Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (20 page)

I watched a hospital charge Ruth more than ten dollars for the saline solution that an intern dabbed on the badly injured hand of her three-year-old son. Stitches would have ruined her. The official-looking receipt the receptionist provided did not match the sums demanded at check-in and listed the saline solution as “medicine.”
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As for the banks, “they give money to their cat and dog,” says Ya’u. “That’s why there’s so much scandal in the banking sector, why so many banks have collapsed.” That’s for the connected elite. Nigeria’s official interest rate is 12 percent, and banks routinely double it for ordinary customers. Those ordinary customers are charged for every deposit, transfer, or withdrawal they make.

“Civil society” has structured itself just as assiduously to snap up development dollars. “Government Operated NGOs” (GONGOs)
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capture a resource stream that includes oil-funded public welfare spending but also international development assistance. On my arrival in Abuja, a customs agent named Godsgift Nwoke Opusunju slipped me her card and a promise of help should I ever need any. One side recorded her
position with the customs authority. The other advertised her NGO, Rescue and Counseling International. “State governors open up NGOs to get their hands on the money,” says a Kano businessman who studied in the United States. “You’re not supposed to have an NGO—you’re the governor!”
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Jobs in such GONGOs—or the civil service—are not easy to get. The type of specialized position that provides scope for contract fraud requires a college degree.

It is in this context that many Nigerians say Boko Haram’s vilification of “Western education” should be understood—at least in the early years. “The system of going to school and getting a job in the civil service and skimming off contracts—that’s what they’re angry at,” says the Kano businessman. “We all feel that way. We’re all frustrated. If they had taken a secular approach, all Nigeria would be with them.”

CLEEN Foundation’s Kemi Okenyodo agrees. “Boko Haram initially had the principle of kicking back against the corruption in the state. It wasn’t against Western education per se. Western education was seen as a tool for corruption, for oppression.”

Muhammed Tabiu, a Kano lawyer and deputy program manager for a Nigeria-wide access-to-justice project called J4A, sees the movement within the historical context of the region’s desire for shari’a law. “We’ve had shari’a law here historically. But under colonial rule and even afterward, those courts were seen as the courts of the people in power. In 2000 the people wanted ‘our’ shari’a courts. The whole agitation for shari’a was a search for a solution to corruption. You can’t get a fair deal. You have to bribe. The law itself is alien. You can’t get justice. People felt that
boko
—Western education that traced back to the mechanics of colonial rule—was the way we got to this state of affairs.”

Indeed, Western Africanists and residents of countries from Nigeria to South Africa alike deplore what they see as a pattern: that post-independence elites seem to have left much of the structure of colonial-era administration intact, just taking over as beneficiaries of the oppressive and extractive system in positions left vacant by the departed colonizers.

Kano bar association chairman Nassarawa agrees with Tabiu: “When
they say shari’a, they aren’t just talking about legal technicalities. They mean politics, economics, social justice.”

Ya’u puts his analysis in almost identical terms: “It was political shari’a: people saw that the injustice was simply too much. Corruption was everywhere, and no development. People thought that if they implemented shari’a, corruption would be cleaned out. People will cut off their hands. But then they saw the criminals still had their two hands.” The criminals in government, that is. “They said, ‘We need more.’ Then you switch to violence.”

For Tabiu too, the disappointing results of the 1999–2000 shari’a movement contributed to the emergence of Boko Haram. “The shari’a that was implemented then was the same structure, just with a new name. It was the same personnel, the same judges, the same staff, the same culture. Some will search for a legitimate way to fight this outcome. They will work for reform. But some say, ‘Whatever tweak you make to this system will not work. You have to overthrow it entirely, bring some pure, pristine system in its place.’ ”

I
T’S NOT JUST
Nigerian Muslims who look for relief to a “pure, pristine” moral system. On nearly every street corner, from the swankest neighborhoods of Abuja, to the slums on its outskirts, to outlying villages that peck and bathe their feathers in the savanna dust, an innumerable assortment of evangelical Christian churches advertise Bible readings and Sunday services. The animists that historically inhabited the southern half of the country have been converted in droves.

