It is obvious that corruption can take various shapes and guises, one of which is what can arise from the sharing of booties and loots among honourable thieves. Armed robbers have been known to confess that the amount of money said to have been recovered from them was far less than what they stole when the police caught them. Similarly, senior bank officials have been known to declare far more money as carted away by robbers than the actual amount stolen away.
In various establishments and institutions in the public sector, internal accounting for “Off Record Expenditures” and departmental imprests, have been known to expose a lot of malpractices. What can be listed discreetly as off-record-expenditure (ORE) can include some money paid to “rain makers to hold the rain during official ceremonies”. For example, there was a case of N2.5 million purportedly spent on “Marabout hired from Sudan for exorcism”.
Tertiary institutions of education are particularly notorious for “off record expenditure on rain-makers to hold the rain during convocation ceremonies.” There are also such monetary matters which it would be impolite to state in explicit terms the actual purposes of what the expenditures were made. For example, the retirement of imprests can be such abbreviations as “MBW” which can mean expenditures on lechery and lewd activities.
There can be internal or departmental monetary matters which can generate such controversies and scandals that in-house panel of inquiry can be set up to “look into the matter”. It was through one of such panel of inquiry that it became known that “MBW” was a colloquial item for “man body is not wood”. That was lechery! What led to acrimony and threats of impeachment was the fact that one “greedy man decided to eat alone what would have been shared among colleagues”.
Inquiries into such malfeasance can also throw some light into possible causes or origins of some cases of assassination, kidnapping and armed robbery attacks. Sharing of booties and loots which end in gross dissatisfaction and acrimony among thieves often result in those who feel short-changed wanting to take some revenge. It is common to hear aggrieved persons make such comments as: “there are many ways to kill a rat”.
Setting up of in-house panel of inquiry to look into “misappropriation of funds” also brings its own dangers. There are cases where those who agree to serve in such panels of inquiry become victims of some vicious attacks, physically or through calumny. A particular case where it was glaring that there was fraud, a strategy for subversion involved pointing out that “a member of this panel is an ex-police intelligence officer, a journalist, now hiding here as a lecturer. He will surely expose all of us if you carry on with this case”.
Obviously, those who live in glass houses are not meant to throw stones. So, a common strategy used by honourable thieves to subvert opening up cases of fraud is to generalize the cliché that “no body is clean in the society”. The claim or assumption that all Nigerians are corrupt is merely used as a calumny whereby a man of integrity can be smeared with accepting a gold wrist watch as a gift” or accused of lechery.
The case of Monica Lewinsky and a former President of the United States of America bordering on sex scandal, is an example of how calumny and corruption can be mixed up. Especially for us in Nigeria, sex-related scandals are ready means of calumny and demolition of personal integrity. Our security operatives have been known to be fond of using lechery and women as ready traps to catch those whom the system would want to rubbish and stain. A game of sanctimony!
There are more serious and clever cases of corruption in Nigeria which we gloss over than the penchant for parading “looters” as diversionary strategy. For example, in The Tide Newspaper of Wednesday May 22, 2019, the Prelate of Methodist Church of Nigeria, Dr Samuel Uche, said: “It beats our imagination that when you are the vilest offender in one party and cross over to a certain party, you become a saint over right”.
Is it not corruption that such practice as burying a white ram alive by 3.15 a.m. in which government officials are involved, should be associated with a democratic governance? Is it not true that tax-payers’ money is used to hire consultants or marabouts to carryout such weird rituals in dark nights? For what purposes are such rituals performed?
The irony of dark deeds is that when sharing of booties and loots result in estrangement and acrimony, old friends among gangs of thieves usually fall apart and reveal what was done in the dark. There are repentant thieves and other criminals who have become whistle blowers and revealers of dark deeds. There are shocking and weird stories about how security votes can be spent!
Dr. Amirize is a retired lecturer at the Rivers State University, Port Harcourt.