The Small Bribes That Built A Giant Nation: How Nigeria Fed Corruption Until It Learned To Eat Us
By Samuel Ashiwel
Corruption did not break into Nigeria like an armed robber. We invited it in like a house help. We gave it food, we gave it a name, we gave it a chair. At first it only stole a little sugar from the kitchen. Today it owns the house, and we are the tenants begging for a place to sleep. That is the tragedy of this country. We did not wake up to find a corrupt system. We raised it from infancy, excused its childhood thefts, and celebrated its adulthood.
HOW A NATION LEARNED TO STEAL FROM ITSELF
The mistake we make is to think corruption started at the top. It did not. It started at the bottom, where nobody was watching.
It started in 1962 when a primary school headmaster asked for one shilling extra to release a testimonial and parents called him wise. It started when a produce officer in the Western Region stamped a cocoa bag as Grade One when it was Grade Three, because the farmer was his cousin. It started when we told a young girl that if she wants to pass, she should go and see her teacher at home.
We never called it theft. We baptized it. We called it dash. We called it kola. We called it settlement. We called it man must chop. By giving it friendly names, we made it family.
What we forgot is that corruption is a school. And small corruption is its primary school. A clerk who will forge a receipt for fifty naira has already graduated in character. Give him fifty billion and he will apply the same lesson. The amount changes. The principle never does. When oil arrived in 1973, the country became rich overnight but our character was already poor. Money without work entered a society where work without bribe had already become difficult. The result was an explosion.
Then the military came and finished what oil started. Soldiers did not just steal money. They stole the idea of consequence. Under khaki, you could not ask questions. You could not go to court. You could not query a budget. For twenty nine years, Nigerians were trained to obey power, not to audit it. A whole generation grew up believing that authority is above accountability.
So when we returned to civil rule in 1999, we were not a people who had been cleansed. We were a people who had been conditioned. We knew how to survive corruption. We knew how to pay it, how to collect it, how to justify it. Democracy simply gave us more offices to practice it in.
If we must tell the truth about corruption, we must look at it from two sides, because one eye cannot see the whole wound.
First, The Vertical Damage: The Corruption of Leadership
At the top, corruption is no longer theft. It is governance. It is the federal budget that arrives with billions for streetlights that are never installed, with billions for dilapidated schools that are never renovated, and nobody resigns. It is the security vote that no state assembly dares to audit, running into hundreds of billions every year, spent in cash, without receipt. It is the contract inflated by three hundred percent because everyone in the chain must eat.
This level of corruption is driven not by greed alone, but by insecurity. The Nigerian politician steals for his great grandchildren not because he loves them, but because he does not trust the system to protect him tomorrow. He buys thugs to win election, buys judges to keep election, buys police to protect stolen money, and buys poverty to keep the people quiet. It is a cycle that feeds itself.
This is why a governor can owe workers salaries for eight months and still be celebrated when he distributes motorcycles. He has created the poverty he is being praised for reducing.
Second, The Horizontal Damage: The Corruption of Citizens
But it would be lazy and dishonest to put all blame in Abuja. The fish may rot from the head, but the body also accepted the rot.
At the bottom, corruption wears the face of survival, but it is still corruption. It is the trader in Onitsha who doubles the price of cement because rain fell. It is the landlord in Port Harcourt who collects two years rent for a house that leaks. It is the bus driver in Lagos who invents a new fare every time fuel price moves by ten naira. It is the student in Ilorin who pays for a project he did not write, and the supervisor who collects money for a supervision he did not do.
We have perfected the art of calling our own corruption hustle. We call it packaging. We call it sharp guy. And because everyone does it, no one feels guilty doing it.
This is the most dangerous stage. When the follower is as guilty as the leader, who will correct who? When the market woman who insults the president for stealing is the same woman who uses a rigged scale to steal from her customers, where does reform begin? We are trapped in a mirror. The leader sees a corrupt citizenry he can easily buy. The citizen sees a corrupt leadership he must bribe to survive.
HOW DEEPLY DAMAGED WE ARE
Corruption has cost us more than money. Money can be recovered. What it has stolen from us is harder to replace.
One, it has stolen our time. Nigeria is a nation where you queue to get what is already yours. You queue to get your drivers license. You queue to get your passport. You queue to get a file moved from one table to another. Those queues are artificial. Someone blocked the system so that you will pay to jump it. In a year, the average Nigerian loses weeks of productive life just negotiating his own rights.
Two, it has stolen our trust. We no longer believe in excellence. When a young girl scores 360 in JAMB, our first instinct is suspicion, not celebration. When a young man gets a good job, we assume he knows someone. When a bridge is commissioned, we wait to hear the day it will collapse. A nation that cannot believe in merit cannot reward merit. And a nation that cannot reward merit will export its best brains.
Three, it has stolen our future and mortgaged it. Today, the smartest Nigerians are not asking how to fix Nigeria. They are asking which embassy to queue at. Not because they do not love this country, but because they are tired. Tired of paying to be employed after paying to be educated. Tired of being asked to bribe to get a bed in a hospital their taxes built.
WHAT WILL BREAK THIS GIANT
We keep looking for a Messiah in Aso Rock. One honest president who will come and flog everyone into honesty. That Messiah will not come. Even if he comes, the system will frustrate him.
Corruption will not die from the top alone. It must be starved from the bottom as well. It will end the day the youth corper posted to a local government refuses to help the chairman forge attendance. It will end the day the teacher in a school says his continuous assessment mark is not for sale, and the student says his dignity is not for sale either. It will end the day the policeman at the checkpoint understands that twenty thousand naira today cannot buy back the respect his children will lose tomorrow.
We need two wars at the same time. A vertical war that sends big thieves to real prisons, not plea bargains. And a horizontal war that restores shame at the market, at the school, at the motor park, at the church and the mosque.
We need EFCC to chase billions in Abuja, but we also need conscience to chase hundreds in our streets. Nigeria is not a hopeless country but rather a careless country. We ignored a leak and now we are drowning. We all contributed bricks to build this giant. All of us, in small ways, fed it. And until we all agree to stop feeding it, it will continue to eat us.
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