#corruptioninnigeria

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Nigerians Celebrate Looters with Government Positions – Emir Sanusi Laments

Muhammadu Sanusi II, the former Emir of Kano, has expressed strong disapproval over what he describes as a moral collapse in Nigerian governance and societal values. During an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Wednesday, Sanusi voiced concern about the normalization of corruption and the culture of rewarding known looters with high-ranking government roles. According to…

Nigerians Celebrate Looters with Government Positions – Emir Sanusi Laments

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Marrying a Nigerian Bride as a Transactional Affair, and a Society That Prioritise Money Over Morals and Values

If money is the least of your problems, you have a 100 percent chance of living the best life in a money conscious society like Nigeria. Like every other thing you can use money to acquire, marrying a Nigerian bride, also taking into consideration all the customs and tradition you have to observe, having the right amount of money is the major determinant in wether the wedding will hold or not. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); You can singlehandedly determine the time and duration and manner in which you want the wedding ceremony to run because you can lift the financial weight of marrying your Nigerian bride. There are other stakeholders who should normally have their say concerning the whole event, but everybody looks around only for the money bag and they act accordingly. This frequently thrown-around statement best describes this scenario: “money stops nonsense.” Love don't cost a thing? Who ever said ‘love don’t cost a thing’ had better wake up from their ‘Lala land’ they are snoring away to. Nigeria is one “world” I know money turns around in its own axis, because you can get virtually everything done with money here. There are other challenges that money cannot solve though. But having liquid cash can make them seem nonexistent as people only value you by how much money you can doll out, not so much as other qualities or values you might possess. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); The moral decadence Who would want to develop good virtues and values when, while growing up, it seems only the people who possess certain amount of money and wealth the Nigerian system work for. Because you know it is survival of the fittest, a jungle, you had better from your tender age, start looking for all available avenues to make this money — no one cares in the society how you made it — they are just waiting to praise God for how he has blessed you and, also having faith your kind financial breakthrough will happen to them, too. Rich vs not so rich

What do you think will be the outcome when you have a civil case with a much richer opponent and the police had to be involved. Like an auction goes to the the highest bidder, you might as well look for a relative who is more richer than your opponent to come to your aid if you don’t want to lose out before it even gets to the court. You know auctioneers would naturally favour the highest bidder. That is why you’ll see someone who is richer than you tell you they will deal with even when they are the one at fault. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Even on the street Do you just wake up in the morning feeling like you owe everybody in Nigeria some money. From the courtesy visit from the beggar who waits on hand for you to collect your change from the commercial bike man, so that you can put it into good use by handing it directly to him. To the street boys that stay on you like guided missile until you come up with some kind of magic that draws some naira currency from you. To the bus conductor who holds on to your change long enough, even after entreaties from you for your change, so that you forget and he can ride home with someone’s money he stole without using a gun. Buy your way to good grade You are about to finish school and you realise you have ‘worked really hard’ maintaining a low cgpa from you 100 level to 300 level. To get yourself a higher cgpa is just a matter of applying your money in the right places, and all you have to do is just feel accomplished. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); That job can be yours. Where is the money? Looking for your dream job? Hey, save enough money, we have a market out there where the juicy jobs are sold to the highest bidder. What is the whole essence of getting trained in the university in the first place anyway. You can buy voters too You are a politician. You can ditch your manifesto. We don’t have that much education to care about what’s in it for us in the next four years. Who cares about them anyway. You know how well you and your colleagues in your political class have mismanaged the economy to a halt, hence earning us the ‘prestigious’ title of ‘poverty capital of the world.’ Therefore, the only way you see yourself winning an election is sharing money to the electorate who have been disenfranchised for so long and just want to satisfy their immediately want. They are usually the people who have suffered under repressive economic policies, looting and mismanagement by their leaders. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Skull miners on the prowl And there are those who withdraw their own money from the dark spiritual realm. A place where the unfortunate is sent to by way of killing them and severing their body parts and using it for money rituals. You see and hear cases of missing persons, and when they are found, they are usually dead, hands, eyes, private parts, heads missing. You wonder what ferocious beast is lurking around doing this — people like you with pretty and handsome faces everywhere — they are looking for money. Relationship between the transactional side of marrying a Nigerian bride and a society that prioritise money over morals and values The groom, the bride, and both their families are an integral part of a society that cares more about money than other things of value which a healthy society yearns for. So there is no gain saying when I conclude our culture and traditions as regards the wedding ceremony; only puts serious pressure mostly on the groom to make available money every step of the way in a typical Igbo or Yoruba wedding.

