A season of demystifications

Chuks Oluigbo

On February 3, 1960, the then British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, having spent a month in Africa visiting a number of what were then British colonies, made the now famous historically-significant "Wind of Change" address to the South African Parliament in Cape Town. Some records say he had earlier made the same speech in Accra, Ghana, on January 10, though that didn’t catch much media attention.

In that speech, which signalled clearly that the Conservative-led British Government was no longer equivocating about the granting of independence to its African colonies, Macmillan said: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”

Subsequent events proved that the change the British PM was talking about was not a ruse as a total of 16 African countries gained independence between February 3 and the end of 1960, though they were not all British colonies. Senegal became independent on 4 April, 1960, followed by Togo (27 April), Mali (22 September), Madagascar (26 June), Congo Kinshasa (30 June), Somalia (1 July), Benin (1 August), Niger (3 August), Burkina Faso (5 August), Côte d'Ivoire (7 August), Chad (11 August), Central African Republic (13 August), Congo Brazzaville (15 August), Gabon (17 August), Nigeria (1 October), and Mauritania (28 November).

In the last one year or so in Nigeria, another wind of change has blown. And this is not just about the illusive, undefined change that was promised (of course, we know change can be positive or negative, and Nigerians can tell better the type they’ve felt and are still feeling since May 29, 2015). It is about a heavy wind that has ushered in this season of demystifications that we are in.

The last one year has seen the shattering of many myths woven around some individuals in today’s government. It’s a year that has exposed their inadequacies, their equivocations, half-truths and outright lies. It’s a year that has underscored the fact that they actually possess no magic wand, forget all that pre-election talk about a serious government fixing power in six months. We have seen through the smokescreen and now know better. We now know how easy it is to criticize a footballer from outside the pitch. We also know they are typical Nigerian politicians, never mind all the integrity and anti-corruption bullshit. All the excuses and blame-game don’t cut it.

As scales fall off eyes, hero worshippers are reviewing long-held beliefs as they behold their messiahs in all humanness, warts and all, and realise that there is only one messiah the world has ever known; that their so-called messiahs are after all mere mortals masquerading as gods. You know, it's like the unmasking, in the village arena – in the presence of non-initiates, including women – of that favourite masquerade of yours that you have held in high esteem for so long, that you actually believed was an ancestral spirit from the land of the dead.

Hero worshippers are realizing that so-called heroes are indeed media creations. But some of us have always known this. Just get a man, weave some myths of omnipotence and infallibility around him, give him sustained media coverage, hide his sins, exaggerate every little good he does, whitewash every dark spot in his life, get Beyonce's make-up artist to make him up and declare him 'flawless', paint him in the most generous epithets, apotheosize him and convince us that he would have come into the world as a god but the Creator changed his mind at the last minute, and boom! another hero is born.

You can also spin an integrity yarn around a candidate, remove his agbada and wear him a tight-fitting dark suit. Forget that he toppled a democratically-elected government or just find the 'right' argument to justify that unnecessary military incursion, 'kill' all reports that highlight the high-handed, draconian and dictatorial tendencies that hallmarked his first coming, including even the fact that the little good that regime is remembered for was actually carried out by a subordinate, baptise him and rename him a born-again democrat, in fact, elevate him to the status of gods, promote this new image of him by hook or crook, and bang!

But public offices have a way of making or marring their beneficiary. A public office can and has unravelled even those to whom we arrogated superpowers. Some erstwhile superheroes have found themselves overwhelmed in a new office, including even some men of God!

Our super-columnists have been demystified in this dispensation. Never mind that they had been churning out incisive Op-ed pieces that farted upon the gates of power since your kindergarten days, when the chips are down, they can lie to you repeatedly, unashamedly, that the president is not sick even when the man says he is going on a sick leave; they can also tell you that not everyone is complaining about the hardship in town (at least, they and their families are not complaining), and they can call you a wailing wailer when you raise genuine concerns about issues of mal-governance.

But in spite of all this, we are overcomers. Nigerians are. It’s well, as we say here. Indeed, this too shall pass.

