Nigeria is a metaphoric Federal Republic which is now poised to embrace a democratic future after many years of dictatorial military governance and military inhibiting mentality that will take more decades to obliterate. It would then proceed to become a Confederal Republic.
The obstructionist policies of those that seek our disintegration, coupled with the actions of local, misinformed compatriots stultify our steady societal growth.
Two Nigerians of high learning and culture, Emeritus Professor Wole Soyinka and Emeritus Professor Chinua Achebe, have repeatedly harped on the damage that corruption and other societal vices are doing and have done to Nigeria.
In spite of the Himalayian protests against corruption, the practice has gathered tsunami intensity. All over the world, many states have suffered from the debilitating effects of corruption.
As a result, the United Nations Organisation has adopted a Convention in order to expose how corruption operates and the UN has tried to make states to understand that development suffers inexorably, where both public sector and private sector officials indulge in corruption.
It must be pointed out that in unorganized, under-developed states, corruption is the engine that drives corrupted accelerated upper ladder climbing. Studies have shown how penniless, uneducated persons without entrepreneurial skills go into politics with fake altruism and become rich and infamous. There are people in our polity, who would not have existed today, if they had not stolen the peoples’ resources.
If a government official earned N2million a month, he would have earned without paying taxes, a total of N24million in one year. He would have earned N96million in four years.
So, by what magical conjuration would such a citizen be able to purchase a house costingN500 million? If he is a successful entrepreneur, this may be possible.
Recommended Solutions
In order to solve the problem of corruption, the state must institute a social justice system that would make it possible to educate its capable citizens from the cradle to universities, create jobs and build affordable homes for citizens. The fear of the future fuels corruption. Family responsibilities like the extended family structure put pressure on the well-to-do members of the family in government or corporate outfits. Lack of life insurance, medical services and social welfare system push people into corruption. Also lack of a religious and God-fearing attributes allow misplaced conscience to fester.
The struggles by the working class to put pressure on their states by demanding for social justice is growing world-wide. I know people, who are upright but are forced by circumstances to become corrupt
THE UN CONVENTION AGAINST CORRUPTION (1)
Introduction:
By the end of the 20th century, the human race had irremediably crossed the Rubicon into self-destruction. Frightened by this undesirable prospect, some thinkers organized to re-think CORRUPTION, which is a twin brother or sister of every human aberration.
In the 21st century, the issue of corruption must not be restricted to what man’s puny brain can devise from time to time, in order to get by. The centre-point of the struggle against corruption must extend to the activities of states, politicians, military intelligence operations, belligerent policies, arms manufacturers and dealers, currency traffickers and dealers in human beings. These constitute a more formidable assignment for all those who are endowed with uncommon abilities and spiritual vision.
In contemporary world society, there are political leaders who have refused to accept modernity but have sustained the anachronistic practices enshrined in a perverted version of the Abrahamic religion. Inevitably, there is a clash of values and virtues, which often lead to wars. The imposition of archaic thought systems on a large number of people in the Orient has tended to draw back the hands of the universal clock.
There is bound to be corruption in every system of societal organization where there is the absence of GOD, the absence of good and the absence of ethical politics. Leaders, who are supposed to advance the cause of their people, have become their problem.
Some world leaders approximately to SWIN BURNES’S qualities of a silly angel (of the Luciferian genre). We identify some world leaders as having:
1. Enthusiastic puerility of mind
2. Incurable un-soundness of judgment
3. Restless excitability of emotion
4. Helpless inability of intelligence
5. Consumptive wakefulness of fancy
6. Feverish impotence of reason
7. A dreamily amiable uselessness
8. A sweet fantastic imbecility
It can be said that in every corrupt mind, act or decision, there is:
(a) a propulsion of evil-mindedness
(b) a vain ambition to make it big and quick
(c) an amorous trajectory to earthly paradise
(d) A decadent moral fibre
(e) A robust criminal intention
(f) An unrepentant, stiff-neck mien and Luciferian disposition to evil
Corruption, like evil, destroys the economy. The result is mass poverty and absence of ethical life, which leads to violence and bloodshed.
The United Nations and Corruption:
International Institutions,
Namely, The United Nations Organisations, The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have shown utmost concern for humanity.
While the United Nations Organisation has taken on the onerous task “to maintain international peace and security” 1 among other global concerns, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have catered for post-Second World War reconstruction and development.
The United Nations occasionally feels frustrated by the war-mongering activities of its disunited sovereign entities. In the same vein, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund often wonder why, in spite of their efforts at providing financial assistance and at times, advice on development, the snail speed in some states’ progress remain disheartening.
Enquiries into the reasons for the slow pace of development yield evidence that among other factors, corruption at various levels and in many states, constitute immaculate impediments to “social progress and better standards in larger freedom.”2
The United Nations Organisation, which has deployed its efforts, invested its energies and has employed its “international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, “3 has realized that very often, its mobilizations often end in the wilderness as a result of hydra-headed monster, corruption.
The entire world community, which had earlier regarded the problem of corruption as “matters within the exclusive jurisdiction! Of states”4 began to accept that there was need for action to combat corruption. The UN drew inspiration from its fight against apartheid, racism and racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance by belatedly introducing the United Nations Convention on Corruption.
On 29 September 2003, the UN Convention against Trans-national Organised Crime entered into force.
The main aim of the above-named Convention is to check or at least, minimize corrupt practices like offering bribes to any official or person. In the domain of politics, it is an offence to rig an election. Election rigging would mean that political power was obtained fraudulently. Where the facts of rigging an election are established, they constitute a breach of the relevant laws. This would engage the action of law enforcement agencies to impose penalties.
Definition of Corruption:
The difficulties often encountered by the international community in defining some concepts leave open ends for transgressors to escape judgment.
In my opinion, corruption is a societal, malignant tumour. It is a soul-destroying, spirit-humiliating and mind-afflicting malady. It operates in a conspiratorial atmosphere
, in which one party (the corruptor) offers or promised to offer some material gift, inducement, bribe or any other act which mounts irresistible pressures on the other party (the corrupted) to do or refrain from performing his official duties or act in defiance of laid down official rules ad practices consequent upon the gift, inducement, bribe or pressure. The proximate cause of the favourable acts must be traceable directly or indirectly to the gift, inducement, bribery or pressure. (see Articles 15 and 16 of the UN Convention)
1. UN Charter (1945) Preamble
2. UN Charter (1945) Preamble
3. UN Charter (1945) Preamble
4. See Article 2(7) UN Charter