As an outsider who is experiencing a Nigerian wedding for the first time, instead of observing and appreciating the rich culture and traditions that a typical Nigerian wedding has to showcase, all that can be beclouded by the intense and vigorous involvement of making one payment or another at every step of the way during the ceremony. This is direct reflection of what is generally obtainable in a society prioritise money over morals and values. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); The transactional aspect of marrying a Nigerian bride Nigeria as we know has three dominant tribes: Hausa/Fulani to the northern part. Igbo to the eastern part. And Yoruba to the south-western part of Nigeria. All the weddings ceremonies that hold from all other tribes, about 300 of them, in Nigeria are influenced in part or whole by these three major tribes. Therefore, I am only going to dwell these three starting from the Hausa-Fulani tribe.

The Hausa-Fulani Sharo wedding festival What fascinates me about the sharo wedding practice, is the fact that you have to go through life threatening pains, in a flogging bout with your opponent, in order to prove yourself worthy of the bride. They say love is pain. This time around it is not emotional pain; this is you getting beat up with cain by the other suitor contesting for the bride against you. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); On one occasion a suitor lost his life on the account of subjecting himself to a flogging match with an opponent who, unintentionally target the back of his neck and it was light out. On getting to the hospital, before they could attend to him, he was already dead. He paid the ultimate price for a transaction affair of marrying a Nigerian bride. The Yoruba igbeyawo

It is a tradition in the Yoruba wedding (igbeyawo) that the groom with your friends and family must meet their waiting in-laws at the venue of the ceremony. The time between getting to the venue of the “igbeyawo” and actually meeting the bride’s family, is riddled with hurdles of sundry payments which, many are times, bore out the groom and his family. It is payment galore within that period. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); And when the groom and his family eventually meet their in-laws to make official request for the hand of their daughter in marriage, they are subjected to various other payments that have no receipt. Marrying a Nigerian bride does not involve you having a receipt, sorry. At a point, the bride’s parent will return the bride price back to the couple emphatically stating that they are not selling their daughter into marriage and they wouldn’t want any harm to come to her. However, prior to the date of the “igbeyawo,” the groom must have spent a fortune checking every item on the list of things required of him by the bride’s family. One thing you cannot take away from the Yoruba in-laws is that they can be flexible and accommodating of the groom’s financial inadequacy. Don’t bank on that though. Be prepared. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Marrying the bride from Imo state The Igbo people are some of the most business oriented people In the world. A typical Igbo man wakes up in the morning thinking of profit and loss, and his day-to-day activity has to be something that brings in money. If it will not result to some profit for him, forget it, he has no business dealing with you. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); The same goes for the Igbo father who is giving his daughter out to marriage. Such a man knows what have many daughters mean — payday upon payday. A suitor who is aware that his bride-to-be is from mbaise, Imo state in the east, “has to buckle his belt” properly so that his trouser don’t fall off. Because, the things he’ll be asked to buy (the list), the amount of money need for it is no child’s play. When it is not affordable

In some instances, suitors have had to postpone the traditional marriage because they could not come up with the amount of money needed to take up all the requirements for the wedding.

