MUST READ: When Corruption Fights Back

We regularly get the sense that corruption parades in mask, sleek as oil, hiding under the cover of darkness. Indeed, it does but not all the time. Sometimes, corruption feeds so fat it gets amazing confidence and breaks out of its mask, daring anyone to come confront it.
From my recent public service experience in Nigeria, this is exactly the picture I get with the pension fund administration. Buffeted by corruption, the pension fund administration had over time become a source of national shame and embarrassment. When finally it appeared that Nigerian government had mustered the strategy and liver to deal a fatal blow on this menace through the task force I headed, the unexpected happened.
In case you are not particularly familiar with what the task force was all about, let me make a brief review. Arising from the ugly situation at the pension administration sector, the President, Goodluck Jonathan directed the then Head of Service of the Federation to inaugurate the Pension Reform Task Force and appointed me to head the team. Our team reviewed the situation and decided to make a comprehensive review of process, structure, organogram and workflow in handling pension claims. As part of this restructuring we introduced the E-Pension Management System platform by which verification of claimants was through the smart card.
In no time, and through these processes, the veil of confusion and bottlenecks by which corruption gained ascendancy over the pension fund was removed and transparency, speed, service delivery set in. The Task Force, discovered that the pension nominal roll both at the Head of Service and Nigeria Police Force were unconscionably padded. The system we put in place identified and eliminated over 73,000 ghost/fake pensioners from the nominal roll.
This immediately translated into saving a whopping N4.2 billion of public fund each month from only one agency, the Office of the Head of Service. My team members and I were in high spirits. We were determined to make a difference and to prove to the world that Nigerians cherished a core social value system that abhorred corruption.
Pensioners would rather under the system we created be in the comfort of their homes and receive bank credit advisories on their monthly statutory entitlements. For most pensioners who had experienced the gross inhumanity of the previous order, it was for them like a dream. In two years of our running the system, several of the suspects that had been illegally feeding fat on the pension fund were unmasked by my led Team. Cash and properties valued at over N1.63 trillion were recovered and forfeited to the government. It was amid the public celebration of this seemingly uncommon feat by my team working with the two Anti-Graft Agencies, that the unexpected happened.
In what seemed to be a curious alliance between the pension fund thieving suspects and some legislators, the Senate Committee chairman on Establishment tried to access some of the recovered funds for his private use, and when he met a determined and uncompromising Teams, decided to accuse my team and I of pension fund diversion. The Committee then set off in what looked like dribble run, and effectively shut down the work of the task force. Chairman of that Senate Committee, Senator Aloysius Etuk, threw caution to the winds, made wild and unsubstantiated accusations against my person and fell short of publicly exonerating the thieves involved. It was for me curious and hardly believable that a legislator would unabashedly create such extensive cover and defence for proven criminals who had turned Nigeria into a laughing stock.
In a particularly disturbing incident, on a day Etuk’s Committee summoned me, I noted that while my team was being treated with utmost hostility, the same criminals from whom nearly N2 trillion in cash and properties had been recovered were being treated like Arabian Princes inside the Senator’s office. Thereafter, it struck me that corruption was truly fighting back, using the institutions of the State. Days afterward, the extent of how desperately these ignoble forces wanted to get rid of me dawned on me when repeated assassination attempts were made on my life. Perhaps to give me the full picture of the dread they wanted me to feel, the individuals that shot at my car were actually wearing uniforms similar to the Police uniform.
In essence, they were signalling to me the scope of their reach and control within the system. If this was not scary enough, what followed with the thieving suspects at the law courts were not only depressing but outrageous. The recent episode involving one John Yakubu Yusuf, a former assistant director convicted in case involving fraud of N32 billion and sentenced to two years in prison with an option to pay a fine of N250,000, is a case in point.
So, if as we occasionally muster the courage to confront corruption in Nigeria, and witness these kinds of setbacks or fight backs, what are Nigerians expected to do? On this particular instance, members of the public, the media and civil society showed outrage and demanded a sanction on the trial judge.
A sanction did come when the National Judicial Council suspended the judge. In essence, irrespective of the manner in which corruption and its agents threaten and roar to frighten and intimidate society, irrespective of the reach and scope of their tentacles into institutions of state, corruption can always be defeated when the media, civil society and members of the public show vigilance, able to rise like one man in a dedicated crusade to push back on the forays and aggressive incursions of the corrupt.
Sadly, we have not been able to reclaim our ground over the pension fund sector because when the forces of corruption roared against the pension task force, we seemed suddenly to lose our voice. They succeeded in grounding the task force, creating a lull that was targeted at pushing back the frontiers of our progress, moving the public attention out of their activities in order for them to fully reenergize for further rounds of damage to society. Essentially, if we must make a mark in the direction of a sustained fight against corruption, we must learn to not only be vigilant at all times but to also know when to rise up in defence of our territory. The Task team had advised Government during the 23rd October 2012 National Economic Team meeting which was chaired by the president of our intention to block more leakages in Government and estimated to recover about N3trillion in one year, but corruption started fighting us right at the meeting, thanks to the intervention of the president who advised that the Team be allowed to speak. The sad situation our pensioners are experiencing now is the result of our collective failure to see through the thin lines and our urge for blood at the site of a newspaper headline without understanding the diversionary tactics of corruption itself.
Maina, former of the federal government’s now dissolved Pension Reform Task Team, wrote from Abuja