At the Mountain of Fire Miracles Ministries, on an early November Sunday in 2013, a well-dressed orderly stopped me at the gate and signaled me to remove my silver earrings before entering, as well as the small white-gold necklace I inherited from my grandmother. I knew not to wear trousers but did not realize such accoutrements were considered immodest—as many Muslims consider the display of women’s hair to be immodest.

The cavernous, three-story cement building was packed with parishioners seated in rows of white plastic seats. Women wore long skirts and jackets in vivid batiks, with matching swaths of cloth wrapped in complex
origami-like folds around their heads. Two video screens allowed those of us at the back of the second floor to watch the preacher as he strode the stage below us, flanked by a UN-style array of international flags, declaiming his message about “Breaking the Power of Satanic Delay.” Like a call-and-response chant, his words were translated line by line from English to Hausa.

“The time for your advancement has come,” he cried. “And no one can stop it.” The men and women around me, crisp in their Sunday clothes, leaped to their feet, their teeth gritted, their heads swaying back and forth in emphatic negation. Elbows flexed, fists clenched, they beat the air in tight motions. “Your Father in heaven . . . He cannot be pocketed. He cannot be manipulated. Nobody can poison his mind against you.”

Many of the preacher’s analogies employed the everyday vocabulary of corruption. “Satanic delay is what I want to call demonic adjournment. The case is so straightforward. The case is so clear. A primary court could judge it. Then somebody look at the case: ‘Okay, I adjourn this case for another three months.’ And that is the end. What is satanic delay? A means put forward by the Enemy to hinder us.”

Or satanic delay is “when the Enemy place a stop-work order on the building of life. Like a contractor who borrowed money from the bank to start the construction. Bank money is on interest. And somebody place a stop-work order on that project. Interest is growing daily. And we are running around: ‘Please, please don’t let me die!’ Oh, Lord!!” The preacher was roaring now: “Let him that want to frustrate my efforts as I pursue my destiny be frustrated by fire!! . . . Enemy of my fulfillment! I am praying on this mountain today! Wherever you are! Be disgraced! Be disgraced. Be disgraced. Be disgraced. The Lord destroy you today! Scatter by fire!!”

Asked afterward why they had selected this particular church to join, parishioners described obstacles in their lives of the type that the sermon had highlighted. One young man said he had been the first in his family to apply to college, but for flimsy reasons, he was not admitted. “The church correctly identifies the problem,” he said. “It tells the truth. The enemy camp kept me from getting admission.” Another
worshipper praised the church for making him “tarry in prayer.” He was an ophthalmologist and had wanted to launch a free vision-screening program in his neighborhood. The project would have cost about $1,000. Though some department directors favored it, he said, the council chairman refused. “The Enemy created an obstacle for me,” the man concluded.

Like Salafi Muslims, many Nigerian Pentecostal churches emphasize the puritanical lifestyle required of members: no smoking or alcohol; no trousers or bare shoulders or jewelry for women. Another parallel with militant Islamists is the pressure these churches place on their own faith communities. Contrary to its reputation, Boko Haram does not aim the bulk of its attacks against Christians. Rather (apart from the police), its primary targets have been members of the Muslim elite: state governors, traditional emirs, or men in the mold of an-Nasiri, the Sufi leader in Kano, whom the group sees as co-opted and insufficiently Muslim. Similarly, evangelical churches reserve their harshest censure for fellow evangelicals. Members of the Deeper Life Bible Church, says Ruth, cross the road rather than associate with a woman wearing earrings or trousers: “They see you as a sinner or an unbeliever. Even if they see you going to church, they say your church isn’t good enough.”

Such puritanical focus on personal behavior has increased in recent decades, as corruption metastasized beyond the confines of officialdom to infect nearly all Nigerians’ behavior.
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When a vegetable seller is off saying his afternoon prayer, the man covering for him jacks up the price of a basket of onions by 20 percent, admitting with a grin, “That’s how I profit.” If a restaurant employee finds her friend a job swabbing the kitchen, she expects a monthly kickback on the salary. “We poor are causing problems for the poor,” laments Ruth’s sister, who works in the defense ministry. “We can’t challenge the rich, or steal from them. The rich can use the law and their power to intimidate us. They can call a policeman to beat us. But we can’t use the law against them, because they have money and they can buy the law. So we have to steal from the poor.”

