O.O. Okereke
Department of Government/Public Administration
Abia State University
Uturu.
ABSTRACT
The poverty rate in Nigeria is high. The poor are so called because they lack the resources to meet their basic needs. The lower class public servants are poor because their income is not enough to meet their basic needs. The desire to live up to their responsibilities forces them into corrupt practices. It is argued here that lower class public servants are corrupt because they are poor. Therefore, to combat {he tendency towards corruption among this class of public servants, they must be adequately remunerated, and regularly too, realistically implement the anti-corruption law and enforce bureaucratic control measures that are already in place.
INTRODUCTION
Corruption practices among Nigerian citizens, high or low, are well known. This has constituted a serious problem to the development of the Nigerian society. International economic interactions between Nigerians and the countries of Europe and America are affected adversely by the phenomenon of corruption. Relationship between Nigerians and citizens of other countries are characterized by caution and mistrust.
In Nigeria, corruption has assumed an alarming proportion. It has permeated all facets of society, running through all classes- upper, middle, and lower classes. If there are differences, such differences are only in terms of degree. The difference in degree is due largely to differences in the circumstances of the classes. The presence of corruption has become pervasive in Nigeria. Whether in private or public enterprises its presence is felt. Corruption has virtually become a way of life in Nigeria. In fact, as Odondiri (1995:80) points out.
Corruption is endemic in our body politic. Nowadays almost every discourse about Nigeria centres more on the high ascendancy of corruption in our public life. There is the very strong perception that in Nigeria corruption is institutionalized and it is not that officials are corrupt but corruption is official.
Corruption in public service took a more ravaging dimension after independence in 1960. In fact, the first military coup in Nigeria which took place in January 15th, 1966, was partly attributed to this phenomenon. Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, the leader of the coup said that much, when he told the Governor of the former Northern Nigeria, that, “It’s because of all those corrupt politicians who, for the past five years have been holding this country to ransom…” that the coup was staged (Gbulie, 1981-82).
Apart from the political leadership, corruption runs through all the strata of the Nigerian society. This article focuses on lower class public servants in Abia State and seeks to show how their circumstances encourage or force them to engage in corrupt activities. To do this effectively, we have organized the paper into sections. The conceptual framework follows immediately after the introduction. The conceptual framework itself is followed by an examination of the circumstances of the lower class before taking a look at poverty and corruption in Abia State. The next section deals with what could be done to address the problem, while the last part of the paper is the concluding remarks.
- Conceptual Clarification
It is traditional to define key concepts in an academic discourse of this nature. The first concept to be clarified is poverty. The word poverty according to Haralambos and Heald (1980:140) “involves a judgment of basic human needs and is measured in terms of the resources required to maintain health and physical efficiency.” The World Bank’s World Development Report (1990), classify the poor as those whose income is below 370 dollars. Those who earn above this amount are not regarded as poor. Shephard (Quoted in Haralambos and Heald, 1980) on his part, argues that “being poor involves a lack of housing, food, medical care, and other necessities for maintaining life.” He informs us further, that absolute poverty is “the absence of enough money to solve life necessities”.
It is important to point out that in relative terms, “it is possible to have those things required to be alive, and even to live in reasonable physical health, but still be poor” (Haralambos and Heald, 1980:189). Relative poverty is measured in terms of judgments reached by comparing the economic conditions of those at the lowest wrung of society with other classes of the same society. Thus poverty is determined by what is the generally accepted standard of living in any society. Consequently, what is regarded as poverty in America may not be poverty in Nigeria, and many other African countries? Poverty can be generally defined as a condition of lack of the necessary resources needed to provide or procure those things that make for good living like good food, good health, and good shelter. Seen from another perspective, the poor are generally those who live below the standard accepted in any society as good life because they lack the means to do so.
In the context of this article, we shall conceive of poverty in relative terms. This is because, the lower public servant who earns a minimum wage of N5, 000, N6, 500, or 7,500 in Nigeria, as the case may be, has escaped from absolute poverty as this is higher than the 370 dollars cut-off by the World Development Report of 1990. Lower class public servants are relatively poor since they occupy the lowest wrung of the service and earn less than other classes.
Corruption as a word has been giving different connotations and definitions. A public officer is said to be corrupt according to McMullan (in Haralambos and Heald, 1980), “if he accept money or money’s worth for doing something that he is under a duty to do, or to exercise a legitimate discretion for improper reason.” But Odondiri (1995) argues that an act may be corrupt without necessarily involving money or money’s worth. He contends that, “A corrupt act may of course consist of a unit of financial and affective considerations. A more embracing definition is the one that says “it involves using a position of power to seek or extort an advantage by a public servant in consideration of the performance or omission of an act” (African Development Report, 2001:117).
