The United Bank for Africa recently “named and shamed” three forex defaulters by publishing their names on the bank’s website. The first two people on the list were said to have cancelled their trips but failed to return the Personal Travel Allowance availed them by the bank despite repeated correspondences by the bank agents. The third person allegedly used a fake visa to procure the PTA.
According to the Central Bank of Nigeria, the sharp practices of collecting the PTA in foreign currency at the official rate and retailing them in the black market were undermining the integrity of the forex market. Hence, the necessity of naming and shaming. I will not hold a brief for those three individuals. However, before alleging wilful dishonesty, did the CBN also consider the inconvenient fact that, given the exponential rate at which the currency is dwindling, the sum those people submitted to the bank in naira had also depreciated by the time they were being asked to return the PTA? Of course, the UBA followed a CBN directive, and so I will skip faulting their discretion on this. I will just focus on the wisdom of naming and shaming as a tactic of social control.
Shame is probably one of the most potent weapons for the force of good that human societies ever created. It could be an effective means of enforcing ethical expectations, promoting civility, and lessening transgressions. Shame induces guilt and an intense awareness of how one’s actions have breached social norms and threatened collective well-being. This introspection is not the end in itself. The self-disgust one experiences from reflecting on one’s action, ideally, leads towards repentance and restitution. Shaming tactic works well in cohesive societies where people’s ethics are universal, and the concept of having done something immoral or improper is relatively clear to most.
In contemporary Nigeria, the tactic of name and shame is routinely invoked but haphazardly applied. Some six years ago, some banks listed the names of hundreds of their bad debtors in full-page newspaper adverts after a three-month ultimatum given to them to redeem their debts expired. How well that tactic worked cannot be readily quantified because some of those people simply moved on after the sensation died down.
At the start of the Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.)’s presidency, he too promised to name and shame treasury looters. One year into his tenure, while departing London after attending an Anti-Corruption Summit, Buhari even vowed to disclose the amount his regime had recovered from treasury looters on Democracy Day. When the list finally came out, it was just a bunch of sterile figures. No names were mentioned, and therefore, nobody to shame.
When studying the effect of name and shame, perhaps there is no better case study in Nigeria than the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria. While AMCON has serially published the names of chronic debtors, one cannot readily determine whether those organisations paid up because they were ashamed of being on an infamous list of those owing the country an estimated N4tn. While individuals who would not return the PTA can be easily identifiable and hence be named and shamed, an organisation is a relatively abstract idea. Businesses can easily absorb whatever embarrassment they accrue from being a bad debtor owing a humongous amount of money than lone individuals can manage.
Even though there have been no objective means of measuring the effect of name and shame, the Nigerian government officials still invoke it when they are frustrated with the inefficacies of administrative processes. In March, Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, threatened to start naming and shaming those responsible for the perennial traffic logjam in Apapa so they could answer to Nigerians. In July, Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, also threatened to name and shame airlines that failed to conform with operational processes. Last week, the Chairman, Senate Committee on Public Accounts, Mathew Urhogide, too said they would name and shame the heads of government agencies indicted by the Office of the Auditor General of the Federation but who refused to show up before the legislators for their probe. These agencies’ heads shun legislators’ invitations, saying they were not accountable to them.
If you wonder when “name and shame” officially became a part of governance, or whether there are no better ways of ensuring compliance with juridical processes than such an approach, I would like to remind you that the government itself is not always consistent on this. For instance, when Justice Minister Abubakar Malami was interviewed on the repatriation of funds stolen by past government officials, he responded that they would not broadcast the names of those involved. Naming anyone, he insinuated, was tantamount to breaching confidentiality with the international agencies they were working with and that such imprudence could compromise efforts. Similarly, when presidential aide, Femi Adesina, was interrogated on the recent United Arab Emirates’ announcement of having six Nigerians on a terror list, he too stated that the Federal Government was not interested in naming and shaming but in bringing them to justice. Adesina’s remark was an interesting observation. His juxtaposition of “naming and shaming” with “justice” suggests that even they know its futility as a social control strategy.
The question is, what is it about Nigeria’s ethical character that makes naming and shaming an ineffective weapon? Government officials threaten to name and shame when they are frustrated with their inability to enforce anything because of the bluntness of Nigeria’s juridical instruments. The truth is that the only time the Nigerian political power achieves anything is when it is applied to terrorise people. Outside brutality and repression, political power in Nigeria has little performative force. That is why, government after government, our lives are not any better. When government names and shames the people on whom they cannot effectively apply the instrument of the law, what they do is cede the responsibility of enforcing social norms to ordinary Nigerians. If, for instance, Nigerians fail to shame either AMCOM debtors or UBA forex defaulters into paying up, the resulting disgrace from the inability to enforce standards is shared between the governor and the governed. Even more, the governor gets to disguise its impotence.
Perhaps, in smaller and homogenous societies, the naming and shaming tactic might even have worked. However, in diverse modern societies, there are no such guarantees. For Nigeria, those who threaten -or carry out their threat- to name and shame social transgressors themselves are people who should be adorned with scarlet letters. A senator threatening to name and shame corrupt heads of the MDAs is a joke laughing at its own mirth. They themselves are corrupt, and by that, I do not simply mean that they steal money but in the sense of breaching norms. The Nigerian leadership class politicians are permanent dwellers of moral breaches. That is why they lack the ethical force to summon anyone to explain financial misappropriation.
Finally, there should be simpler ways of de-motivating people from abusing the PTA than this name and shame strategy. Rather than regularly bombard them with multiple correspondences to return the PTA, why not just bar them from such privileges either indefinitely or over a period? Why would a bank put so much effort into pursuing some individuals over a few thousand dollars when everyone knows that is not the source of our forex troubles? The transactions killing Nigeria’s economy are not in the PTA those three people refused to return. We are being diminished by the arbitrage activities of rich and powerful people trafficking forex in the Federal Capital Territory. Even the CBN that directed defaulters’ names to be published knows the real culprits. If those people do not feel any self-disgust for what they do to Nigeria, why would the person who refused to return the PTA do either?
Besides, I would be careful naming and shaming transgressors in a place like Nigeria where virtually everyone is awaiting their chance to take a share of the national cake. Rather than people see defaulters as lawbreakers, they might even admire them for already doing what everyone else wants to do. That is how a perverse society makes its heroes.
Credit: Abimbola Adelakun, Punch