President of the Nigerian Senate, Senator Bukola Saraki, on Monday observed that the current anti-corruption war has not “yielded much success” because of too much sensationalism, tagging the current anti-corruption was as five ”minutes sensationalism”Speaking at the launch of a book written by Kogi West Senator, Dino Melaye tagged the ‘Antidotes for Corruption: The Nigerian Story’, Saraki said the fight against corruption should focus on deterrence and not punishment.
The Senate President said the current government was making effort in forcing back the menace.
He said, “I am convinced that why our fight against corruption has not yielded much success is that we have favoured punishment over deterrence.
”We must review our approaches by building our institutions to make it difficult for people to carry out corrupt practices.
“It is my view that the key area of prevention, we must work on, is to make it difficult for stolen money to find a home.
“We must fight corruption with sincerity, and not fight symptoms… unlike the five-minute sensationalism we have now. It must not be based on individuals but on institutions.
“Let us fight corruption with sincerity. If we fight corruption in a corrupt way, we will not make any headway.”
Ambiguity here! Punishment and deterrence? Punishment is the price for disobedience and deterrence is the cautionary act to serve as a lesson for such others who may want to ‘copy’ the misconduct of those being punished. Metaphorically, both serve the same purpose but the Nigerian ‘by all means’ mindset continually chuck deterrence as a meaningless, purposeless action.
In a pandering and wrongly imbibing nation, it is not unusual to see people fearful of those with privileged authority to a point where the majority become docile, subservient and intimidated. Senator Melaye claimed at the press chat that ‘even the roadside mechanic is corrupt’. The nation turned itself as an arena of ‘who dares wins’ decades ago, even before Melaye left the secondary school, so there is nothing strange if the socio-economic pyramidal structure dictates that ‘all and sundry’ can now seek legitimate/illegitimate means of survival. There are survivors and those living it big – which is why the senate president (chair-person of the book launch), is still found untouchable, despite his complicity in various topical corruption concerns in Nigeria’s history. One wonders then what the ‘state of the nation is’ in terms of democracy, good governance and workable administrative process. Most people may blame the current administration but let’s look back to immediate past to see how unenviable the position of the current administration is; and that is not granting them undue credit because, it’s been made obvious that they’re unprepared, disjointed in structure and with over-flexible, unrealistic political ideology. A pessimist may forecast the ‘worse’ of 2 (PDP/APC) despite some significant endeavours being undertaken at the moment. Yes, it’s a first of its kind, but with the process, Nigerians also want to see the product.