Nigerians decry corruption                      Photo courtesy

Nigeria is suffering from several acute ailments within its leadership cabal. On display are incompetence, lack of vision, kleptomania, maladministration, crudity, callousness, and cluelessness on how to grow Nigeria and its citizens, to name a few. Of these, runaway greed is perhaps the mother of them all. It is impossible for Nigeria to make any meaningful progress without taming its culture of corruption.

Ordinary clerks in the government security and minting agency that prints our currency easily bring home in a day, 30 sheets of freshly minted N1000 notes to cut and own without question. Within our haunted presidency, turncoat Rueben recently told us that 50-year old contracts are still being renewed and funded annually. A few days ago, Lamido Sanusis's central bank donated N100 million to Kano State for relief activities over the Boko mayhem, just like that. Where else on planet earth does the central bank of a country have a blank check to dole out state monies in its care like if it were the rulingpolitical party without anyone losing their job or go to jail? Only in Nigeria.

Criminal  looting with its associated wasteful spending has since become the only know-how, next to brute force, that the Nigerian governments use to solve national problems, all problems. Where the totalitarian strategy of killing off a village doesn't quite work, the government of the day simply throws money at the problem in the hope that it will buy it a few months of peace. The so-called amnesty negotiated with the Ijaw Delta militia a few years back was miserably another name for cash settlement in which money was tossed at forsaken Delta youths in the form of fixed payments or sponsorships abroad, as if that would solve the much wider social problems of group unemployment, lack of potable water, housing, electricity and ubiquitous environmental degradation.

Even a whole dedicated federal ministry of Niger Delta Affairs that was created for the area with its successive annual budgetary allocations of N51 billion (2009), N86.2 billion (2010), N55.2 billion (2011) and N59.7 billion (2012) turned out to be a cash tunnel to nowhere. Four years and over N250 billion later, the Ijaw people are poorer, their land unproductive and face a bleak future. 

The cash treat goes on, relentless. Having failed woefully with its state of emergency in the Northeast to deter the virulent Boko Haram, the current government has started the same good old strategy of amnesty talks with a group of murderous Nigerians who used the sinful western technology to kill everyone in sight in their war against haram for establishment of a halal society.

Regardless of how much growth our national economy is showing on paper, a country that cannibalizes its own resources will never break even. As poverty levels double among the polity with over 100 millions of us living on less than $1 a day, the legislators are adding a N16 million land cruiser each to their fleet of cars at our expense.The people we elected to pilot us are our executioners. The only thinking they carry around is the one that maximizes their overnight wealth, minimizes social developments and stunts our emancipation as black people.

Unconscionable looting is killing our society. Do not expect government to fight itself. We cannot leave the fight against corruption to the pretentious excellencies and honorables. Anyone waiting to see them follow the so-called "rule of law" against each other on corruption charges may as well wait till the crab goes to sleep. Notice how they've been releasing hard core looting governors on jumpable bails or dismissing altogether poorly made cases of corruption. The fight against corruption is a people's fight, it belongs to the citizens. We tried peaceful "occupy" protests, but they brutalized and killed us out of the squares. Why don't we continue the peace protests in a more creative way? These people are less than one million! They cannot be more intelligent than the remaining 159 million of us. One really neat product of globalization that we have in our favor today is communication and its speed. We are in the age of internet, facebook and twitter.

SaharaReporters and other similar social outlets don't crawl snooping around for corruption data, people send them in unsolicited. Even tabloids are different today. A 500-reader village newspaper could now have more stop-press information in one week than Daily Times ever did in 40 years!

It is past midnight in our land of slavery and damnation. Let's turn things the other way around. Why don't we shadow every single one of our looters? Let's mirror their lifestyle back to them and to the international community that they dread so much. It is time for everyone to adopt and shadow at least one looter. Until we cover every single one of them, from the Local government councilperson to the cook in Aso Rock. Adopt anyone among them whom you believe is looting us and follow our money with  him/her.

Don't listen to anyone who tells you he is a progressive and is only joining our rotten system to change it from inside. Nonsense.No matter their integrity before they get in, anyone entering  our feckless political class and becoming comfortable receiving those scandalous emoluments  and allowances against the  level of hunger, despondency and death in the larger society, is a fraud.

Adopt them, shadow them and detail what you see. Record what they were before and after they joined. How many shoes, shirts, cars and houses they had before and ho many shoes, cars and houses they begin to accumulate soon after becoming a member of the ruining elites. Get the numbers of the cars, addresses of the houses, be it on the posh streets of Abuja and Lekki Peninsula, in London's Bayswater, in the swanky districts of Dubai, Bangkok or near their doctors in the exclusive areas of Mumbai. Get the numbers of their accounts on and off shores. Pictures. Photos. A picture is worth a thousand words.

While some Nigerians are collecting the data, the rest of us should be thinking about outlets. It is time to establish a thousand anti-corruption radio stations, television stations, newspapers even if only 50-readers wide in circulation, anti-corruption town hall meetings, movies, books,  flyers and lunch-time debates. Imagine the impact of flyers alone! Just flyers, everywhere. Imagine flyers containing corruption data on the looting activities of politicians in your station  alone. Imagine what that could do to the level of awareness of the people of your state, their resolve, at election times.

Verify your data for truthfulness and accuracy and publish it via any means you can, including facebook, twitter or send to sahara, village square, etc. Everybody has their own level at which they feel shame. I would imagine this new phase of the struggle would have a cumulative effect on our insensitive leadership crop, certainly by the time the next  election cycle comes around.

By Qansy Salako

Boston, MA.