“Corrupt and corrupting,” Shettima sums up the atmosphere in Nigeria today.

Such generalized ethical collapse encourages militant groups on both
sides of the religious divide to preach personal morality as a cure for society’s ills. “You purify yourself, then everybody will, and then society will improve, and God will be happy with you,” Ya’u in Kano explains the logic. A fervent member of the Mountain of Fire Miracles Ministries testifies: “Naturally, you change your way of behaving, of dressing. And if everyone changes their own way of dressing and behaving, there will be a change in the nation.”

And yet many Nigerians have accused these churches, with their opulent pastors and well-dressed officers, of replicating the very corruption they were supposed to counter. “They are taking money from poor people and keeping it for themselves,” says Ruth, explaining why she, the daughter of a pastor, no longer goes to church. “They are supposed to give that money to the poor. When you see the cars they have or the watches they wear . . .”

In the view of Ruth Marshall, an eminent U.S. scholar of Nigerian Pentecostalism, “one of the huge disappointments of the movement was the idea that you could change the nation by radically changing individuals. Changing the polity by changing individual morality failed.” One consequence, she says, is an evolution in Pentecostal preaching. “Spiritual warfare is beginning to dominate. There is more and more violent language in prayer rallies, more imprecatory prayer.”

That is precisely what I was hearing at the Mountain of Fire Miracles Ministries. The pastor, unlike his counterparts in Boko Haram, never specified what Enemy he was talking about. He stopped short of urging his congregants forth against any particular structure or system or institution—or against any ethnic or religious community.

But to me, he seemed only a breath away. As I stood, surrounded by several thousand foot-stamping, fist-shaking worshippers, a jolt of fear passed through me at the raw power of the violence in the air.

Many Nigerians believe the political elites are deliberately trying to give that violence a sectarian cast, as the country is increasingly described in north vs. south, Muslim vs. Christian terms. The elites, say ordinary Nigerians, are the only ones with anything to gain in such a contest. The poor suffer equally no matter who is in power.

“The impulse toward a radical response to the abusive political economy is being diverted by politicians and religious leaders” and
directed toward members of the other religious community, says Kano bar chairman Nassarawa. “The people have a common enemy. They are all victims. But the politicians want to prevent them from finding their common interest. So they go to a mosque or a church or a political group and tell them to fight against the ‘other.’”

“The anticorruption message is being misrepresented and sold to the south as a sectarian thing, as north versus south,” agrees Muhammad Mustapha of Democratic Action for Good Governance, “so the south won’t have solidarity with the north.”

Nigeria, profuse with colorfully diverse communities, displays a curious consistency, beneath that mottled surface. Acute, systemic public corruption, an affliction suffered by all, is eliciting remarkably similar responses across different belief systems. But given the radical form these responses are taking; given the lack of restraint in manipulating them—by Nigerian elites as well as foreign terrorist groups; and given the atmosphere of increasing desperation that drives people to extremes, Nigeria is starting to resemble some poorly tended makeshift refinery deep in the Delta swamp. It is fixing to explode.

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The country whose resource-based kleptocratic model may most closely parallel Nigeria’s is Algeria, also an oil state, formerly a military dictatorship; minority Berbers provide some of the cultural diversity that is even more remarkable in Nigeria. Like Nigerian government officials, suspected of colluding with violent groups, including Christian rebels in the Delta as well as Muslims in the north, the Algerian government has long been thought to pay off or incite violent Islamists.

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The name “Ruth” is fictitious.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Up a Level

Afghanistan and Washington, June 2010–January 2011

T
he Arab uprisings and my explorations of other kleptocracies were still in the future on the night of June 23, 2010, when I was sitting in the plywood hooch of the RC-South commander, General Nick Carter, at Kandahar Airfield. Transfixed by the screen of his desktop computer, I was reading the news out loud.