When 'good men' shun politics

CHUKS OLUIGBO

The need for good men to take active interest in public affairs, especially by getting involved in politics and governance of their localities, has been amply expressed by several generations of great minds, often highlighting the dire consequences of not doing so. This was the point made by the great philosopher Plato when he wrote in The Republic, “The fate of good men who refuse to become involved in politics is to be ruled by evil men.”

Edmund Burke, the 18th Century British statesman, is also known to have echoed the same thought when he wrote in his ‘Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents’, "All that is necessary for the forces of evil to triumph is for enough good men to do nothing."

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the 26th President of the United States, put in more elaborately and explicitly in his April 23, 1910 speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, titled ‘Citizenship in a Republic’.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat,” Roosevelt had said.

John Eidsmoe, a American professor of constitutional law who previously taught at the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, Faulkner University, Montgomery, Alabama, narrows it down to Christians in his God and Caesar: Christian Faith and Political Action, where he encourages Christians to join politics.

Against the backdrop of the oft-stated excuse that politics is a dirty game, Eidsmoe agrees that politics may indeed be dirty, but adds, however, that so is business, law, labour, education, sports, and just about every other imaginable human activity under the sun.

“But if politics is dirty (and it is), is that any reason not to get involved? If Christians stay out of politics, they remove the light of the gospel from the political arena and abdicate their responsibility to be the salt of the earth that savors and preserves society... the Christian who refuses to become involved in politics consigns the realm of politics to the secular and the unregenerate,” he writes.

Eidsmoe quotes Senator Mark Hatfield, the late American politician and educator, who once said, “For the Christian man to reason that God does not want him in politics because there are too many evil men in government is as insensitive as for a Christian doctor to turn his back on an epidemic because there are too many germs there. For the Christian to say that he will not enter politics because he might lose his faith is the same as for the physician to say that he will not heal men because he might catch their disease.”

In Nigeria today, in light of the cloud of bad governance that currently envelopes the country, there is an increasing clamour for more good men in Nigeria – in this case successful professionals in different fields of endeavour – to get involved in politics to rescue the country and the citizens from the present quagmire.

Alex Otti, immediate past group managing director/chief executive officer, Diamond Bank plc, while speaking in Lagos recently at the launch of a book of essays in honour of Phillips Oduoza, outgoing GMD/CEO of United Bank for Africa plc, encouraged the retiring UBA boss to go into politics and use his wealth of professional experience gathered over a period of 30 to get his home state of Imo out of the woods. He also urged other Nigerian professionals to join politics now or watch the country further descend into a cesspool.

“When you go out there and see the quality of people who make decisions that affect you and me, you will be ashamed. You can go to Youtube and watch a legislator at the House of Representatives talking about our economy. I don’t remember the name of the gentleman but I remember what he said. A legislator, a House of Reps member was asked how the economy was doing, and he said, ‘The economy is sinking; it is doing like this, like that, like this, like that. If not for this strongman called Buhari, the economy would get under water’. That was his own economic analysis,” Otti said.

“Quite frankly, we need to get involved in how this country is run, and the more of us that get in there the better. Otherwise we will be left with nincompoops, mediocre people who will be answering governors, deputy governors, House of Assembly members. As we know, everything is garbage in, garbage out. If you garbage in, you will garbage out,” he said.

The book, Dynamics of the Nigerian Financial System: Essays in Honour of Phillips Oduoza, is a collection of a total of 30 scholarly essays edited by Michael M. Ogbeidi, a professor in the Department of History & Strategic Studies, University of Lagos.

Otti bowed out as GMD/CEO of Diamond Bank in 2014 and waded into the murky waters of Nigerian politics. He contested the 2015 governorship election in Abia State under the auspices of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), but lost to Okezie Ikpeazu of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Not convinced that he lost the election, Otti had gone to the Elections Petitions Tribunal in protest. The case later went to the Court of Appeal, and then the Supreme Court, but Otti’s bid to wrest power from Ikpeazu failed as the apex court ruled in Ikpeazu’s favour. Otti has since retired into journalism where he writes a back page column in one of the prominent national dailies while waiting for another opportune moment.

Earlier in February, Bob-Manuel Udokwu, ace actor and senior special assistant (creative media) to Anambra State governor, Willie Obiano, had told this writer in an interview that creative industry people were best suited to rule the country.

