I have just come out of an interesting session with a very brilliant team from the Pan African University. I dont know how they know me o but found me a worthy subject of a very seminal research paper.
They wanted to gauge the role of social media in combating corruption or something along those lines. I didn’t take them seriously simply because these people come at me and I tell them my mind and they find it very odious and end up not using my thoughts .
But Dr Odoh was very persistent, as all my attempts at dodging including pretending that the network was not working fell on deaf ears. She pushed and pushed and pushed and finally she got me.
Edgar, what is your take on corruption she fired.. I responded, my sister we are all thieves. She smiled and looked towards her colleague who was struggling with his ear piece.
I continued, every Nigerian is a thief simple. The problem is that we tend to play the ostrich game and say ohh it’s Government and it’s officials that are corrupt.
Big fat lie. All 200m of us are thieves and are corrupt. Corruption is the most democratised and universally spread ethos in Nigeria today.
Blaming Government alone is just a very terrible sign of a national collective push towards denial. The society is corrupt and it is from this pool of corruption that we select our leaders.
I always laugh when we rail against corruption in government and the next minute rush to your Senator and expect him to pay your children’s school fees or pay the maternity bill of your thrid wife or help u cure ur venral disease.
It is this pressure that leads to them stealing cos if they don’t settle their constituents, their career is gone.. So it is only the very stupid ones from us and we are plenty, that will stand and be shouting-war against corruption.
Can you wage a war against yourself,,? Corruption is now more than ever before ingrained in our psyche, systems, institions , ethos and our culture.
Corruption is Nigerian and we must accept it for what it is, a part of our lives, a mainstay and the only thing that welds us together as a people.
Corruption is a unifying factor. It brings all tribes together in unity as we pilfer and steal. Did you see the tribes that were involved in the Betty Edu malfeasance? Almost every tribe and tongue was represented.
I told them that corruption was OK but that the issue was that it conveyed undue advantage to those who either by status, stature and financial position where positioned for it.
Once that advantage is removed everything will be perfect. It is in this guise that we would need to regulate and manage it.
It is a cancer, it has no cure all we can do is to learn to live with it. Give everybody access to corruption. Don’t do different rules for everybody, let all of us have the ability to bribe police, beat up a judge for a funny ruling and settle referee in a football match and you will see how everything will calm down.
They now asked me what role I thought social media would play in all these and I shouted.
Social media in the hands of a barely literate population is the worse thing that has ever happened to this country since Dimka killed Murtala Mohammed.
When people who cannot dimension issues are given power by virtue of N100 data, what you see is chaos and anarchy. I asked them to go to the comment sections of any major blog and they will see madness.
What we now have are virtual mobs roaming the cyber world, bullying people and weakening institutions. You begin to see court judgements leaning towards social media pressure, Government officials reacting or creating policies to either abate or curry social media to the point that an actress with no real experience in governance or a firm grasp of issues attempting to parley her huge following into power.
My people, at the end, I told these egg heads from this great university, that their questioning was wrong and would not achieve any purpose if they began like d rest of society to hold out Government as the citadel of corruption with an exclusive monopoly.
I told them that we must begin to reorientate society so that we will all agree that we are all corrupt and then begin to push in education and enlightenment so that self regulation will kick in.
I added dt we may not see results in our lifetime but we must start and it behoves on schools like the Pan African University to lead the push and come down from its high horses and lead the push for self enlightenment of the people with the hope that just may be we would be able to begin to change the narrative ever so slowly
But for now, I assured them that we are all corrupt including them interviewing me and the sooner we all agree to this fact the better for us.
Thank you
Duke of Shomolu
