Like here, in Brazil, cases of police brutality are as widespread as poverty in an IDP camp.
Political corruption in Brazil shares same tone and tenor with Nigeria. They both have a long history of corruption that stretches to the colonial period. A book I call Nigeria’s bible of corruption which details the Nigeria’s history of graft is Stephen Ellis’ The Present Darkness(2016). It surgically looks at Nigeria’s long history of corruption, from pre-colonial, colonial times to the corrupt activities of politicians of pre and post independence and the Second Republic. It also examines Nigeria’s drug trade, its organized crime and cosmic power involvement in corruption.
Recent Panama Papers and Paradise Papers drilled deep down into the Brazilian own involvement with corruption. In the country, there is a complexity of corruption networks flavoured by mafia, drug traffic networks and terrorist activities. In Nigeria, the hyena excrement is sustained by access to government office. Invoice-padding is notorious in both countries. Known in Brazil as superfaturamento, its notoriety is buoyed by padded invoices and grand-scale inflated construction projects. Brazil’s Olympics and FIFA World Cup stadia and Nigeria’s coastal highway are examples. In a damning October 13, 2020 report, Transparency International said Brazil had a “progressive deterioration of the institutional anti-corruption framework” and lamented what it called a fatal setbacks in Brazil’s fight against corruption.
In both countries, politicians, in dalliance with corrupt private sector persons, are their countries’ top predators. Primarily scavengers of their nations’ common patrimony, like hyenas, a huge chunk of the two countries’ political class’ diets come from feeding greedily on direct and indirect kills. As hyenas’ feeds range from animals of various types and sizes, carrion, bones, vegetable matter, and other animal droppings, so is the gluttonous feeding habits of the political class of Brazil and Nigeria. For over a century, these human carnivores’ eating jaws have been strengthened to become as strong as hyenas’. It makes their political class fit to be ranked among the strongest national patrimony-devouring humans in the world.
When Nigerian and Brazilian teams met last Monday, ostensibly for the former to woo investors in the latter, some very cynical countrymen said it was an “awór’áwo”. It is a classification akin to a cackle of lost hyenas finding selves and flocking together. Awór’áwo is an isolation for discourse of a core of Yorùbá religious thought and practice in the cult of secrecy which produces associational benefits. It can be compared to the general rule in chemistry which says that like attracts like. In the rule, polar molecules like water are attracted to and by other water molecules. Prof Jacob Olupona’s “Awo: The Nature and Essence of Secrecy in Yorùbá Religious Traditions,” in The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy(2022) broke down the attraction to its granules. He said it “enables traditions to distinguish between devotees and outsiders and to create the needed aura of sacredness for a very few custodians of the tradition… (It) is often invoked as a weapon of control over traditions and may serve as a demarcation between outsiders and insiders.” Nigeria and Brazil are insiders in a cult of national misdemeanours.
As the Chief Hyenas of Brazil and Nigeria met, Nigeria’s boastfully proclaimed that there was “no more corruption” since he took office. This provoked cynics’ snigger. In a chorus, they say the Nigerian Chief Hyena was in a domain similar to his, where lying to the citizenry is a governmental culture, a walk in the park. There, Lie lies to Lie (Iró ńpa’ró fún’ró). It can be compared to Olupona’s cult of secrecy where devotees create the needed aura of sacredness to sustain a long tradition.
The truth that both Nigeria and Brazil shied from as they met last week was that, in both countries, corruption is as prevalent and destructive as an affliction of AIDS. Though a universal problem which afflicts the economies of developing and developed nations, corruption has far more debilitating effects in Africa, South and Latin America. It is even more precarious in Nigeria for the sake of her security. Since the September 11, 2001 bombing in America, corruption has been ostracized as a major pivot for transnational terrorism in the world.
In the words of John Mukum Mbaku in his Corruption in Africa: Causes, Consequences and Cleanups (2007) “Terrorists have been able to corrupt public officials in many developing countries and use these countries’ financial institutions to launder money and make it available to their operators in the developed countries to finance (their) operations.” While Nigeria votes trillions of Naira yearly in budget to fight terrorism, it must look at and beyond the big-fat-stomach of big-epaulette military officers – apologies to both Eddie Iroh, in his Toads of War and Fela Kuti’s description of then General Olusegun Obasanjo. Nigeria must move to finding whether and how these monies end up in the hands of terrorists who use same to finance terrorism activities in Nigeria and elsewhere.
