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Syndication
Why Are Nigerian Public Officials Such Kleptomaniacs? Part II
Posted May 23, 2007 · Charles O
This discussion started with a previous entry.
The Class Factor
We Nigerians are crassly class-conscious. We are so highly hyperaware of where we belong in the social strata, and, worse, come to that determination through the most absurd of metrics. The measure of a Nigerian’s worth is never a function of, as Dr. Martin Luther King might like, the content of his character, nor really of his potentials, nor even of his actual contribution to society… The formula for the Nigerian measure of a person’s worth incorporates amongst other bizarre variables, the degree of that person’s manifestation of ostentation.
You Are the Size of Your Wallet
In the Nigerian context, you are the car you drive, the shoes you wear, and the size of your wallet. A person who, by accident of birth, has access to his father’s Mercedes Benz, wears American designer labels, and frequents high-brow Lagos Island clubs believes as a matter of course that he is an inherently superior being to the road-side mechanic. To prove the point, he carries a koboko on the Mercedes’ dashboard, and deploys it, without hesitation, against the mechanic—and, for good measure, the Okada operator and the bus conductor. Understand, his father is a retired Army General; the bus conductor who dares protest the injustice of the assault stands liable to be bundled into the trunk of the car, taken to the nearest barracks, and turned over to recruits to be given a proper and deserved thrashing.
Examples of our inane metrics for social stratification are abundant. The kid who gets MTV via cable somehow develops a conviction that he was conceived of higher-grade genetic material than the village-raised houseboy. The housewife who hasn’t procured the latest overpriced association wrapper puts herself at risk of castigation; the household which fails to boast the latest technology du jour (cable, DVD, landline, et cetera) is banished to a hellhole of inadequacy…
So What Do These Have To Do With Why Nigerian Public Officials Are Such Kleptomaniacs?
The real thrust of the foregoing observations is that the Nigerian predisposition to this sort of social stratification makes us take steps not to advance ourselves as individuals or even as a collective, but strictly as individuals relative to everyone else.
Let me explain this hypothesis: because of the ingrained social stratification, the Nigerian is in general more actively and aggressively interested in what he might do to surpass all else in the scheme of things. The desire is not so much to do well, but to do better than others, even if that means suppressing the others or stifling their advancement…
This, I hypothesize, is a major reason why our leaders (and I use “leaders” loosely) continue to steal money without reprieve, and without stopping for a moment to consider actually doing something to raise the general level of society’s welfare. Consider the thieving Nigerian public official’s perspective: “the more I steal, the wealthier I get… the wealthier I get (i.e., the wider the divide between me and the people), the more public adulation I receive from them and the better-off (i.e., happier) I am.”
From this perspective, the Nigerian public official has zero incentive to perform public service. Indeed, his incentive to enrich himself (and consolidate so much power as to be literally worshipped), runs counter to any incentives there might be to perform the duties of his office. If he were to initiate and implement strategies to advance the populace, everyone would catch up with him on the social ladder.
That would never do.
Keeping Up With the Jones’
I happened to have a conversation with a retired Nigerian Army General about the state of Nigerian public affairs, a while ago. My question to him was basically the one I pose here: Why are Nigerian public officials such kleptomaniacs? Why do they continue to steal even after they’ve stolen enough to last ten lifetimes? His response was highly instructive:
After they’ve amassed so much wealth as to cater for whole villages for extended periods, Nigerian public officials continue to steal money because they MUST, at the very least, keep up with their peers. If you are the governor of a state, the surest way to maintain your relevance and stature in the league of governors, and, indeed, assure your continued and recurring access to public office, is to remain at least as rich as (and, by correlation, as powerful as) your peers. In summary, the governor must steal at least on the same scale as the other governors in order to maintain his stance in that circle. To fail to do so would be to assure himself of usurpation in the next election cycle.
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