The Mind Of The Corrupt

AMBASSADOR EZEWELE ABIONANOJIE CYRIL

The mind is a democracy of ideas where each of the ideas you hold has a debate ground where related ideas form factions against each other. Your colour of thoughts which are chiefly the product of your environment and your exposure determines the nature of your decisions.

The funniest thing is that the ideas you held while you were young have greater grounds of supremacy in controlling your belief system over the ideas you knew nothing about until later. Most people would rather die than to give reasoning to a new idea that opposes their conscious beliefs. Once an idea is not in line with their believed ideas, it will automatically be registered in their conscious mind as an opposition idea. This is the main reason you find it difficult to change people from bad ideologies to the realities of life.

In the same vein, expecting a politically corrupt individual to turn a new leaf and serve for the betterment of the public is like waiting to board a ship at the airport. Such corrupt individual’s mindset has been abysmally and disgustingly finetuned to function in such a way that he sees nothing wrong in looting public funds. The negative aftermaths of his actions does not matter to him as far as he satisfies his immediate needs. The part of his conscience that pushes for good conduct has been choked by the bad ideas he allowed to be registered in his conscience as the only way up the ladder of success. He derives pleasures from public pressures. He makes gains from their pains. He is human that has no feelings for other humans. From the sweat of the public’s agony he makes his blood money.

Most times, such evil and corrupt individuals are golden – tongued orators with colourful academic certificates with the capability of making lies seem to be the truth. According to Lucky Dube, he described them as Dracula, saying, “He talks like a new state President, telling people what he would do for them. He walks like a human being. He eats like everybody does, but deep down in him he knows he has bad news. His eyes shine wild with fire. His heart is as cold as ice. No mercy at all”.

The most bedeviling part of the unholy set up is that the above majority of the general populace do not see anything wrong with what the corrupt politicians are doing. They view them as smart people who took advantage of quickest way to greater heights. It is dangerous to have the corrupt control powers of authorities and it is even more dangerous for the governed to accept corruption as a norm on the ground of boarding the bandwagon.

Corruption has eaten deep into the bone marrow of our society to the point that in the mind of virtually all our youths with political ambitions is to loot public funds if they eventually get there. Today, corruption has turned Nigeria into a huge forest of wild animals, tearing at each other without mercy. It started as a seed and as nothing strong was done to get the seed of corruption off the ground, as it receives the rain of nepotism and negligence, it germinates into open stealing of public funds and the establishment of baby factories, which later develops the leaves of insecurity and insurgency. And today, it has produced the seeds of kidnapping and the harvesting of human organs.

As horrible as it is, to maintain the life and the usefulness of the organs, the human organs must be harvested from a person when he or she is still very much alive and well. What a painful exit! Among others, all these malicious and Dracula behaviours came to play as a result of the corrupt situation that is being accommodated and celebrated in our corridors of power for so long. The corrupt is not concerned about these dreadful situations. They hire security with their illicitly acquired wealth while their children study in some of the prestigious schools abroad. No mercy on those whose chances are tinier.

This was not the visions of our founding fathers when they struggled to take the inhuman chains of slavery and that of colonialism off our feet. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana never bargained for this when he pushed strongly for the liberation and the emancipation of Africans from foreign oppressors. Neither did Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria envision it as he struggled for the independence of his people. Nelson Mandela of South Africa did not endure 28 years in solitary prison to have us turn against each other as means of survival or to protect a mere adopted religious supremacy. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania did not surfer to instill uprightness in our hearts to be selling people’s heart among other human organs for survival. Thomas Sankara did not change the name of his country from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso (meaning the land of upright people) for us to accept corruption as our way of life. Armilcar Cabral of Guinea Bissau did not die for nothing to have us become a problem to ourselves.

We have been stumbling from one repression to another for decades. And now that we have secured a position to be able to determine our future without foreign interference, greed has taken over our system of thoughts. We have forgotten or undermined the long way, the tortures, the pains, the trivialization and the lives we have lost on our way to freedom. Just at the peak of it, we have become a stumbling block to ourselves. The earlier vision of our forefathers of ‘LET MY PEOPLE GO’ has been translated to ‘KILL MY PEOPLE FOR GROWTH’. We have lost the empathy that makes one feel for one another in the human community.

The greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is to have the innocent mind of the oppressed corrupt as well. This is why our corrupt leaders are receiving chieftaincy titles and honourable awards from the members of the public. They have become glorified thieves in the land of thievery.

Please note this: The work of an oppressor is to oppress. He can never accord freedom to the oppressed unless the oppressed is ready to fearlessly tackle the oppressor for his liberty, for when we learn to dare the things that scare us, we are on our way to freedom.

Ambassador Ezewele is the author of The Enemy Called Corruption and writes from Lagos.