First point to note is that corruption can only happen in the context of an office or a service provided by that office. Corruption is abuse of office or the deviation from a standard to facilitate illegitimate personal gain. Just as there can be no photocopy without an original, corruption cannot exist without a legitimate service. So, if you fix the service,…..
One of the biggest problems with our current anti-corruption drive is the flawed assumption that corruption is something that only bad people do. It is flawed because it is simply not true. And to work with that assumption is to set ourselves up for another spectacular failure against this ubiquitous ailment.
Corruption can be bad – it can lead to murder,…..
Why would a practicing medical doctor hide an Ebola case? Why did the patient who was treated in secret conceal the fact that he had exposed the doctor? More importantly, how are we going to ensure these leaks do not happen again? These and more are the kinds of questions Nigerians are asking as the Federal Government announces the spread of the Ebola virus beyond Lagos and into Port Harcourt.
The quick and hard answer to these questions is that…..
He stepped out at the train station expecting tog to see his contact but no one. After seeing two more fruitless trains pull in and depart, he called Emeka to know what was going on. Emeka apologized for being late and asked my friend to meet him at another station two stops away. But this annoyed my friend who had gotten used to people keeping their appointments. So he refused, citing the additional inconvenience and cost and instead offered to…..
If you were appointed to run a public institution that is corruption-ridden and delivering very poor services, how will you go about turning that institution around?
Is there a process you can follow to ensure you get the right results in as short a time as possible? Are there steps that will ensure visible, deliberate and desirable outcomes that your customers (the public) and your staff (public servants) can support and celebrate?
When faced with corruption, we are often tempted…..
Those who closely follow the global effort to #BringBackTheGirls of Chibok, must be greatly puzzled by the very slow response of the Nigerian government to the news of the kidnapping or to ameliorate the plight of the Chibok people. As new Amnesty International information indicates that the military got prior information of the attack and did nothing extra to ward it off and as the world appears to show more care for the Chibok people than its own government, people…..
With the May Day bombing of a bus park in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, coming on the heels of the national and global outcry over the April kidnapping of over 200 schoolgirls in Chibok, it must now be clear that Nigeria is at war. But is there enough to show indication that can give Nigerian people hope of victory in the face of these blatant acts of terrorism? I do not think so. More needs to be done to show…..
I was born in Bonny, the Niger Delta island famed for its generous store of Nigerian crude oil but completed my primary education in Community Primary School, Queenstown, Opobo, because my father retired to his hometown not long after. Those early years in Queenstown were quite active, memorable and exciting because of the freedom and simplicity that goes with living in such natural island settings.
While my dad’s vigilance prevented me from doing many of the things my peers did,…..
It was not until over a year after her 2008 kidnapping that I began to accept that my brother’s wife was not going to come home. It took some other family members longer. In the early weeks after she was kidnapped, in the heat of the Niger Delta militancy, we had been involved in a lot of frenetic activity to get her out, negotiating, speaking with the police, militants, etc and there was some progress. Her driver and the friend…..