President Olusegun Obasanjo in an address he presented at the formal signing into law of the Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Act, 2000, gave a somewhat elastic definition of corruption when he argued that corruption covered acts such as: use of one’s office for pecuniary advantage, gratification, influence peddling, insincerity in advice with the aim of gaining advantage, less than a full day’s work for a full day’s pay, tardiness and slovenliness. A person is said to be corrupt if he or she uses the position occupied to extort favours from clients outside the official rewards due to him or her. In other words a public official is corrupt if such official accepts any reward or favour for performing his statutory duties.
When we talk of lower class, this presupposes the existence of an upper class. Society is traditionally classified into upper class, middle class, and lower class. Since our focus is on the lower class we shall concern ourselves with defining it.
Karl Max, Weber, and other scholars who have written on classes and social stratification use economic factors as basis for such classification. Anthony Giddens (in Haralambos and Heald 1980) for instance, identifies three classes in advanced capitalist societies. These are the upper class made up of owners of property and means of production, the middle class made up of those who posses education, professional or technical qualifications, and the lower or working class who are those possessing manual labour power. These classes differ in their relationship to the forces of production and reward system.
Parkin (in Haralambos and Heald, 1980: 48) would prefer the use of one’s occupation as a basis for class categorization; He supported this with the argument that “the backbone of the class structure, and indeed the entire reward system of modern Western society, is the occupational structure”.
Functionalists on the other hand, are of the view that the reward system must be related to the functional importance of occupations. That is why the manager earns more than the factory worker because of the functional importance of his position in the organization.
Given the explanation above, the lower class is made up of those skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled manual workers. Their functional position in any organization is relatively less important and this is reflected in the reward system. They are the lowest paid.
In the public service, the lower class will refer broadly to those designated as junior workers- that is, those on grade levels 01-06. This category of workers are largely service staff and include, clerks, drivers, cleaners messengers, printers, electricians, mechanics, and indeed all the artisans, etc. working in the public service.
Having clarified the three key concepts in our study we need to examine the circumstances of the lower class public servant, since in our view this is certainly related to the propensity to be or not to be corrupt.
- Circumstances of the Lower Class Public Servant
The lower class, as has been pointed out earlier with particular reference to the public service, is those referred to as junior workers. They occupy the lower bracket of thepublic service structure. That being the case, they are disadvantaged from whatever angle one may want to look at it.
According to the functionalist perspective, they are lowly rewarded because of the little functional importance attached to their occupations. Seen from the angle of power, members of the higher classes in the public service, as engineers, Directors, Permanent Secretaries, etc, receive higher pay than members of the lower class (junior staff), “because they have greater power”. In other words, lower class public servants earn less because they are powerless. Therefore, they are not only the lowest in the public service structure, they are thought to be functionally of less importance, powerless and hence, receive lower pay.
They earn just enough to keep body and soul together. Their earning is hardly enough to assure them of the good things of life. They are therefore poor. The circumstances of the poor are generally similar in many societies. On individual level, according to Lewis (in ibid:), “the major characteristics are a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependence and inferiority, a strong- time orientation with relatively little ability to defer gratification, a sense of resignation and fatalism.” At the family level Lewis also observes that life is characterized by “free union or consensual marriages, a relatively high incidence in the abandonment of mothers and children, a trend towards mother-centered families and a much greater knowledge of maternal relatives”. The poor are also known for having large families. For their low wages the lower class, and hence the poor, cannot afford good food and are largely malnourished; cannot afford medication for their families especially given the high cost of hospital services. The high cost of medical services is partly responsible for the high mortality rate among the poor. They also live under poor housing conditions. Given these situations, the lower class public servants find it difficult to meet their responsibility to themselves, their families and their communities.
Poverty and Corruption: The Abia Case
The lower class public servant, as already noted, is poor and, being so, exhibit a strong present-time orientation and cannot defer gratification. They live from hand to mouth. They live on daily basis and exploit any situation that offers prospects of instant reward. For the poor lower class public servant life is about survival.
The poor junior worker is faced with many social responsibilities. He has a family, he must feed them, pay school fees, medical bills, etc. but his legitimate earnings as a worker certainly cannot meet all of these needs. Consequently, the poor worker explores and exploits all possible source of additional income irrespective of whether it is legal or illegal, in the spirit of “man must survive”, “man must wack”. A visit to some of the Ministries and parastatals in Abia State in the course of this study confirmed the desperate condition of the junior workers. Many of them agreed that the delay in paying salaries has worsened their already bad condition leaving them with no option but to “help” themselves. In this desperate situation, the lower class public servant or junior worker who is largely poor is easily vulnerable and amenable to corruption as” many of those interviewed confirmed.