For those intending couples who see this as barrier because of the groom’s financial state, and they don’t want it to stop them from being a couple, they go ahead living together as man and wife. However, the husband is always reminded that if he doesn’t come to do the things required of him, the kids he has with their daughter are not his yet; they belong to the bride’s parents. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Conclusion Nigeria is one society where amassing stupendous wealth puts you on a level where you feel you are invisible to life challenges of a regular citizen. You can get away with many and everything as along as you know the price to pay any opposing force or entity. The cultures and traditions we claim to uphold and cherish are nothing without money. Especially with the traditional weddings, when there’s no application of money, it may turn to an event with bad bloods and counter bad bloods. Read the full article

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Corruption threatens Nigeria and its election - President Buhari

Read a new article wrtten by President Buhari below On February 16th, Nigeria will hold a general election. Four years ago, the country experienced its first democratic transfer of power to the opposition since 1999. The vote in a few days will be no less significant. As president, I have tried to judiciously exercise the trust vested in me to combat the problems of corruption, insecurity and an inequitable economy. All are important. But amongst them, one stands above the others as both a cause and aggravator of the rest. It is, of course, corruption. A policy programme that does not have fighting corruption at its core is destined to fail. The battle against graft must be the base on which we secure the country, build our economy, provide decent infrastructure and educate the next generation. This is the challenge of our generation: the variable on which our success as a nation shall be determined. But the vested interests at play can make this fight difficult. By way of their looting, the corrupt have powerful resources at their disposal. And they will use them. For when you fight corruption, you can be sure it will fight back. It even threatens to undermine February’s poll and – by extension – our democracy. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has raised concerns over laundered money being funnelled into vote buying. This is the problem of corruption writ large. It illustrates how it lurks in all and every crevice of public life, manipulating due process in pursuit of self-preservation and perpetuation; protecting personal political and economic interests at the expense of the common good. Indeed, those who have criticised my administration’s anti-corruption drive are those who oppose its mission. And though their lawyers may craft expensive alibis, they cannot escape that which binds them together: a raft of documents and barely legal (some clearly illegal) mechanisms – whether that be the Panama Papers, US Congress reports, shell companies or offshore bank accounts. Corruption corrodes the trust on which the idea of community is founded, because one rule for the few and another for everyone else is unacceptable to anyone working honestly. But as we have intensified our war on corruption, so we have found that corruption innovates to resist the law. This is not the sole domain of those Nigerians, but the international corruption industry: the unsavoury fellow-traveler of globalisation. Once the enablers are let in – as they have been in the past – the greed of those they collude with grows. We have closed the door on them, but unfortunately there still remain individuals who are willing to open windows. Concrete progress has been made, but there is still much to do. We have repatriated hundreds of millions of dollars stowed away in foreign banks. These funds have been transparently deployed on infrastructural projects and used to directly empower the poorest in society. More is still to come from our international partners in France, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Yet the hundreds of billions sifted out of the country for the best part of this century promise more. We have secured high profile convictions, but greater cases remain. Lawyers table endless objections to obstruct court proceedings, whilst their clients hope it lasts until a ‘friendly’ president is voted into office. We must continue to tighten the legal framework and ensure the authorities have the investigative powers at their disposal to secure sentences. Only then will we begin to neutralise the advantages the corrupt have. More ghost workers must be removed from government payroll (almost $550 million has been saved from identifying phantom employees). More can be recovered through our whistle-blower policy ($370 million has been returned since its launch in 2016). More is still to come. But, together, we shall prevail over corruption. A Yoruba proverb states that only the patient one can milk a lion. Likewise, victory over corruption is difficult, but not impossible. We must not flounder in our resolve. I know many Nigerians would like to see faster action. So do I. But so too must we follow due process and exercise restraint, ensuring allegation never takes the place of evidence. For that is not the Nigeria we should wish to build. There is no doubt that this Administration has changed the way we tackle corruption. The choice before voters is this: Do we continue forward on this testing path against corruption? Or do revert to the past, resigned to the falsehood that it is just the-way-things-are-done? Or that it is just too difficult – too pervasive – to fix? I know which one I would choose. It is why I am asking Nigerians for another four years to serve them. MUHAMMADU BUHARI, PRESIDENT, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA Read the full article