The current trending economic activities and reports are about banditry, kidnapping, and corruption.
Banditry and kidnapping are trending because they are happening as each day breaks or night falls. Corruption is taking place every minute of the day and night.
There is hardly a day without media reports of at least two of these unholy events.
Banditry and kidnapping are driving fear into the citizens as they go to bed at night or prepare for work in the morning. They look more dangerous than corruption because they can result in fatality instantly. Yet, the major foundation for the two is corruption, the silent killer of human and non-human resources.
One often hears that a bad economic situation is responsible for kidnapping and banditry but it is not totally so.
In the 1970s when the Nigerian economy was awash with oil money, particularly with the oil boom, an outcome that led to the quadrupling of crude oil prices of 1973/74, armed robbery was very rampant. So, these nefarious activities can occur during an economic recession or economic boom. Therefore, we have to look for the causal factors somewhere besides poor economic conditions. Of course, there exist economic injustice, economic mismanagement and economic exclusion that can and do aid other illegal socio-economic activities like kidnapping and banditry.
Although banditry and kidnapping activities occur across the nation, banditry is popular in the North while kidnapping is a popular business in the South.
Notwithstanding some differences, they share common factors regarding motive, structure, modus operandi and the agony they unleash on victims.
The common denominator or motive of all these nefarious economic activities is money with greed as the fertiliser. We may deceive ourselves to link banditry to the domination of one group or tribe over another.
A general check on the aftermath of displacement of people post-banditry action is not settlement by the invaders, except in the case of Boko Haram or ISWAP activities which are not common banditry activities, but the end product of common banditry is either the establishment of farmlands or mining activities by ‘big men’, government supported foreigners or even people in leadership position in a community or state.
This structure of banditry is different from the structure of kidnapping in that, in most cases, the kidnappers carry out the business largely for personal benefits rather than working for someone else. In a few cases though, the kidnappers, like armed robbers, work for a coordinator who somewhat had graduated from going into the field.
Corruption or corrupt activities have no colour, religion or region. It is an omnibus, hydra-headed and rainbow coalition or well-organised business. Corruption is hardly carried out singlehandedly but by individuals or groups consisting of Christians, Muslims and traditional religious citizens.
“Corruption or corrupt activities have no colour, religion or region. It is an omnibus, hydra-headed and rainbow coalition or well-organised business”
Of course, corruption, on a broad definition, takes place in the homes where parents favour one child over another or engage in cheating; in workplaces where files and stationery disappear or more zeros added to simple figures to balance the books; and on the streets in a myriad of activities.
Corruption has brought down marriages, severed family ties, disorganised or disintegrated corporate organisations and even governments. So, the structure or framework of corruption is multidimensional.
In its elegant form, someone or a group of people or organisations sits atop the corruption pyramid, dishing out directives to the lower group. In a lesser fashion, it can involve two people or two groups on the same pedestal, or even one person who feels he/she can take the risk alone to maximise the benefits, forgetting that people were involved in the processes that brought the opportunity to his table.
All these activities have reached a crescendo in this country to the extent that people and organisations are calling on the appropriate government agencies like the police to do something about them.
The three economic activities have reached epidemic levels requiring urgent attention. The perpetrators of these shameful acts even have the effrontery to make Abuja, the seat of the Federal Government, the headquarters of their businesses. It is symptomatic of a failed state and the government must assure us of its readiness to protect the citizens by first protecting itself from these marauders.
For banditry and kidnapping, there are foot soldiers recruited from the army of out-of-school children, school dropouts, unemployed youths, underpaid workers, pension-deprived ex-military personnel, economically excluded individuals, et cetera. Corruption is not carried out singlehandedly but by groups consisting of Christians, Muslims and traditional religious citizens as foot soldiers. We can start tackling the problems by reducing the population of the sources of foot soldiers.
Learning and teaching must be taken very seriously. The two go together. If you provide an environment conducive to learning to encourage schooling but the teachers are hungry, the children can easily be discouraged.
I have heard of the provision of food as part of incentives to encourage out-of-school children to aspire to go to school. There is no programme to pay teachers living wages and allowances to encourage them to keep the children happy. The wages and salaries are not only discouraging but also irregular in many cases.
The government thinks the best way to supplement such meagre remuneration is to engage the teachers in non-teaching and sometimes derogatory assignments like involving them in census and election activities.
Even academic staff members in tertiary institutions, particularly in the universities, look forward to mundane jobs during the election period to augment their salaries instead of using that period to carry out research activities beneficial to society.
To be able to use teachers and lecturers, they arrange holidays for the period. The government must evolve policies to encourage schooling and both potential students and teachers must benefit or be encouraged. The government should also discourage students from dropping out of school by instituting scholarships at the state level just as the Federal Government has promised to do.
Job creation should not be the business of the Federal Government and private sector alone, the state governments must also be seen to put in place programmes on job creation in order to reduce youth unemployment.
This must start from running proper technical schools within the current 6-3-3-4 education system. The need to promote small and medium-scale industrial enterprises with appropriate tax incentives or some subsidy like initial partnerships to inject funds into the business and withdraw after two to three years when the business would have stabilised can be considered.
The issue of underpaid workers is very rampant in the low-level private sector. Most small and medium-sized businesses have no regard for the national minimum wage, yet they overuse their employees. But of course, how many states of the federation obey the minimum wage laws? So, the workers try to find some jobs, any job to supplement whatever they are getting from their normal jobs. It will therefore be easy to recruit such individuals to engage in odd jobs like kidnapping and banditry.
The issue of pension-deprived military men becomes relevant in view of the involvement of the use of arms for banditry and kidnapping assignments.
The way bandits and kidnappers handle guns shows some expertise, which only those who have been trained to use guns can have. It is easy to recruit deserters and ex-military personnel who have no salary. The earlier threats by some ex-military men to engage in protest this January show that they are many and largely in the lower cadre.
Discipline fades in the face of hunger and when one is called to put his skill into use for some good or even bad money, the persuasion to accept would not be much. It is high time the military protected its integrity not only by paying these ex-military men their money but flushing out and punishing those who cause the problems of the pension scam. They did not allow military discipline to pass through them.
The economically excluded citizens are those who have no skills, they are already in a poverty trap and no one is coming forward to empower and train them to have some skills.
The legislators who normally take this as part of their constituency project must first train such citizens before giving them equipment for any job. Hopefully, by the end of the day, the country would have been able to tighten the market for foot soldiers used in abnormal economic activities.
Tella is a Nigerian academic economist and professor of economics at the Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, Ogun State.
