It must have been in the 1950’s when (under the colonial civil service), it was really a huge achievement for any “Native” to be admitted into what was classified as “Senior Service”. It conferred immense status and entitled you to seat in the front row in the Church or mosque. That was not all. Along with a generous salary you were entitled to very impressive perks of office ranging from a car to paid vacation for you and your family anywhere within Nigeria. As for those in the “Very Senior Service”, the fringe benefits included six weeks paid leave in the United Kingdom with free passage on the “MV Aureol”; “MV Apapa”; “MV Liverpool” or some other ocean going cruiser courtesy of Elder Dempster Lines with their Head Office on the Marina, Lagos.
In exchange the colonial civil service (and His/Her Majesty’s Government) demanded the highest level of honesty and integrity from all cadres of civil servants. Entrance into the service was based on written and oral examination and successful candidates were required to master the “General Order” [GO] and “Financial Instructions” [FI]. Any infraction would merit prompt and severe sanction which would be published in the government gazette. A case in point was that of Mr. Francis Campbell, a Senior Administrative Officer. He fell foul of civil service regulations by giving a lift to a friend in his official car as he drove from the mainland (Yaba) of Lagos to the government secretariat on the Marina. He was severely reprimanded on account of the fact that the condition upon which he was provided with the car was that it was strictly to convey him (and him only) from his residence to the office and back again. He lost his job.
Another casualty of the strict interpretation of the civil service regulations was Mr. Inyang Bassey who was given a loan to purchase a car but he changed his mind and settled for a motor cycle (which was much cheaper) instead. Regardless of the fact that he had not defaulted on the loan, he was charged to court for embezzling government funds. He ended up in jail.
Sadly, on January 18, 2016 Alhaji Lai Mohammed Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Culture was quoted on CNN as saying that between the period 2006 and 2013 just 55 people (including two women) allegedly stole a total of N1.34 trillion in Nigeria. That is more than a quarter of last year’s national budget.”
It immediately caught the attention of Prof. Nic Cheeseman, an Associate Professor of African Politics who is also head of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University. His research addresses a range of questions such as whether populism is an effective strategy of political mobilization in Africa; how paying tax changes citizens’ attitudes towards democracy and corruption and the conditions under which ruling parties lose power. In addition to a number of book chapters and articles, he was published two co-edited collections: “Our Turn To Eat” (2010), which covers the politics of Kenya since Independence, and “The Handbook of African Politics” (2013). A monograph, “Democracy In Africa” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015 and a second book, “How To Rig An Election” is currently under contract with Yale University Press.
It appears that he has also been consulting for Lagos State Government. Consequently, he is inundated with stuff from Nigeria as he prepares for the forthcoming “Africa Week” in Oxford.
Just as the news was being digested, another headline screamed at us that “Man beheads stepmother for ritual” in Benue State. The young man, Echeno Adakole was said to have quietly followed his stepmother to her farm in Obagayan community in Otukpo Local Government Area of the state on Tuesday. It was gathered that, the suspect pounced on the victim, overpowered and killed her. He was said to have beheaded his stepmother and left the headless body while he took away the head. Residents in the community believed that the suspect beheaded his stepmother for ritual purposes.
Sources from the community said relatives of the victim became worried and raised the alarm, when she did not return at the usual time she used to return from the farm. Thereafter, a search party was then deployed to the farm where they discovered her headless body. “Some people who were sent from the community to go and search for Mama in the farm were shocked to find her headless body in the farm. More shocking is the fact that when they returned home, her head was discovered with her step son,” a resident said. Members of the community were said to have pounced on the suspect and were going to lynch him but for the quick intervention of the policemen from the Otukpo Area Command.
That same week, another screaming headline reads: “I was raped severally in prison – boy”. The story detailed the ordeal of a 16 year-old secondary school student who claimed that he was raped severally by older inmates in prison at Kirikiri, Lagos. However, the boy said that he could not report his ordeal to the prison warders for fear of losing his life. He said that he was arrested and remanded by some policemen at Obalende area of Lagos while he was on his way from an extramural class, accusing the police of changing his age from 16 to 19, in order to jail him. He said that he was charged to court for an offence he did not commit. He words: “I was coming back home from Epe after attending extramural classes when a team of policemen on patrol arrested me at Obalende and took me to the Bar Beach Police Station at Victoria Island.
“The police kept me in a cell with other boys for one week. They said that we belonged to a gang that attacked a team of policemen. “I denied the allegation and told the policemen that I was a secondary school student and just 16 years old, but they did not listen to me. They beat us mercilessly and said we should shut up. I was in the police custody for one week with the other boys and our parents were not aware. The police arraigned us at the Igbosere Magistrate’s Court. Before they took me to court, they doctored my age from 16 years to 19 years. The magistrate ordered that we should be remanded in prison.
We were remanded at the Kirikiri prison. I was kept in the general cell. We were more than 100 inmates and the seniors there molested me sexually. I was raped several times in a day and they would tell me not to cry. I was in remand for one month and those days were horrible.”
J.K. Randle