But for esprit-de-corps and hypocrisy, nothing should have made Nigeria’s Chief Hyena hoist self up for the global mockery that followed. This is because the world is in possession of statistics of the mutating and multiplying cancerous cells of corruption in Nigeria. A few days ago, I was guest of Oyo State’s and Western Nigeria’s oldest television station, the BCOS. The discussion centered on damning verdicts of two frontline Nigerians, President Olusegun Obasanjo and Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar III. As guest speaker at the Nigeria Bar Association (NBA) Annual General Conference in Enugu last Sunday, a day before the Nigerian Chief Hyena made that statement of zero corruption in Nigeria, the Sultan had warned that justice in Nigeria was increasingly becoming a “purchasable commodity”. He said, “Today, justice is increasingly becoming a purchasable commodity, and the poor are becoming victims of this kind of justice, while the rich commit all manner of crime and walk the streets scot-free”.
As if choreographed, Obasanjo too in a new book entitled, Nigeria: Past and Future, also lamented that Nigeria’s judiciary had been “deeply compromised”, and warned that judicial corruption had turned Nigerian courts into “a court of corruption rather than a court of justice.” A circulating August 19, 1976 New Nigerian newspaper’s lead story which screamed, “Judge arrested over N20 bribe”, where a judge was arrested and jailed for corruption in Benue State, tells how the internal mechanism for judicial correction has died in today’s Nigeria. What is the National Judicial Commission (NJC) doing today?
My submission during the interview was that, except we want to play the ostrich, there is indeed an erosion of judicial integrity in Nigeria. A huge percentage of litigants are sceptical that they could get justice in our temple of justice. But isolating the judiciary and leaving the media, the banks, civil service and so many other corruption-blossoming institutions in Nigeria will be unfair. Nigeria is one huge ball of corruption. However, all of us – the judicial system, civil society, media, etc, must get involved in re–calibrating this perception. This is because, the moment the courts suffer such rout in perception, we can as well call it a day as far as a country is concerned. We can afford to have everything perceived as dirty – the executive, the legislature – but not the river, the judiciary. It is the source of our national value. This is because, when anything is dirty, it is taken to the river to wash but when the river itself is dirty and you take your dirt to it for cleaning, you will be washing your dirt with the dirty. What you get therefrom is deep filth and disaster reminiscent of the Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 debut novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born hue.
It takes boldness and leadership sincerity to own up that things aren’t looking up. Nigeria is not anywhere corruption-free, whether at the micro or macro level. Corruption is pervasive here and its ubiquity is legendary. If Nigeria’s Chief Hyena based this sweepingly boastful claim on a recent Transparency International (TI) ranking and the few arrests made by the EFCC, he fell into the argumentative pitfall called fallacy of excluded middle. The law of excluded middle frowns at oversimplification. It is against forcing a complex situation into a false dichotomy while ignoring nuanced possibilities or state of affairs that are indeterminate. The fallacy of excluded middle occurs when you apply “true or false” situations to complex social issues and subjective judgments in situations where the predicate is ambiguous and not easily captured in a Yes or No situation.
So, it is true that TI, in its 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), placed Nigeria 140th as against earlier 145th position in corruption in the world. It scored it 26 out of 100, as against previous 25 out of 100. It is also true that Ola Olukoyede, the EFCC chair, recently succeeded in arresting some mushroom and tilapia of corruption, with a 2024 conviction figure of 4111, the highest thus far. Two problems arose. One, where are the sharks and behemoth (the Arogidigba) of Nigerian corruption, most of whom attend the Federal Executive Council (FEC) and National Economic Council (NEC) meetings weekly and periodically? Second, to use these two – TI index and EFCC convictions – as indices of Nigeria’s zero corruption is deceptive.
Economists say that systemic poverty is a harbinger of macro corruption. This variant of corruption is on the ascendancy in Nigeria today. Recently, the World Bank aggregated Nigeria’s systemic corruption as being on the ascendancy. In a widely publicized interview, a lawyer, Ndidi Edeogbon, also disagreed with Nigeria’s Chief Hyena. She said, “I found out yesterday that 60 to 70% of Nigerians paid bribes for police help. 53 paid to avoid trouble with the police. 56 per cent paid bribes to get government documents… And on the level of perceived corruption, 70% of Nigerians say the police are the most corrupt. This is followed by the presidency with 62%, then parliament with 65%, local government councilors with 55% and judges with 54%.”
So, why play the ostrich by making such untrue statement of zero corruption in Nigeria? Can the hyena deodorise himself even thousands of kilometres away from home
Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.
