LAGOS: Starting your own company is expensive in any country but Nigerian businessman Chidi-Martins Opara faced a hidden extra cost: the payment of bribes. The first hurdle was registering his small cleaning and pest control company. The official fee was less than 10,000 naira ($75), but Opara says he paid four times that amount in bribes.
“You have to give money to the big officials so your papers will move faster. Otherwise your file gets ‘lost’,” he says.
Now the business is up and running, there are more bribes to pay: to company directors who award contracts, or to middlemen who can gain access to wealthy clients.
“If you don’t do it, you can’t do business,” says Opara.
“You work hard for them, but they take the profit. Corruption is the biggest problem in Nigeria. It’s an epidemic.”
His experience is typical in Nigeria and in many other African countries, where corruption has arrested development by discouraging private enterprise as well as diverting public funds into individual pockets.
Nigeria is the world’s eighth biggest oil exporter, but billions of petrodollars have been stolen by politicians and the country has little to show for its oil wealth.
Most of its 140 million people live on less than a dollar a day and they have to make do with decaying hospitals and schools, potholed roads and patchy power and water supplies.
Corruption has become a way of life for many. Instances of teachers, journalists or judges taking bribes are not uncommon and policemen routinely supplement their income by extorting cash from drivers at roadblocks.
“It’s like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon,” said Opara, describing the task of eliminating corruption in Nigeria.
As well as making life difficult for local businesses, corruption discourages foreign investors.
To improve the situation, 24 countries signed up for a peer review system under the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), a home-grown rescue plan that aims to encourage more aid and foreign investment in return for better governance.
But progress has been slow. The first peer review scorecards, on Rwanda and Ghana, which had been due earlier this year were unveiled on Sunday. Both governments have drawn up a plan of action to tackle the weaknesses that were identified, including corruption in Ghana’s public administration.
South African President Thabo Mbeki sought to bolster his country’s reputation as one of Africa’s cleanest when he sacked his deputy Jacob Zuma on June 14 over a graft scandal.
Kenya, which has seen disbursement of some aid income delayed because of corruption, said it would like to follow South Africa’s example but it had not “one iota of proof” against people in high places.
In Nigeria, the worst offender in Africa and the third-worst in the world according to a perceptions index compiled by watchdog Transparency International, President Olusegun Obasanjo says his government is making a difference.—Reuters
