The new government in charge in Nigeria has embarked on a long overdue campaign against corruption. While the main focus is on the bigwigs, it is rather strange that ordinary folks appear to feel the crunch of the latest anti-corruption drive the most. Just maybe, more than ever before, Nigerians will come to terms with the reason why to the rest of the world, corruption is synonymous with Nigerians, not just the Niger-area they live in.
In an atmosphere where a large population doesn’t have simple answers to the most basic problems of their nation or indeed the slightest inkling of what the problems really are that are responsible for the overwhelming symptoms of such despicable magnitude, rectifing problems become hopeless. The entire nation seems to be calling out for any kind of lingering respite to a problem they don’t actually understand fully.
“The Niger-area calls out its people to arise as compatriots, to answer the call and obey, to serve diverse yearnings with their quest for spoils of all kinds. The people’s labour of long past shall never be in vain, as long as they serve with might and heart, to function based on little selfless wisdom and plenty of eased up selfish insanity. ”
The Niger-area is the freest region on the African continent, if not the world. Its people laugh at the slaves of freedom in the west, who are not aware of what freedom truly gives them, if they are not really free to do as they honestly like. The many limitations that come with the organized lifestyles of so called developed nations render their long tested freedom styles tasteless and makes them a rich tasteless meal, exotic only because its classy whiff is an attachment of convenience to be eaten with only the right kind of cutleries.
However, in a land where business is not about service too, but primarily for the profit craved for, then profit is not the two way traffic it ought to be. Profit should satisfy both ways, and not some individual obsession of those who are able to dominate everything and everyone in everyway. The discipline people show in their business is packed full of the opportunities they create for only themselves. It is this kind of orientation they comes along with functions in the Niger-area’s civil service, where and when the public servants bully their way into roles that further enslaves the common people they already dominate in all aspects of daily living.
The larger percentage of the Niger-area public servants’ stewardship continues to seek personal profit first, as they indiscriminately excel in their private pursuits mainly. The civil service is all about serving others and not self, hence a conflict is eminent at every turn of the people’s daily quest when those paid to serve their interest only serve themselves instead. This trend doesn’t follow the concept of separate entity which business and private ownership thrives on steadily.
It is the peoples’ life dependent desire to suffice amidst a mounting list of inabilities that forces them to react with cooperating with the corruption than solves their lack of fair opportunities. These corrupt civil servants, forcibly imposed military leaders and highly favoured politicians, deny the people their simply right to public service. The people of the Niger-area simply live in a mazy enclave of a grand collusion of all brands of public authority, functioning mainly in the most practicable means of corruption known to civilized man the world over.
The people’s labour for a fair opportunity to live comfortably is denied them by the lustful abilities of the nation’s leadership, represented not just by the elite but even the ordinary folks in simple places of authority. The simple rewards most privilege people receive for work done is full of abnormalities. The typical civil servant in the Niger-area can oddly afford to live well beyond their official means. They accomplish this feat against all odds because literally the land is full of partakers in this national pastime, in one form or another. It is an insurmountable anomaly that is ironically both cruel and favourable to all and sundry across the board, from an objective point of view. The lucky employed people’s capacity to do their work is continuously polished by everyone else, at the expense of the nation’s credibility. The nation appears to breed a long continous line of similarly gifted and well groomed corrupt people. It is a frustrating experience to abolish corruption in the Niger-area because everyone agrees they are not corrupt but thrive on corruption either directly or indirectly; everyone and everybody. The people of the Niger-area thrive from corruption, more than they do without it. For every single thing lost in the proper form, there isn’t a replacement in the improper form to supplement. Planning has to be on a last-card basis, few risks ever taken.