Today in the Abia State public service, the typist collects gratification from those promoted before typing their promotion papers, even when doing this is part of his/her statutory duties; the driver exploits the opportunity of an official errand to make several false monetary claims on government; the messenger expects to receive instant gratification before sorting out and dispatching the files of clients; the mechanic, electrician and road maintenance artisan, all pubic officers, engage in one corrupt practice or the other; the security man makes, bogus overtime claims, and many other similar practices too numerous to exhaust in a short discourse as this one. It is a common practice in the Abia public service of today, for public officers to lobby and indeed bribe to be posted to schedules considered “lucrative” or “viable”. Lucrativeness and viability of schedules is usually defined in terms of the opportunities it offered the officer to appropriate his or her office for personal interest.
The tendency towards corruption among lower class public servants in Abia State, is largely due to their poverty level. Corruption is the result of the extreme inequality in Nigerian society. In a situation where the wealth of the Nigerian nation appears to have been permanently appropriated by the upper classes whose members flaunt their wealth in an ostentations demonstration that provokes the envy of the poor, in a situation where the poor are struggling to keep body and soul together as well as meet their responsibilities to their families and communities, they are pushed into acts of corruption. There is a general feeling among the junior workers that the wealth, which the upper classes flaunt, was made illegally and corruptly and therefore, are justified to also engage in corrupt practices. This observation is confirmed by the African Development Report (2001:119) on Nigeria, when it stated that:
Rampant corruption among the ruling class has, over time sent the dangerous lesson that being honest and law-abiding does not pay. Consequently, those among the ordinary people who have learnt this lesson from the top then try to replicate such corrupt practices at their own levels in the form of petty acts of bribery, peculation and embezzlement of public funds.
The feeling that some commissioners, Permanent Secretaries, Directors, and other higher public servants are corrupt is widespread. The higher civil service has weakened its moral standing to scold or discipline those under them and this seems to have emboldened the junior workers themselves in this acts. The Civil Service Rules, which contain procedural instructions on operations of the service and the Financial Instruction, which outlined procedure for government financial transactions to avoid abuse, are as a result, hardly invoked against erring officials.
The wide spread poverty among Nigerians, especially among lower class public servants, is responsible for the pervasiveness of corruption in public life. The lower class public servants, in Abia State, feel powerless, marginalized, helpless, deprived, and angry against the system that condemned them to this kind of situation. As a result corruption is seen as a legitimate means of making up for the shortfall in earnings.
What to Do?
The public service is the strength of any administration, whether military or civilian. It is through the service that the state fulfills its purpose. As the pillar of government, it is the responsibility of the civil bureaucracy to ensure that the government succeeds. In the past the civil service was well motivated, disciplined, and efficient (Okereke, 2003).
The lack of motivation arising from the irregularity of salaries has affected the public service generally and lowers class public servants in particular. The result is a public service whose morale is very low, a service that is frustrated, poor and corrupt.
To overcome the problem of corruption among lower class public servants in Abia State in particular, and Nigeria in general, there is need to spread wealth approximately equally among Nigerians through adequate remuneration of the junior workers, reinforce and strengthen the public service institution, pay salaries regularly as and when due. The political and bureaucratic leadership must be transparent and committed to giving service rather than self-aggrandizement.
Existing policies and/or laws such as the Poverty Eradication Programme and the anti-corruption law must sincerely and realistically be implemented. The lower class public servant and the public service generally, must be re-invigorated from their despondency and made exciting and committed servants and service.
CONCLUSION
Corruption has become a national malady in Nigeria. It has infected all segments of the society, the upper class, the middle class and the lower class public servants alike.
In this paper, we have shown that corruption is largely due to pervasive poverty among the people. The lower class public servants themselves, being poor, have the tendency to engage in corrupt activities. In other words, the circumstances of the lower class public servant force them into corruption. They lack the means to feed their usually large families adequately, pay hospital bills, give them education, cloth and provide them with descent shelter. The pressure to live up to these responsibilities, and more, forces them to exploit every opportunity to make money that presents itself. Victims of the corrupt activities of lower class public servants are usually their clients or the public at large who they come in contact with in the performance of their statutory duties.
To overcome corruption therefore, the wealth of the nation must be spread relatively equally through programmes that bridge rather than expand inequality in society, motivate the junior workers by paying them attractive salaries that must be paid regularly, and improve their working environment.
REFERENCES
African Development Report, 2001
Gbulie, B. (1981). The Five Majors Onitsha: Feb-African Publishers.
Haralambos, M and R.M. Heald (1980), Sociology” Themes and Perspectives Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Odondiri, P.G.O. (1995), “The Dilemma of Bureaucratic Corruption in Nigeria” in Journal of Nigerian Affairs, vol. 1, No.1.
Okereke, O.O. (2003). “The Nigerian Civil Service after the structure Adjustment programme: Some Critical Reminiscences” in Nigerian Journal of Politics and Administration, vol.1, No.3. Work Bank: Work Development Report (1990