Asked why many entertainers were going into politics, Udokwu said the motivation was to serve the people in a different capacity.

“You can’t sit on the sidelines and keep complaining that things are not working right. I went to vie for a position in the Anambra State House of Assembly and people asked me this question a couple of times and my answer is this: I have children who are in secondary school now and they know their father is influential. The things I saw as bad happening to our country when I was their age are still there till today. Now they grow older and ask me: ‘Dad, at some point in your life as a young person you had influence, you were well-known and people loved you, you had the opportunity of going into a political office where you could help to change things. Why didn’t you explore that opportunity to make the country better by becoming involved in what was going on?’ What do you think I would tell them? I would bow my head in shame,” he said.

“But I had to try, and they know I’ve tried and will keep trying. I know it’s going to work but if it doesn’t, my children will give me a pat on the back and say, ‘Dad, you tried. It’s an evil system out there.’ If I succeed, they will say, ‘Dad, you see you have encouraged us and we are proud of you that when you went in there, things changed for the better’,” he added.

Udokwu said a number of big-time creative people have successfully done politics and returned to their creative career, citing American actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was a two-term governor of the State of California but is now back on the movie set, as well as Nigerian actor Richard Mofe Damijo, who moved from special adviser to commissioner, and is also now back to the movies again.

“Let us come to the critical analysis of this whole thing. What is the qualification for somebody to vie for a seat in the House of Assembly? Primary Six. What’s that for House of Reps, Senate, governor? Cheap. And for president? Most of us have better qualifications than what the country has prescribed for its rulers. These are my leaders today for crying out loud, but I’m sorry to say, I watch some of them on television; some of them are two terms, three terms in the National and different State Houses of Assembly, they go there to warm the benches because they find their way any way into those chambers and they have nothing to offer. And so it becomes business as usual,” he said.

“How many people are in the Senate? How many are in the House of Reps? And how many of them do you see today when they show Senate sessions saying anything? Do we have to continue like that when we have very vibrant, well-educated young men and young women who have shown themselves, the world already knows them? Some of these politicians, we don’t know their strength of character; some of them don’t even have stable homes. All we see are posters and there’s a lot of largesse, but Google up any of these artistes that are vying for positions and the whole world knows them. You can be in Afghanistan and at the click of a button you know who Bob-Manuel Udokwu is. So let people stop questioning the rationale for people in entertainment going into politics,” he said.

Nigeria and the widening gyre of official corruption

CHUKS OLUIGBO

One major campaign promise of Muhammadu Buhari as presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) was that he would eliminate corruption in Nigeria if elected president.

“If we don’t kill corruption, this corruption will kill us,” Buhari told Nigerians during his campaign for the 2015 general elections.

He reiterated this in his inaugural speech on May 29, 2015, saying, “At home we face enormous challenges. Insecurity, pervasive corruption, the hitherto unending and seemingly impossible fuel and power shortages are the immediate concerns. We are going to tackle them head on. Nigerians will not regret that they have entrusted national responsibility to us. We must not succumb to hopelessness and defeatism. We can fix our problems.”

Buhari’s APC quickly made political capital out of that “kill corruption or it will kill us” mantra, especially as they saw in it an opportunity to further tar the then President Goodluck Jonathan’s already battered image, and many Nigerians also hailed Buhari for saying it the way it is.

The truth, however, is that Buhari was not saying anything new. Successive governments in the country since the First Republic have always vowed to eliminate corruption from the polity while every military coup since Nzeogwu was justified by accusing the ousted regime of massive corruption.

As it was in the beginning

On January 15, 1966, a group of five majors led by Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu truncated the First Republic in a bloody coup, accusing the civilian regime in the country of widespread corruption.

In his maiden broadcast on Radio Nigeria, Kaduna announcing the coup, Nzeogwu said, “The aim of the Revolutionary Council is to establish a strong united and prosperous nation, free from corruption and internal strife.”

Nzeogwu went on to warn that bribery or corruption, embezzlement, looting, among a long list of other offences, were all punishable by death sentence.

Though Nzeogwu and his fellow coup-makers never got to rule the country, that coup marked the beginning of military encroachment into Nigerian politics. The country would thereafter grope through 13 long and dark years of military dictatorship led by men who proved to be more corrupt than the civilian regime they ousted.

