Rekpene Bassey
Some questions offend before they enlighten. They unsettle the comfortable, provoke the patriotic, and compel a nation to look into the mirror it has carefully avoided. “Is Graft a Nigerian?” is one such question.
It is a deliberately uncomfortable question, not because corruption belongs to Nigeria, but because the sheer persistence, scale and sophistication of corruption within the country’s public institutions have made many wonder whether graft has become woven into the fabric of the Nigerian state.
The truthful answer is both simple and profound. No! Corruption is not Nigerian.
Graft has no nationality. It carries no passport, pledges allegiance to no flag, speaks no native language and worships no particular god.
Corruption has flourished under monarchies and republics, dictatorships and democracies, capitalist economies and socialist states. It has corrupted emperors in Rome, mandarins in imperial China, kings in medieval Europe, corporations on Wall Street, oligarchs in Russia, political machines in Latin America and military juntas across Africa.
However, history teaches an equally disturbing lesson. Although corruption belongs to no nation, nations have collapsed because they failed to defeat it.
That distinction is the essence of Nigeria’s dilemma. Today, Africa’s largest democracy finds itself confronting not merely isolated acts of official misconduct but the gradual normalization of corruption as a parallel system of governance.
Procurement scandals no longer shock. Budget manipulation rarely surprises. Massive forfeitures of assets worth billions of naira have become almost routine headlines. Investigations involving politically exposed persons dominate public discourse with alarming regularity.
Public outrage erupts, social media explodes, investigative agencies act, courts intervene, and eventually another scandal takes its place. The cycle repeats. What ought to be extraordinary has become ordinary.
Nigeria’s performance in the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index illustrates the depth of the challenge. The country scored 26 out of 100 and ranked 142nd among 182 countries and territories assessed by Transparency International. The score was unchanged from the preceding year—evidence not necessarily of dramatic deterioration, but of dangerous stagnation.
The figures describing everyday bribery are equally sobering. The third national corruption survey conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that approximately 87 million bribes were paid in Nigeria during the 12 months covered by the 2023 survey. More than ₦700 billion was estimated to have changed hands in cash bribes, while bribery prevalence stood at about 27 per cent.
These are not simply statistics about dishonest transactions. They describe millions of encounters in which citizenship is converted into negotiation: a file moves because money changes hands; a right becomes a favour; a public service becomes a private tollgate.
The consequence is larger than the amount paid. Each transaction teaches the citizen that institutions cannot be trusted to function according to law. Each successful demand for an unlawful payment communicates that official authority can be privately rented.
Over time, this corrodes the moral authority of the state.
The Roman philosopher Cicero had warned than two thousand years ago that “the welfare of the people shall be the supreme law.” Implicit in that maxim was an enduring truth: when public office ceases to serve the public, the state begins to consume itself from within.
Plato, another great thinker, reached a similar conclusion in *The* *Republic* . He argued that the decline of states begins when rulers cease governing for the common good and instead govern for private advantage.
And Aristotle refined the argument further, maintaining that governments degenerate whenever those entrusted with authority subordinate public interest to personal enrichment.
Centuries later, Lord Acton condensed the same warning into one of history’s most quoted observations: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
These philosophical reflections are not abstract musings. They describe a recurring historical pattern. Civilizations rarely collapse because they suddenly become poor. They become poor because corruption gradually destroys the institutions that created prosperity in the first place.
Empires seldom fall solely because stronger enemies emerge beyond their borders. More often, they decay internally long before external forces deliver the final blow.
The Roman Empire, despite unmatched military strength, suffered debilitating administrative corruption before barbarian invasions accelerated its decline.
The Ottoman Empire experienced decades of bureaucratic decay before it became known as “the Sick Man of Europe.” More recently, countless post-colonial states discovered that corruption could quietly undermine economic development, weaken public trust and hollow out institutions without a single foreign army crossing their frontiers.
Nigeria would do well to study these lessons. For decades, public debate has treated corruption primarily as an economic offence. Newspapers calculate stolen billions.