The nation’s leadership lost out on the key point of note. They failed to realize the importance of creating genuine honest opportunities for employees at the best rates of remuneration. It is the best way to reduce corruption, if there is a genuine will to do so. In the depth that makes up the core of the swelling problems of the nation is a deep set adherence to the reliable unwritten laws of corruption, which always sees to it that both the masses and the elite get through their common difficulties of getting even the simplest things done. It is the readily available factor which can be enlisted as the means of the practical aid needed to overcome basic problems of basic origins. Corruption is boisterous and exuberant in being so appropriate in providing solutions where there are none in sight. The people have always faulted corruption for many of their woes, hypocritical adjudging their assumed or presumed high standards for what they consider as fair and justified. They generally speak ill of the same corruption they rely heavily on to get undue advantage over each other at every given point they feel stuck, which is often.
Almost every time in the most corrupt circumstances, it is the undeserving person who deserves but is made unfortunate for purely manipulated reasons. The elite and the masses alike, readily use their privileged placings to their advantage and utilize bureaucratic bottle necks to their personal favour and this is always to personalized effect. The whole nation has stereotyped its view of institutionalized entities as a complex world of activities that render specific selfish functions to those within it that are favoured. Member of the society forget that what constitute an organized setting is basically the people. Formal entities are made of separate single individuals that function in their own personal capacities of family and at community levels first, and these are practically informal. Their daily functions as separate micro units are guided by their orientations and relationships with others.
These play a huge role in the manner people present themselves, within a larger context. This also includes how they represent their selfish desire to explore every possible means to get the upper hand at all times, irrespective of who is most deserving. Their efforts always buttress those actions that are constantly seeking to unset the perceived advantage of rivals. All visible encouragement obviously given to this trend is strictly insinuated by the general popular acceptance it receives. This is so especially from the inactions of the multitude concerned with it, the same people that get the bad end of these constantly reoccurring discreet corrupt practices. It is these same clearly disadvantaged persons who actually cheer the numerous gains of corruption and they identify with the reverence it gets in their communities that claim to abhor corruption. This irony is not only contradictory to their verbally professed beliefs, but it is also genuinely complex in revelation. It is completely opposite to what the aspiration for their nation as a whole is.
The country has become filled up with steadily growing perpetrators of the ills of corruption, so much that it is so hard to tell which form of it is derogatory and which isn’t anymore. Corruption has lost its bad face and with its constant gains as a sure means to get firm results; deservedly or not, its human vice status has gained more public appeal and taken on a popular human face. Corruption has bought itself an esteemed status with its visible gains and encouraged more and more people to partake with increasingly conscious intent. With its new air of acceptability, corruption naturally leads the whole community, with a visibly conscious flair. Almost everyone but not everyone, lives in the Niger-area with the honest knowledge that given the same opportunities as those in the most privileged positions, most of those now disadvantaged will happily do the same corrupt stuff, the very same corrupt things they are noisily criticizing others for doing presently.
The ordinary folks readily make all the other less privileged people around them as disadvantaged as they are and don’t think twice about it, because they see through the smoke screens and identify with the origin of their indigenous corrupt tendencies. The ethical origins of corruption are still evident in its manifestation as it was the case in the old days. Definitely the archaic and primitive ways of doing things had not been alone in bringing out the odd need to seek favours from those who can deliver and to gratify their own personal natural needs and lustful wants for merely doing so. Their resolve is to ensure that they follow their lust for selfish gains and still adhere to the dominant national principle of taking advantage of others always, and letting others take advantage of them on the same parallel.
They pay for these corrupt practices in every possible way, through varied and quietly unclear means, with clearly stated or insinuated terms. The insinuation is always clear even if the mode of payment isn’t always. The generous nature of all the perpetrators of corruption deceives by its actions and the lies it tells are quite intentional in every sense of it. All the benefactors are fools because they are used to satisfy a bigger need than they could provide for themselves and are thus only a means to another person’s brief joy, which they can not claim to enjoy too.
That is the only telling streak of corruption that is never necessitated by its course of action, an action not initially viewed as the selfish act it is. It is an action that always resumes its pull for a solution within the sphere of human attraction for individual needs first of all, and then a desire to maximize gains by all workable means. Each lie used to achieve this goal is a generous tool that is evidently steered towards that singular purpose of offering an insinuated insult to the individual who yields to corrupt advances. By succumbing to these advances, the individual is lowering the logical sense of value of their individuality. What credible worth that accrues to an individual is tainted and lost in due course with corrupt practices.