The military administrations of Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi and Murtala Muhammed were short-lived. But the long reign of Yakubu Gowon (1966-1975) and Olusegun Obasanjo’s three-year rule (1976-1979) recorded cases of massive corruption.

For instance, the celebrated case of cement import racket, in which officials of the Defence Ministry and the Central Bank of Nigeria were accused of falsifying ships manifestos and inflating the amount of cement to be purchased, happened under the ‘watchful’ eyes of Gowon, who was seen as too weak to fight the corrupt wolves surrounding his government. Similarly, under the Obasanjo regime, during which major projects like building of new refineries, laying of pipelines, expansion of the national shipping and airlines, hosting of the Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), among others, were carried out, most of these projects were seen as conduits for siphoning of public funds as well as enrichment of party loyalists. There were also the land grab issue under the Operation Feed the Nation (OFN) initiative using the instrumentality of the Land Use Decree, the ITT scandals which Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo-Kuti sang about (remember International Thief-Thief), and, indeed, a certain $2.8 billion that allegedly grew wings and flew out of the Midland Bank, London account of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

The Shehu Shagari civilian administration which took over from the military in 1979 reeked of pervasive corruption. It was during this period that some federal buildings went into flames following investigations into the finances of the officials working in the buildings. The notorious rice import licence scandal also happened during this era.

Indeed, it was during this time that Chinua Achebe wrote The Trouble with Nigeria (1983), in which he stated that “corruption in Nigeria has passed the alarming and entered the fatal stage; and Nigeria will die if we keep pretending that she is only slightly indisposed”.

Referring to a story in the National Concord of May 16, 1983 with the headline “Fraud at P&T”, Achebe quoted the then Federal Minister of Communication, Audu Ogbe, as revealing that the Federal Government was losing N50 million every month as salaries to non-existent workers.

“In the course of one year then Nigeria loses N600 million in this particular racket…With N600 million Nigeria could build two more international airports like Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos; or if r are not keen on more airports the money could buy us three refineries; or build us a dual express motorway from Lagos to Kaduna; or pay the salary of 10,000 workers on grade level 01 for forty years,” Achebe wrote.

He also drew attention to an editorial in The Daily Times of the same day, titled “The Fake Importers”, which highlighted “a story of Nigerian importers who having applied for and obtained scarce foreign exchange from the Central bank ostensibly to pay for raw materials overseas, leave the money in their banks abroad and ship to Lagos containers of mud and sand”.

When Buhari wrested power from Shagari through a military coup on December 31, 1983, he said in his broadcast on January 1, 1984 that “corruption has become so pervasive and intractable that a whole ministry has been created to stem it”.

“While corruption and indiscipline have been associated with our state of under-development, these two evils in our body-politic have attained unprecedented height in the past few years. The corrupt, inept and insensitive leadership in the last four years has been the source of immorality and impropriety in our society,” he said.

Yet, when Ibrahim Babangida took over the reins of power in a military coup in August 1985, he told the nation that “events today indicate that most of the reasons which justified the military takeover of government from the civilians still persist”.

“When in December 1983, the former military leadership, headed by Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, assumed the reins of government, its accession was heralded in the history of this country. With the nation at the mercy of political misdirection and on the brink of economic collapse, a new sense of hope was created in the minds of every Nigerian,” Babangida said in his August 27, 1985 broadcast to the nation.

“Since January 1984, however, we have witnessed a systematic denigration of that hope. It was stated then that mismanagement of political leadership and a general deterioration in the standard of living, which had subjected the common man to intolerable suffering, were the reasons for the intervention. Nigerians have since then been under a regime that continued with those trends,” he said.

One scandal involving the Buhari military regime that has refused to go away is the controversial issue of 53 suitcases. The story goes that in 1984, the Buhari regime announced a change of Nigeria’s currency and ordered all luggage entering or leaving the country to be searched to ensure no currency was being smuggled. One writer sums it thus, "The 53 suitcases saga arose in 1984 during the currency change exercise ordered by the Buhari junta when it ordered that every case arriving the country should be inspected irrespective of the status of the person behind such. The 53 suitcases were, however, ferried through the Murtala Muhammed Airport without a customs check by soldiers allegedly at the behest of Major Mustapha Jokolo, the then aide-de-camp to Gen. Buhari. Atiku was at that time the Area Comptroller of Customs in charge of the Murtala Muhammed Airport."

