BY DR AUSTIN ORETTE
It is becoming very tiresome to listen to the negative stories of corruption. It has become fashionable to ask the question “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?
No day goes by without the story of corruption and people complaining incessantly about the odious system. With all the gall and bitterness that Nigerians complain about corruption, no one has defined the entity called corruption.
Corruption here, corruption there and corruption everywhere but the Nigerian conveniently excludes himself as the purveyor of corruption. He is good while the other people are bad. His tribesmen are good because they are not in power. His barometer of corruption is always subjective.
Corruption is an activity done by others but never us. If we are to build a just society we have to be honest with ourselves and understand that if corruption is a bacteria, it cannot grow in a sterile medium.
To eradicate corruption, we have to examine ourselves and the role each and every one of us is playing to foster corruption in Nigeria. We should not aspire to have good leaders when we are not good citizens. The leadership we have now is an accurate representation of who we are.
Crying to God to intervene is not the solution. God learnt his lesson the last time he sent his son to a corrupt world. You guys crucified him. Someone said he only picked his pocket in a Moline. After all, he is the son of God while we are ordinary humans who are hungry.
We can eradicate corruption if we clearly define it and accept that we are the problems, not the leaders. The leaders are just representatives of us. We should not expect a good leader to come from amongst us when we are not good citizens.
When you look at the literature of other lands where corruption was a problem, you could see clearly these lands have master teachers who provided them with existential philosophy. China had Confucius and Lai Tao; the West had Descartes, Schopenhauer Nietzsche and the rest who examined the meaning of life. These people wrote and preached provocative ideas that woke up their fellow citizens from the slumber of unbridled materialism and careless existence that had no meaning.
Where are our wise men in Nigeria? They have all surrendered to gospels of foreign religions that extol materialism and hedonism that leads to the decay of our existence. We as a people have surrendered to life without meaning where the pursuit of materials is everything.
We are all in a brutal struggle to out ego our egos. Every institution that was erected to tame this corruption becomes a breeding ground for corruption.
Then another is set up to rectify the previous and it becomes a school of corruption. This is why we suffer. We shout and bellow that we are saints being oppressed by demons when we are the ones who built the altar of worship to these demons. If we can find a way to exorcise these demons from ourselves, we can begin to say we are ready to eradicate corruption.
Let us start by questioning people’s source of wealth. Don’t dine with them if they can’t explain it. Sudden wealth should always be questioned and interrogated. Failure to participate in this exercise is an indication where our loyalties lie or the hunger in the neighborhood has been weaponized against us.
DR AUSTIN ORETTE WRITES FROM HOUSTON, TEXAS
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