The Niger-area is heavily dependent on corruption and its civility lives within a peaceful anarchy, as a direct result of this. Civility endures the pains of justice when it is denied and suffers the roughness of a terrain it has no exact control over but must still live in. Strangely, it is unfairly just because it appropriately makes a case for the kind of prosperity the society finally attains. The kind of value the society gets at the end of the day characterizes the value it attaches to its well-being as a knitted modern society. A massive majority of the people represent this rude truth that runs in the essence of the nation. More than anything else, this speaks for the holistic national character of the entire nation, if nothing else does.
The popularity of corruption is cultural in the Niger-area and its visible effect makes it an accepted norm, embraced mainly because of its success, employed for its viability and endeared for its reliability. It lingers on for this simple reason as the whole country stares with awe as nothing else steadily brings a logical end to corruption without also ending established cultural norms, as they have always existed. Corruption has taken on the same meaning as what was erstwhile proper in the people’s custom. It has suitably taken on a similar face, like the use of faith and belief interchangeably. By admitting this contrasting advantage and shortcoming of malicious corruption, both perpetrators and critics of corruption simply affirm its strengths. The futility in the people’s competing selfish thinking and eventual deeds always comes to the fore even when it is negatively accepted. This likens how true faith always takes root with the illogicality of hope, while it is logical to assume that the reasoning of hope establishes individual and collective faith.
Corrupting became excusable in a land that symbolizes despots as successful icons, where incredibly expensive luxuriously reliable strong four wheel drives and huge standard utility vehicles aren’t only symbols of waste but essentially convenient means of transporting ostentatiously paid important public servants over badly maintained old highways. In a land where hard working people who desire to work for their earnings and have no wish to achieve anything from being lazy but from the harsh unpleasantness of earning an honest living, nothing has proven to be as resourceful to the diverse people as ramifications of corruption has.
Nothing fashioned against the resounding might of corruption prospers in the Niger-area because nothing has as yet replaced or promised to replace its real abundant achievements for the people who grew up relying on it for succor. If the people as one whole identifiable package, with the same single identity, do not have guaranteed legal access to the benefits of their nationhood and they must remain as one entity, then they will obviously take it without any consideration for how legally they do. They will stream out of their shores in search of the golden fleece they know they world offers and will look from it to the ends of the world. The people of the Niger-area will search in the most obscure lands, much poorer than their local villages, which they ran away from. They search in streets that are dirtier than their toilets or refuse heaps, look inside jails more hostile than their indigenous battle fields, in communities that hate them for just visiting. They look for more the only way they had learnt at home; the only way they see work.
The people’s determined whispers stir reasoning ideally fake, just like the leadership they always follow. They mimic a wrongly expressed sincerity and they have raised a banner that says as much to themselves and every other onlooker. Theirs is a fakeness that is too pronounced to be viewed as something else. They reek of shame as a people but individually claim holiness. A whole tradition altered itself to suit its fakeness and finds itself functioning not like it envisaged but like it fraudulently dared to, only so that it can sustain itself, as it calls itself.
FEVER SERIES
Fever: The Origins of Fever (Book I)
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Fever: Rising Temperature of Fever (Book II)
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http://okadabooks.com/book/about/11389
Fever: The Appetite of Fever (Book III)
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https://www.createspace.com/5195617
http://okadabooks.com/book/about/11390
Fever: Gentle Aching Fever (Book IV)
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/432470
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00YUOGDFS
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https://www.createspace.com/5195618
http://okadabooks.com/book/about/11391
Fever: The Coldness of Fever (Book V)
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/451306
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00YUOYL7K
http://authl.it/B00YUOYL7K
https://www.createspace.com/5195619
http://okadabooks.com/book/about/11392
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