Nigeria Content Online

What if someday,
the choice over who should occupy the highest elected office in this
country should come down to a decision between two disparate types?

The first sort, a
relatively honest candidate with sufficient resolve, a stiff upper lip,
and a perception of government’s role in the development process
constructed around the belief that personhood is only possible through
the people or community. The second, a person, flawed in many respects,
but who understands the limitations of insisting on the public
provision of every conceivable service in today’s much changed
environment; one, in other words, who sees the individual in society.

Admittedly, the
choices before the national plebiscite are rarely this facile. But
until a couple of weeks ago, I was minded to plump for integrity as the
non-negotiable minimum for national leadership, if we are ever to
escape the cul-de-sac in which we find ourselves. I would thus have
voted for integrity in political office, over competence with
demonstrable flaws. Five decades after independence, it is clear that
corruption is a much more complex phenomenon than we are wont to
concede. There are the obvious economic costs to it.

The private
benefits from sordid dealings and authorised thieving are more than
compensated for by the huge costs imposed on society as a whole in
terms of opportunities foregone (including from the facility with which
beneficiaries of the corrupt system repatriate their loot and the
reluctance of foreign investors to put their money here). Corrupt
practices also lower the quality of life, since society bears generally
higher costs across every department on its account.

But now, I realise
that corruption’s moral burden is the more insidious one. This is not
solely a matter of being forced to take positions behind concepts of
right and wrong. It is more about the way these positions then force a
template of values on us. Because the inequities generated by a corrupt
environment force fundamental convictions, through these convictions,
corruption erodes the middle ground that is so essential to agreement
on the consensuses needed to move an economy like this out of the rut
that it is in.

You are either in
support of individuals feathering their nests, on the argument that
such actions are inevitable until a responsible state emerges which
then goes ahead to render such “private insurance” unnecessary. Or you
are firmly against irregular access to the public till, convinced that
the process of generating this “private insurance” is the short leash
that reins in the emergence of a responsible government.

There is no in
between. Or so I was persuaded until recently. Even in the choice of a
president for the country, the attitude to sleaze and access to public
funds I’d felt is the most important. But supposing this indignation
with the sad and bad effects of corruption in all spheres of our
national life joins (as it seems to have) with a crypto-left wing
aversion to all forms of wealth, and instead of a programme of economic
development and social progress based on the release of individual
entrepreneurial skills, decides instead to democratise poverty?

Put differently,
rather, instead, than conceive of government as an arbiter of the
extremes of wealth and want that a free enterprise system generates,
supposing our quest for a less corrupt leadership leads us to vote for
a mindset that imagines government as necessary for collectivising
agriculture, nationalising factories, and expropriating the emergent
(and “thieving”) entrepreneurial middle class.

We’d be doomed!
There is strong evidence that a culture of private provision is
superior to that of public provision. And this evidence is not from
1989 when the Berlin Wall collapsed. Nor from a bit earlier, when
Margaret Thatcher showed how powerful the individual becomes once shorn
of the constraints of the state. Instead, it comes from observing the
mercantile leaning of our people.

Better therefore,
to support a known thief who would, after having gorged his or herself
at the trough, have the good sense to leave private enterprise alone.
Nay, have the good sense to create conditions that help entrepreneurs
thrive. Undoubtedly, there’s so much that is wrong with having to
choose between South Korea under Syngman Rhee, and Tanzania under the
Nwalimu Nyerere, when other less unsightly examples (especially
Singapore) recommend themselves so strongly.

However, if ever this particular push should come to shove, we should look to the policy outcomes as we choose.