With sluggish confidence, I drove into the jigsaw called Asokoro in Abuja on a Monday morning in September, 2021. Asokoro is a nest of beauty but it makes the brain swirl in dizziness from its multiple streets, closes, crescents and alleys that lead the unfamiliar and uninitiated into a cul-de-sac or a wild distance from one’s destination. Every time I had to keep an appointment at Asokoro, my 17 years’ experience as an Abuja resident is brought to shame by my stark illiteracy about the geography of Asokoro. On that Monday morning, I turned to Google Maps, the second brain of this generation, to snake me through my misery to my destination. All trusting, Google Maps made me turn right, left, right again… until I noticed a car stubbornly driving directly towards me in my lane. Not given to a quick temper, I halted to observe what the driver had in mind. A woman, in a crispy white outfit of the Vehicle Inspection Office (VIO), approached me to demand for my driver’s license.
“What’s the issue?” I asked.
“Oga,” she repeated defiantly. “Your driver’s license.”
I pulled my license from my wallet and handed it over to her, and waited for her verdict.
“You’re driving against the traffic on one-way,” she told me.
I explained to her that I didn’t know my way, so I was keeping to Google Maps’ prompts.
“You’re not the first person who has been misled by Google Maps” she argued, entered into my car and demanded that we drive to the VIO office at AYA in Asokoro.
“I have an appointment for 11am,” I told her. She gave me the response of a stone-goddess, who expresses neither her acceptance nor rejection of a worshiper’s supplication. In cold silence, I drove to VIO’s office at AYA, where inordinately excited officers, like hunters who had killed an elephant, would subject me to a fine of N4,000 for driving against traffic.
As I queued behind over eight other drivers to make payments for violating two, three or more traffic offences, most of which nobody taught at driving school, I noticed a strange system that agitated my mind. A woman, looking religiously ordinary and old-fashioned, wearing a faded dress, with lips dried, uncoated, and face devoid of the shiny beauty accentuated by powder, was engaged in open wrong-doing.
I waited until it was my turn to make the payment. The form that contains the traffic offences is produced with embedded carbon, but for everyone who paid the fine before it was my turn, the lady tore the original sheet, wrote the charges, collected the cash, and asked the ‘offender’ to go for clearance. For the next person, she would scribble figures on what was supposed to be a duplicate copy of the original ‘charge sheet.’ That way, there was no record of the offence committed and no record of the fine paid. This is because there is usually nothing written on the stubs of the forms issued.
As I was about to make my payment, I looked sternly at the woman and refused to give her N4,000 when she stretched out her hand to collect it. ‘Bring your money,” the woman asked.
“I can’t pay until you use the carbon to write the offence I committed and the fine I would pay,” I resisted.
“Oga, why are you being difficult? Are you the only person here? I’ve not used carbon for anyone.”
“Okay,” I challenged her. “Where is the record to show I paid this money to you?”
She looked at me bewildered. “We don’t have enough booklets, that’s why I’m not using the carbon.”
“Madam, don’t tell me that VIO cannot print enough booklets from all the money you collected from everyone here. I can’t pay you until you open a new page and use the carbon.”
Angrily, the woman used the carbonated paper to write what I should pay, but, as punishment, she refused to collect cash from me. In protest for not facilitating the corruption, she asked me to pay my fine into a VIO’s account in a bank in Asokoro. Happily, I trekked to the bank, made the payment, and returned after about an hour to meet a new long queue of traffic offenders paying cash which would, most probably, not enter into the treasury!
Without receipts for payments made by traffic offenders, most of the money collected by the religiously-looking woman could be funneled into private pockets, meaning government has enacted traffic laws that facilitate illicit acquisition of wealth by VIO officers. The craze and passion that exudes from VIO officers when they harass motorists on Abuja roads are better understood in this context.
But Vehicle Inspection Officers are not the only public officers guilty of this white collar crime – crimes not involving violence but which inflict worse injuries on society more than armed robbery and kidnapping. It’s called corruption, but I call it python, because such crimes have the devastating effects of a python on the society. A python is deceptive and patient, but when it constricts a person, including its owner, it would leave the person dead.
My encounter with the VIO officer came to mind as we marked the United Nations World Anti-Corruption Day on December 9, 2021. In Nigeria, corruption does not really hide behind any mask. The VIO should have an intelligence unit who should detect the propensity for fraud involved in what I witnessed at the AYA VIO office. Since 1975, every government has attempted to win the heart of Nigerians by invoking anti-corruption measures. Murtala Mohammed ‘s administration enacted the Corrupt Practices Decree in 1975; Shehu Shagari’s administration launched the Ethical Revolution, and set up the Ministry for National Guidance to create awareness of the evils of corruption; Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, in 1983, enacted the War Against Indiscipline (WAI); Ibrahim Babangida enacted the Corrupt Practices and Economic Crime Decree; Sani Abacha came up with the Indiscipline, Corrupt Practices and Economic Crime (Prohibition) Decree 1994, and, on his return, Olusegun Obasanjo enacted the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC). Subsequent administrations have invested in the two commissions. So, why has corruption grown taller, bigger and more prosperous, earning Nigeria a seat among ‘fantastically corrupt’ countries in the world.
As a tributary of these laws, every government office has an anti-corruption desk, internal auditors, finance and audit committee who should insist on due diligence, but their activities have not fatally wounded corrupt practices in Nigeria. However, the main body actively exposing corruption – media and journalism – is hounded from street to street, chased from city to city, and forced into silence by government functionaries and agencies. When investigative reports that name names are published, the reporters are abandoned to the sharks to devour. The police, who should fight corruption, intimidate investigative journalists, through bizarre invitations, based on complaints for those fingered for corrupt practices. This contradicts what the police should do. In a society that seriously intends to fight corruption, the police must take up leads provided by investigative journalists to probe further and bring suspects to book. In Nigeria, it takes the opposite route, victimising journalists whose work is geared towards entrenching transparency and accountability in Nigeria. At another level, lawyers have joined the crowd resisting investigative journalism by writing letters, on behalf of their clients, to journalists, to stop journalists from carrying out investigative reporting. Security agencies are using the Cybercrime Act to harass online journalists, accusing them of cyberstalking, and stifling every effort to probe wrongdoing and corruption, especially at the state level. Terrorizing journalists who attempt to expose corruption is antithetical to the legal frameworks put in place to fight corruption; it is like corruption fighting back through security agencies. From all indications, top civil and public servants know how corruption is perpetrated; they know those involved in corruption; they have evidence of corruption; and many participate in corruption. So, they hardly lift a finger to oppose it. This is not how to fight corruption.
