Nigeria Is A Captured State, But Who Are The Captors?

It seems to have become fashionable for many people who comment about Nigeria to describe the nation as a captured state. Thus, “state capture” has become a popularly invoked phrase as we bemoan our woes as a people.

What do people mean when they say state capture? The phrase seems to speak for itself; it connotes a situation where certain persons appropriate state apparatuses (institutions) for personal gains. In this case, state institutions, instead of serving their legitimate purpose of enhancing collective wellbeing, become a tool for realising personal and selfish goals.

It is very obvious that whenever Nigerians talk about state capture, the culprits they have in mind are the political class who are seen as exploiting state institutions for self-aggrandizement, monetary and otherwise. Thus, Nigerians who are not part of the ruling class tend to see themselves as just victims of state capture and never part of it.

However, a deeper look at how things go in our nation clearly reveals that state capture is not just a political class phenomenon. Its manifestation is seen down the entire spectrum of our institutional set-up; from the presidency to the office of a local government chairman, and from the civil service to tertiary schools. State capture, in Nigeria, is a mountainous heap of rotten waste which stench pollutes the entire nooks and crannies of the country.

At the governmental level, politicians are getting rich through their captive hold on state machinery which they exploit with little or no recourse to law and morality. But then at the level of public service, civil servants and other categories of government workers are also taking advantage of their positions to enrich themselves. It’s no longer news that many civil servants and other categories of government workers are living well above their means. I’m not talking about those of them earning enough from other engagements (colloquially called “side hussle”) but those whose only meaningful means of earning is their salaries. I used to know of a state civil servant whose salary would be in the region of N50, 000 but who lived like a wealthy man, riding a fleet of cars and building a mansion. I’m certain almost everyone of us will have a similar story to tell about a person he knows. Needless to say, such government workers are doing exactly what politicians do; exploiting state institutions for selfish gains. That’s state capture through and through.

Another instance of state capture manifests in the process of public recruitment where persons in positions of power take advantage of their offices to circumvent due process to ensure they put their relatives, friends and lovers in job. Again, politicians are not the only guilty ones here as culprits are similarly found among senior officials of government agencies and departments, among executives of public parastatals, and among heads of public higher institutions. Once you are connected to any of these officials, your chances of getting employed are quite high.

Some years ago, prior to my employment as a lecturer, I was working as a tutor for a prelim programme run by my university which is a federal institution. At the beginning of a particular academic year, the university conducted screenings to determine who would remain as a tutor and who would be shown the exit door. One of our lady colleagues whose poverty of content and teaching aptitude was already known to all of us, performed so badly that she was asked to butt out of the programme. However, soon after,, we heard she had become employed as a lecturer in the university. In other words, she had practically become “promoted” ahead of all of us. As I was soon to learn, the magic was possible because her husband who is a senior personnel in the university pulled some strings. It is such instance of state capture that has ensured that many incompetent hands are running our institutions in the various sectors; educational, economic, security and so on and so forth, inevitably resulting in poor outcomes.

The point is that our public institutions have become so weak that they are easily amenable to capture by anyone under whose charge they’re put. Thus, anybody who becomes a president, a governor, a permanent secretary, a director, a vice chancellor, whatever, will easily subdue the value-sustaining mechanism that should be the character of every institution; hence instead of having the institution run in line with its intrinsic values, such an official rather imposes his selfish will on the institution. Thus, an institution would require transparent and prudent management of funds, but such an official ensures this value is suppressed as he steals and squanders funds. Also, an institution would require a competent workforce, but the official insists on his own way and forces his lover on the institution as a worker, whether this person is competent or not. This is the ultimate definition of state capture as the state’s progress is stunted due to selfish captors that are exploiting its machinery.

To stand any chance of liberating our state from its captors, our understanding of state capture must transcend the usual approach whereby everyone points an accusing finger on government officials and politicians without seeing other state captors in the lower rungs of the society’s ladder – including possibly themselves.

However, one can only say that there are various levels of state capture depending on the value of the gain being pursued. When it’s about small contracts such as supply of table water to parastatals or printing of exam scripts for universities, state captors at lower levels can influence things. But when it comes to huge money spinners like contracts for road projects or obtaining crude oil mining licence, the stakes are really higher and only the state captors at the highest level can influence decisions. You need to be connected to them to reap this most precious fruit of state capture.

Former Minister of Labour, Dr. Chris Ngige, was spot-on when he observed that the process of recruitment at federal agencies like the CBN and the NNPC has been captured by powerful politicians given the far larger wages paid by these bodies vis-a-vis other government employments. So, according to him, for you to get employed in these “elite” institutions, you should be connected to these individuals wielding power at the highest levels. Make no mistake about it, once university lecturers, teachers and any other category of workers succeed in getting the federal government to approve a similar plum wage structure for them, the recruitment process in that sector will become hijacked by the most powerful who would upstage the less powerful officials currently holding sway. That’s the dialectics of state capture; it reduces what should be a modern state to a medieval fiefdom where might is right.

Lastly, as I have noted several times in this column, corruption in Nigeria is in many instances transactional; it takes the participation of the led to sustain a corrupt leadership. This same logic is also very emphatic in the dialectics of state capture. As soon as our own person gets into a public office, we start pestering them with demands for personal favour of various forms. But then, we seem not to be always attentive to the reality that for them to give us that money, they will likely have to steal it, and for them to give us that job, they are likely going to circumvent the due process of recruitment. When we insist on evaluating the performance of our legislators by the number of bags of rice they share every Christmas, then we’re contributing significantly in nurturing state capture. The bags don’t fall from heaven!

So, as we cry of state capture, let us remember that it is a product of our value system. The state captors are products of our society and its value system; their success at capturing the state is totally dependent on the enabling variables present in our society. And in many cases, even the supposed victims of the said state capture are complicit. In other words, even those who are advocating for “liberation” of the country from its bondage may be among the makers of the bondage. All the cry about youths wanting to “take back their country” (especially in the last election) may come to naught if those youths do not direct their mind to the fact that they too may also be part of the problem.

However, this is not to play down the special role of the leadership in ending state capture. Direct beneficiaries of state capture are the powerful in society. It will take the powerful to subdue them Therefore, it’s those that wield political power, those that control the state’s coercive apparatuses of the police force, the courts and the prisons, that are in the best position to emphatically take the lead in the move against state captors.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.