Nigeria : The dangerous mix of corruption and poverty

Nigeria The Underperformer: The dangerous mix of corruption and poverty, by Walter Carrington on October 26, 2013   /   in For the record 6:47 pm   /   Comments A former United States ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Walter Carrington, speaks on the challenges of corruption in Nigeria and the mismatch between growth and poverty as it relates to the much touted VISION 202020.   He admonishes Nigerians to rise and harness the plethora of potentials in the country for the common good while not leaving behind the womenfolk. EARLY ASSOCIATION WITH AFRICA/NIGERIA I am transported to a time some sixty years ago, when I too, was an eager student about to graduate into an uncertain world. The Second World War had recently ended and the Cold War, pitting the United States and Western Europe against international communism, had even more recently begun. There was genuine fear that, with both sides possessing nuclear bombs, a deliberate or accidental launching of one of these weapons might start an unbreakable chain of retaliatory actions which would result in the annihilation of most of the world’s population.  That was the world that I left university to enter.   But there was a more optimistic world yearning to be born.  The First World War had led to the break up of defeated Germany’s African empire.  There were many here on the Continent and in the Diaspora who believed that the Second World War had so weakened the victorious allies and emboldened their colonial subjects that the time for African liberation could not be far off. How fortunate I was that, when I was just a fortnight further along my life’s journey than most of you are on this day, I made my first visit to the continent of my ancestors.  Two weeks after receiving my first university degree in 1952, at a convocation such as this, I was on my way to Senegal as one of eight American delegates to an international youth and student conference which was to be held in its capitol, Dakar.  There I met many young people who in less than a decade would join with older freedom fighters to haul down the British Union Jack and the French Tri-coleur from their government buildings and replace them with the flags of their newly independent countries.  Some of you may have noticed that I did not mention another major colonial power – Belgium.  The delegation from their largest colony, the Congo, included but one African. Congolese until 1954 were allowed to receive no more than a basic primary education unless they were studying for the priesthood.  As a result, at    independence in 1960, there were only 17 university graduates in a country with a population of 13 million. That’s fewer than the number of you sitting in any one of the rows before me today. *AFRICA SHAPED MY DESTINY That first trip to Africa was to change the direction of my life. Before I was 30 years old I had traveled twice to Africa at a time when few members of my generation in America had been here even once.  My second trip was to Nigeria leading a group of students on a program called the Experiment in International Living. It occurred the year before Nigeria’s Independence. We traveled throughout the country living with Nigerian families in Lagos and Ibadan in the West; Enugu and Port Harcourt in the East; and Kano and Kaduna in the North. Regrettably, Ilorin was not a part of our itinerary. That trip tightened the hold Africa had on me which I had first felt at that youth conference in Dakar.  I embraced the opportunity offered to me by administration of John F. Kennedy to help set up the Peace Corps in Africa.  I would spend the next six years living in Sierra Leone, Tunisia and Senegal and then most of the following four years traveling from Washington to towns and villages throughout the continent overseeing the work of development being carried out by a dedicated group of young Americans. 1960, when Nigeria and most of West Africa became independent from British and French rule, was the beginning of a decade of great expectations.  I remember coming back to Africa in 1961 to establish the first Peace Corps program in Sierra Leone.  What great hopes there were that West Africa would become the model for the rest of the continent.   East and Southern Africa had been held back by their white settler populations from achieving independence peacefully.  I remember that I used to jest that every country in West Africa should have an image of a mosquito emblazoned on their new flags. For it was that malaria bearing insect which had caused this region to be christened as the “White Man’s Grave” driving Europeans to search for greener, healthier pastures on the other side of the continent in which to settle down with their families. Much has changed in Africa from those days of my youth more than half a century ago, but so much more needs to be done.  The end of colonialism brought about governments of the people; each country’s first elections brought about government by the people, although in too many cases not for long, as authoritarian presidents for life and military dictators took over.  The return of democracy once again gave Africans the right to decide by whom they would be governed and for how long.  But elections, even when free and fair, rarely brought about governments that were for the people.  Rather they tended to be for the elites; for the rich and those who hoped to become rich through government contacts and contracts… continued