But it was during the regime of Ibrahim Babangida (IBB) that corruption was legalized and upgraded to the unenviable status of a state policy. Drug dealing, money laundering, advance fee fraud (419) and other financial crimes as well as routine disbursement of vehicles and cash gifts to earn loyalty became the order of the day. The IBB era saw the emergence of a new crop of extremely wealthy Nigerians, including military officers, without a discernible source of income. Many of them were “IBB Boys”, a euphemistic term for those whom the Minna, Niger State-born general used as fronts for his dirty deals. But the biggest scandal of the era was the missing $12.4 billion Gulf War oil windfall which has remained unaccounted for till this day.

The Sani Abacha junta (1993-1998) was a defining moment for military dictatorship in Nigeria and the regime took official corruption to new heights. After Abacha’s sudden death in 1998, investigations uncovered loots amounting to several billions in foreign currencies scattered across banks in world capitals.

As recent as 2013, it was reported that the Federal Government recovered a total of €22.5 million from the confiscation on money laundered by Abacha, while a total of €175 million was also recovered from the Abacha family following a confiscation order by the Supreme Court of Liechtenstein. This was besides about $1 billion voluntarily returned to the Federal Government in 1999 by members of the Abacha family and some of their accomplices, another $1 billion (out of the $1.1 billion that had been identified, traced and frozen) the Abacha family agreed to return to the Obasanjo administration in 2002, the sum of $700 million in several Swiss banks which the Swiss government said had been returned as at December 2012, another $640 million that was frozen, among numerous others, both discovered and undiscovered.

Even though the Abdusalami Abubakar administration was short-lived (June 1998-May 1999), there are suspicions that the now white-bearded general took great advantage of the pandemonium in the country to enrich himself and members of his inner circle. His regime is also implicated in the major Halliburton scandal.

The PDP years, 1999-2015

The 16 years the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) occupied Nigeria’s presidency have been aptly described as “the years of locusts and caterpillars” due to the widespread corruption the country witnessed in those years. From Olusegun Obasanjo to Umaru Musa Yar’Adua to Goodluck Jonathan, the story was the same. Though the Obasanjo administration set up the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), which has a mission “to rid Nigeria of corruption through lawful enforcement and preventive measures”, as tools to fight against corruption in the country, the agencies turned out to be tools for witch-hunting political opponents.

The administration itself was mired in corruption’s messy mud. Cases of corruption under Obasanjo include the KBR and Siemens bribery scandals, Transcorp shares scandal, the huge billions that went down the drain in the power sector reforms and refurbishment of oil refineries, among several others.

From the year 2000 to 2014, Nigeria ranked in the league of most corrupt countries in the world based on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, only making slight improvements and relapsing to the bottom rung along the way.

The Yar’Adua administration, though quite brief, had its own baggage of corruption scandals, but it was the Jonathan administration that redefined official corruption in the country.

Under Jonathan, there were allegations of unremitted funds by the NNPC, the $250 million BMW purchase by the then aviation minister, the trillion-naira petrol subsidy scam, the Malibu Oil International scandal, among several others. But the most stunning thing about corruption under the Jonathan regime was the impunity and brazenness of it all and the president’s inability or unwillingness to rein in the greed of the hawks within his cabinet.

Indeed, in his letter to the then President Jonathan entitled “Before it is too late”, Obasanjo said: “As Head of Government, the buck of the performance and non-performance stops on your table and let nobody tell you anything to the contrary. Most of our friends and development partners are worried and they see what we pretend to cover up. They are worried about issue of security internally and on our coastal waters including heavy oil theft, alias bunkering and piracy. They are worried about corruption and what we are doing or not doing about it. Corruption has reached the level of impunity. It is also necessary to be mindful that corruption and injustice are fertile breeding ground for terrorism and political instability.

“And if you are not ready to name, shame, prosecute and stoutly fight against corruption, whatever you do will be hollow. It will be a laughing matter.”

