“Every society gets the kind of criminals it deserves”. – Robert F. Kennedy.
When we mention nationalization, the concept that first comes to mind is the transfer of assets or commodities from being privately owned to being publicly owned or controlled.
What does not come to mind is the notion of transfer of ideologies, principles and concepts, from privately imbibed to publicly or more generally imbibed or accepted. This has a huge influence on the direction any group would go as regards progress, stagnation or retrogression.
Now, follow me.
In the early stages, vice when repeatedly taken to certain extremes, is termed deviance or criminality, but when criminality has permeated the majority of a system, when it has been etched deeply in the mindset of a group, it is no longer merely criminality, that level of rot is called corruption.
That is the stage when the system no longer possesses the moral leverage or intrinsic justification to prosecute the wrong doer, when what should ordinarily be an an anomaly, has attaindattained ascendancy in the internal lattices of the system.
Unfortunately, this process can occur on a much larger scale, it can occur with nations who fail to be vigilant, and we are discussing Nigeria.
Around the world, we see the different qualities and tenets imbibedand absorbed by both rising nations and those in decline, and from the respective practices we can draw a trajectory for prosperity and progress for both cases almost accurately.
The nations who imbibed grit, industry and the penchant for riding favourable tides even as recently as fifteen years ago have fared far better than those that began well on the surface.
On the other hand, the nations in decline who have internalised graft and sharp practices along the way,even with a fifty years head start, indvertantly fall behind because internal decay eventually brings about visible breakdown in all spheres of the nations plagued by corruption.
Consequently, whatever methods, behaviors, or inclinations a people imbibe and absorb, or for this case “nationalizse”, they will eventually give account of, and the reckoning will be taken at some point further down their path.
Without delving too deeply ,any onlooker can see how Nigeria is faring in the reckoning,the present hardships and woes suffered by majority of the populace is directly connected to our nationalized practices. Of these practices, one stands out preeminently, and that one is an unbridled level of Corruption.
For the more favorable outlook, an adequately honed sense of nationalism in majority of a populace may not be enough to protect them from the worst the human nature can muster but what it can do is ,it can serve as a beacon of hope for the better, going forward.
An unalloyed sense of nationalism is what it takes to galvanize citizens whose nations find themselves in doldrums and stagnations, into the single mindedness that births a uniformity in the drive to achieve growth and emancipation from mediocrity or worse.
The singular mindset fostered by nationalism has been sufficient to drag nations away from the brinks,into developmental strides that have been heralded the world over. India serves here as a case study, having dragged half the population of the second most populous nation from poverty in the decade between the years 2006 to 2016.
The population being discussed for India is around the billion mark ,and half that is double the population of Nigeria in the most conservative assessments. In India they were able to exploit their demographic window to boost their advancement in information technology and related services along with a general utilisationutilization of their large population,to improve from a third world country in dire straits ,to an economic power alongside leading nations like the U.S and China.
But we are discussing Nigeria, whose demographic window is a more favourable one than India’s, albeit with a largely smaller population, yet such indices should portend a scenario where cases like that of India can be replicated through application of a proper mindset.
Currently, that is too much to ask in Nigeria.
Rather what we are witnessing is a primitive mindset, working one of the grandest cons the world has ever seen on its populace, playing pretend on sustainable development, an approach that will never work to move us forward.
This is a situation where the intrinsic nature and mentality of those tasked with shaping the minds of the society, those tasked with protecting the individual lives in society, those tasked with the defensce of the vulnerable ,and prosecution of the offenders are all equally twisted across board.
As for the mind shapers, and here I mean the educational and learning institutitutions,these are themselves deeply compromised entities, a cesspool of mediocrity and sleaze, constantly complaining over respective governments of the day, but themselves corrupt despots like the regimes they denigrate, running a smaller representation of all they claim to eschew. These include money and sexual favours for grades,compromised standards and processes for admissions, victimization of students,the use of old and outdated course curriculums, and a general apathy towards the building of the students under their supervision.
A looped continuum that can never improve itself,or the graduates they churn out,except for the occasionally rare cases.
And what about the defenders, the police and other armed bodies in the country, theirs is probably an evil highly rare the world over. Their Broad daylight collecting of bribes along major roads all over the country,guns for hire,saboteurs of their fellow officers,illegal arrests and detentions,planting of evidence,and of course the ever present apathy against those they are tasked to protect.
They will blame most of their excesses on poor working conditions and low salaries,lies to defend their greed and incompetence.
For our legal institutions,I leave this to the imagination,considering their silence in the face of a system rife with multiplicity of damning ills and breakdowns.
For those with designs on truly rescuing Nigeria from the dregs and abyss of self-inflicted retrogression and decay, theirs is the onerous task of cleansing, or attempting to cleanse a nation whose preoccupation and creed has been the furtherance of it’s own internal rot, and the violation of virtually every single principle or institution prerequisite in the building of nationalism and patriotism in the hearts of its citizens.
It truly is bleak,perhaps even worse than can be explained.
A heartless government,abjectly wicked institutions,decadence,and a populace whose individuals expactantly wait their opportunity for governance,swindling the electorate,bribing and even killing their way in so they can mete out all of what they suffered in the hands of their predecessors on those still on the outside,and so the cycle continues.
In the end,what do we truly understand the nationalization of corruption to be? What can the be expected from it repeated perpetration? Well In a hopelessly looped continuum, the nationalization of corruption is defined as the total corruption of nationalism.
Mr Boma Princewill
AFRICA THISDAY 