CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
One hydra-headed disease that has gained widespread attention and epidemic proportions is corruption. Corruption’s impressions and seals may be seen and felt by people and states all over the world, regardless of their levels of sophistication or lack thereof. Corruption exists on a local, national, and international scale. At any level of its existence, corruption has the inherent capacity to destroy and disable people, the state, and those in charge of the day-to-day operations of the state at its social, political, economic, religious, moral, and general development levels by infecting them with terrible viruses that, in addition to undermining the advancement and progressive development of the people, also infect and reconfigure their psyches. These are feasible because corruption, in any of its multifaceted manifestations, has horrible potentials that can neutralize and bring to a halt the aspirations of sincere and diligent people and institutions in nations throughout the world to progress form of undermining the true value system that underpins the long-term growth of a people and their state, creating broad discontent and instability, nonsense out of public institutions, deterring foreign direct investment.
In any culture where corruption is accepted as the standard, there is one factor that never changes: a gigantic and monumental threat to the safety and well-being of the populace, as well as the decline and paralysis of the state and its institutions. When Huguette Labelle, a former chair of Transparency International, remarked that “corruption ruins lives and obstructs attempts at social and economic development,” he was speaking the truth. Anyone with a sense of morality and the truth can see this and praise him. No serious, independent, and reasonable person can deny that corruption seriously threatens a people’s and their state’s morals, politics, economy, and overall survival.
Local, national, and international efforts and actions to check or contain it have repeatedly failed or polluted solutions due to the complexity of the forms corruption takes in environments and societies where it has evolved into a practical, trending, fashionable, and cherishable value system for the survival of the people. However, a glimmer of hope appeared when the United Nations, through General Assembly Resolution 58/4 of 31 October 2003, which went into effect on 14 December 2005, began to take steps that not only raised awareness about strategies for preventing corruption but also aimed to criminalize it in all of its forms. When the United Nations’ efforts in this area are closely examined, two things become clear: first, the establishment of a global network of frameworks upon which the conscious fight against corruption can be mounted, initiated, or put on the global agenda, and second, the raising of awareness among members of the international community of the existence of corruption and the widespread condemnation of it. These are done so because the unfettered blooming of corruption at any level has the potential to rip members of the international community apart. This way of thinking is predicated or grounded on the idea that corruption transcends national boundaries and can help to advance heinous and demeaning anti-social behaviors like organized crime, terrorism, drug use, and human trafficking, among others.
There is a concerning tendency in the conversation about corruption: no nation on earth can assert that it is free of corruption or that its people and institutions do not partake in corruption and corrupt activities. The obvious fact is that there may be significant variations among nations in the extent or involvement of corruption. Whatever the case, corruption levels may be higher in developing and impoverished nations. Nigeria is a growing nation where residents and institutions compete and glorify corruption and corrupt practices and where efforts to check and contain corruption have failed to yield any noticeable results.
According to Okeyim, Ejue, and Ekanam (2013:24), “corruption is pervasive in Nigeria,” and Lawal and Tobi (2006:642) analyze the effects of this by stating that “Nigeria presents a typical case of a country in Africa whose development has been undermined and retarded by the menace of corrupt practices.” Nigeria’s high level of corruption has attracted international attention to the point where it was declared the most corrupt nation in the world by Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index for the years 1995 to 1997 and second most corrupt nation in the world in 1999. In the recent past,
Tony Blair, a former British prime minister, called Nigeria “fanatically corrupt” during one of his state visits to the country. This statement implies that corruption in Nigeria is institutionalized and deeply ingrained in the minds of most Nigerians. The British prime minister’s description appears to confirm how things had been in the past. The claim that corruption is a culture in Nigeria has been made for some time (Iyanda, 2012; Nwaokugha, Nyewusira, and Nyewusira, 2013), and Achebe’s statement from 1988 that “keeping an average Nigeria from being corrupt is like keeping a goat from eating yam” attests to the veracity of this claim. It must be noted that the few Nigerians who fight corruption in their personal lives or after ascending to public office are viewed as failures. For the majority, any chance to hold a public position is a call by culture to plunder the state’s coffers in order to starve the populace or destroy the institution or establishment where he served. In fact, the fact that corruption has nicknames in the three primary indigenous languages spoken by Nigerians is evidence of how deeply ingrained it is in their daily lives. Ndokwu (2004) claims that corruption is referred to by the Igbo as Igbuozu, the Yoruba as Egunje, and the Hausa as Chuachua. Ajie and Wokekoro (2012:91) assert that corruption is a practice and a custom that “children are born into, fed with, grew with, socialize with, live with, and possibly die in” highlighting the idea that corruption is a culture in Nigeria.
There is barely any area of Nigerian society that can be excluded as being free from corruption due to the widespread or prevalence of corruption in that country. Whatever the case, there are some industries where the pervasiveness of corruption may horribly and disastrously ruin a state and its citizens, and one such industry is education. This stance is taken because corruption in the education sector seriously harms Nigeria’s moral standing and overall well-being. With a focus on highlighting the implications of corruption in the education industry for Nigeria’s national development, attempts will be made to show the prevalence of corruption in Nigeria’s education industry throughout the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. In an effort to do this, we will identify patterns, manifestations, and individuals whose behaviors encourage and support corruption in the Nigerian education sector, and on the other side, we will propose suggestions for how to address the issue of corruption in the sector.
Fundamentally, our approach is philosophical. Nwaokugha and Danladi (2016:421) define a research approach as philosophical “when it involves or incorporates speculation, analysis, and prescription.” Within the context of philosophical inquiry, speculation is a research process that focuses on creating and discovering logical coherence over a broad spectrum of thinking. This means that the logical or orderly sequence from which any claim’s conclusion are produced or made provides the foundations or basis for whether the claim is legitimate or reasonable. This methodology builds up concepts and determines the degree to which one notion is directly linked to or related to another, despite being firmly grounded in logic and used in conjunction with logic. The goal of analysis as a method of philosophical inquiry is to elucidate all potential meanings linked with concepts and prepositions by critically examining them. While prescription focuses on techniques that can be used to construct standards upon which standards can be built for judging values or other concepts, the core issue in this method to philosophical study is language and the use of language, especially in establishing the relationship between proposition and reality.
making a directive value determination. We begin with the concept of corruption because it is customary for this methodology to do so when defining a major topic.