Economists estimate lost growth. Anti-corruption agencies announce recoveries. Courts issue forfeiture orders. Politicians promise reforms. Still this framing is incomplete.
Corruption is not merely an economic problem. It is fundamentally a national security problem. This proposition forms the central thesis of this article.
The greatest threat to the Nigerian state may not always originate from insurgent camps in the North-East, bandit enclaves in the North-West, pirate networks in the Gulf of Guinea, or separatist violence in the South-East.
Those threats are visible. Their violence commands headlines. Their victims are immediately counted.
Corruption is different. It operates quietly. It does not always carry rifles. It signs contracts. It manipulates procurement. It inflates budgets. It diverts intelligence funds. It weakens institutions long before armed criminals exploit the resulting vacuum.
By the time insecurity becomes visible, corruption has often completed its work. A military denied modern equipment because procurement funds disappeared cannot effectively defend national territory.
An intelligence service operating with obsolete technology because acquisition budgets were diverted cannot anticipate emerging threats.
Police formations deprived of mobility, communications and forensic capabilities because public funds were siphoned away cannot effectively combat increasingly sophisticated criminal enterprises.
Communities denied schools, healthcare and employment opportunities become fertile recruiting grounds for extremist organizations, criminal gangs and violent movements.
In this sense, corruption does not merely accompany insecurity. It manufactures insecurity. It finances insecurity. It sustains insecurity.
The relationship is neither theoretical nor accidental. It is structural. It is the enemy within.
The World Bank has repeatedly emphasized that weak governance and corruption undermine state capacity, discourage investment and reduce public confidence in institutions.
Transparency International consistently identifies corruption as a major obstacle to sustainable development and democratic resilience.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ( UNODC) has similarly warned that corruption facilitates organized crime, illicit financial flows and transnational criminal networks.
Nigeria’s experience illustrates these global findings with painful clarity.
Over the past decade, the country has witnessed investigations and judicial proceedings involving billions of dollars and trillions of naira in alleged public-sector fraud, procurement irregularities, illicit financial flows and unexplained assets.
Anti-corruption agencies have recovered substantial sums and secured thousands of convictions. Between October 2023 and September 2025, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission reported more than 29,000 investigations, 10,525 court cases and 7,503 convictions.
During the same period, it announced recoveries exceeding N566 billion and $411 million, together with 1,502 properties and other assets.
These figures demonstrate institutional activity, professional effort and the importance of sustained enforcement. But public perception continues to suggest that corruption remains deeply entrenched.
This paradox raises an uncomfortable question. Why do recoveries continue to increase while public confidence in accountability remains fragile?
The answer lies in the distinction between recovering stolen wealth and preventing it from being stolen in the first place. A nation cannot recover its way out of systemic corruption. It must reform its institutions out of it.
That is precisely where Nigeria now stands. The country faces a defining choice.
It can continue treating corruption as an endless succession of isolated criminal cases. Or it can recognize corruption for what it has become; a strategic threat capable of weakening every instrument of national power, from economic growth and political legitimacy to military readiness and social cohesion.
History offers little comfort to nations that make the wrong choice. No nation state has ever prosecuted enough people to compensate for institutions designed to fail. No civilization has survived indefinitely after allowing public trust to collapse beneath the weight of official impunity.
The question, therefore, is not whether Nigerians are inherently corrupt. They are not. Indeed, millions of Nigerians demonstrate extraordinary honesty, resilience and enterprise every day under difficult conditions.
The more urgent question is whether the Nigerian state has developed sufficient institutional courage to ensure that integrity becomes more profitable than corruption, that public service once again becomes a sacred trust rather than a commercial opportunity, and that the law protects the country more faithfully than it protects those who exploit it.
For when corruption ceases to be an exception and begins to resemble a governing principle, the nation confronts a danger greater than recession, greater than political instability, and, in many respects, greater than war itself. It confronts the slow corrosion of the country from within.
That is the danger Nigeria must now confront! Not tomorrow, but today.
Bassey is the President of the African Council on Narcotics and a Security Specialist.
