Thoughts on ‘stealing is not corruption’...By Abimbola Adelakun

There was something painful – and profoundly pitiable – watching President Goodluck Jonathan seated before millions of Nigeria at the last presidential media chat and labouring to defend an earlier assertion: That stealing is not corruption.

 When he first said it, he was simultaneously lampooned by critics, and praised by supporters for his philosophical insights. Some of the latter group have challenged the rest of us to an academic treatise; that we should tax ourselves to extending the frontiers of learning by analysing the President’s mind. I am tempted to agree with this group; academic debates are wholesome and much needed in confronting the anti-intellectual atmosphere Nigeria sometimes seems to be. 

What I suspect, however, is that the continuous fixation on the theorising of “stealing is not corruption” is a ploy to stagnate the debate in the realm of abstraction. Considering the damage corruption has done to us as a nation, such an attempt is an act of violence in itself. There are countless reiterations of “stealing is not corruption” in the media and elsewhere with the expression used to either score political points or turned into satire.

Due to the popularity of that (mis)statement, in years to come, the mantra will be one of President Jonathan’s many presidential legacies: a typification of his attitude towards a cultural failing. In future, Nigerians will recall the Jonathan Presidency as the years of the locust and how, by the President’s shunt attitude, the implications of his myriad faux pas were furthered by his attempts at conceptual conjectures.

His differentiation of the term, properly deconstructed, does have some merits but will still be perceived as a ruse to upturn staggering reality through frivolous deployment of language as refuge from the depravity of the political landscape. A debate on whether stealing is indeed corruption cannot alleviate the reality of the debilitating toll corruption has taken on Nigeria’s cultural, political and psychosocial atmosphere.

The unwillingness of the public to engage “stealing is not corruption,” it should be noted too, is not an indictment of collective intelligence but rejection of a yarn constantly woven to hoodwink a suspicious – even if ironically passive – public. If the same statement had been made by someone else, people would have listened differently. You cannot have an administration where flagrant acts of corruption are routinely overlooked and then hope to make things right by distinguishing between “stealing” and “corruption.”

Just lately, the Lagos State Peoples Democratic Party governorship candidate, Jimi Agbaje, was reportedly trying to use statistical abstraction to explain the success of President Jonathan in the area of corruption. He borrowed figures from Transparency International to justify his stand that nobody has fought corruption like the President – an assertion even Jonathan himself dares not make. Nobody should pretend that corruption is about figures and reports for, even the process of writing and re-writing those papers are tainted by the demon of corruption. If Jonathan knew he had fought corruption, he would be providing proofs, not announcing he is developing technology that will enable him to correct human behaviour.

“Stealing is not corruption” has been defended by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission Chairman, Ekpo Nta, who asked those who cannot differentiate between “stealing” and “corruption” to get an education. The President himself tried to derive some legitimacy for the statement during the media chat by attributing the statement to the ex-Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Dahiru Mustapher. The problem with such feeble attempts is that it neglects the point: that the messenger is the message. That when we look at Jonathan, we see all that he represents before even a word escapes his lips.

Watching the media chat, I waited for the President to give an idea into the workings of his mind by defining “corruption” and what it means to him. Beyond the rhetorical rigmarole, he ought to be pointedly asked the content of his moral philosophy. If the President can stand before the nation, prevaricate and ramble to justify an untenable position, then who is he when no one else is present? If we know his personal philosophy on corruption, a few more things will perhaps make more sense. The metaphor of a natural chemistry of a goat and yam the President used to explain people’s proclivity to corruption is telling.

 It would have been a cogent point except unlike goats, human beings are not creatures of instinct. There is a reason humans do not mate in public – unless you are on a Big Brother franchise – and this is because they are supposed to have evolved rationality.

After running a colourless tenure suffused with perhaps some of the most bizarre acts of looting that ever happened to us, Jonathan is running for second term against an opponent whose anti-corruption image seems to be the only thing he has got going for him.

 Ironically, even the All Progressives Congress has not articulated a coherent and realistic approach to tackling the issue of corruption to show that they are aware of its complexity and yet committed to restoring the nation’s integrity. Does that mean that if either party eventually wins, we would still be just as stuck?

The distinction Jonathan struggles to make between the two terms “corruption” and “stealing” is rather disingenuous because it neglects how the use of a language to express a thought (or an idea) endorses that which it initially gestures towards.

In other words, the language we use to describe all phenomena are arbitrary but through consistent use, meaning is consolidated such that people even get to share a cultural frame of reference. The way we frequently reach for the word “corruption” to describe social misdemeanour will probably be strange to a cultural outsider but Nigerians are not confused about what they are talking about when they attribute abuse of power, disruption of processes, and violation of systems to almighty corruption.

The claim the President makes that local languages do not have words in their vocabulary that convey the viciousness of corruption perhaps misses the point about translation and transplantation. If people are not sufficiently outraged when confronted with a case of someone who is said to have eaten public money as against describing him/her as “thief”, we should look for reasons beyond the realm of language.

More than his complaining about the overcharged use of “corruption,” it is long overdue to extract from the President a policy plan that details how he intends to correct a culture that has become almost biologically ingrained in the average Nigerian.

Source:  Punch