Since the inauguration of the Buhari administration in May 2015, several new allegations of corruption have emerged against the Jonathan government, and some key officials of the Jonathan government as well as PDP members are currently being detained or investigated over allegations of corrupt practices and misappropriation of fund, the most prominent being the $2.1 billion arms deal involving the former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki. Indeed, the Buhari administration, which actually claimed that the Jonathan government left behind an empty treasury, has used what it terms “massive looting of the treasury” under Jonathan to justify its own ineptitude.

Buhari’s anti-corruption fight

There has been so much noise about the Buhari administration’s fight against corruption. Though the jury is still out on the sincerity or otherwise of the anti-graft war, which is one of the three cardinal points on which the administration hinged its campaign, analysts have observed that the way the war is going, there are signs that the Buhari administration won’t achieve any milestone but may end up more corrupt than those before it.

The analysts say apart from the hullabaloo and media trials of those being alleged of corrupt practices, there is neither real investigation nor prosecution going on. They also allege that the Buhari presidency is shielding corrupt members of the ruling APC while witch-hunting members of the opposition PDP. Specifically, they point to the harsh treatment meted out to Sambo Dasuki, Olisa Metuh and other officials of the Jonathan government which contradicts the kid-glove handling of the allegations of misconduct involving the Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai, Minister of Transport, Rotimi Amaechi, and Minister of Interior, Abdulrahman Dambazau.

The analysts also accuse the Buhari government of nepotism, a form of corruption, especially in his appointments of person to key government offices. His appointments have been skewed heavily in favour of his kinsmen, mainly Northern Muslims.

Why corruption thrives

Among numerous reasons why corruption thrives in Nigeria, analysts believe the most striking is the total absence of any form of deterrence. Though there are anti-graft/anti-corruption laws in the country, analysts believe that because these laws are not implemented to the letter or at all, the incentives to be corrupt outweigh the disincentives. As such, corruption continues to thrive in spite of existing anti-corruption laws because there is no fear of consequences. And this has been the situation since independence.

“Although Nigeria is without any shadow of doubt one of the most corrupt nations in the world, there has not been one high public officer in the twenty-three years of our independence who has been made to face the music for official corruption,” Achebe wrote in 1983.

“And so, from fairly timid manifestations in the 1960s, corruption has grown bold and ravenous, as with each succeeding regime, our public servants have become more reckless and blatant,” he wrote.

What Buhari should do

In a report, “Impact of Corruption on Nigeria's Economy”, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimates that “corruption in Nigeria could cost up to 37% of GDP by 2030 if it’s not dealt with immediately”.

“This cost is equated to around $1,000 per person in 2014 and nearly $2,000 per person by 2030. The boost in average income that we estimate, given the current per capita income, can significantly improve the lives of many in Nigeria,” it adds.

Indeed, not a few Nigerians believe in Buhari’s personal integrity and moral rectitude, though this is still a matter of conjecture as recent events have shown. However, assuming but not conceding that Buhari is personally incorruptible, what about those in his government and party, many of who, in any case, are former members of the PDP and served in different capacities in PDP governments at both the federal and state levels between 1999 and 2007?

Moreover, as Achebe pointed out, helpless integrity has always failed to solve the problem of rampant corruption.

“As we have sunk more and more deeply into the quagmire [of corruption], we have been ‘blessed’ with a succession of leaders who are said to possess impeccable personal integrity but unfortunately are surrounded by sharks and crooks,” Achebe wrote.

Assuming this is the situation Buhari currently finds himself, what must the president do now?

In The Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe admonished the then President Shagari thus: “But to initiate change the President of this country must take, and be seen to take, a decisive first step of ridding his administration of all persons on whom the slightest wind of corruption and scandal has blown. When he can summon up the courage to do that, he will find himself grown overnight to such stature and authority that he will become Nigeria's leader, not just its president. Only then can he take on and conquer corruption in the nation.”

This admonition, offered 33 years ago, may well be more relevant today than when it was first given. And indeed, this is the path President Buhari must urgently take if his anti-corruption crusade won’t amount to “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing” (apologies to Shakespeare). If he looks closely, there may even be massive corruption going on right now under his very nose.