American International Journal of Social Science

An Evaluation of Nigeria’s Management of Anti-Corruption Strategies
Blessing Ose Oligbi (Ph.D); Tunde Agara (Ph.D)

Abstract
Corruption is a reality that afflicts all of humanity, a phenomenon that is not the specialty of any people or nation, it takes many forms nevertheless, and it is a universal cancer. This paper primary aim is to assess all of the adopted strategies and why they have failed given the fact that rather than abate, corruption has become more entrenched and endemic. Nigerians have suffered irreparable damage from deliberate, deliberative and pre-meditated collective looting of the public treasury by criminally-minded politicians and their bureaucratic surrogates. Waste, mismanagement, squander-mania, and profligacy have become the name of the game at the expense of the delivery of basic public goods, and services. Our submission is that former attempts to cleanup corruption have all failed because the leaders do not understand the dialectics of corruption and the strategies were not properly directed to address it. This is, of course in relation to other faults that have been identified earlier. Every attempt at handling corruption had adopted a holistic conceptualization of corruption which has led to the belief in a uni-linear notion of causation of corruption and a rather simplistic perception of its solution. Our thesis is that corruption in Nigeria can be categorized into three types; political corruption, bureaucratic corruption and corruption of the bureaucratic process. It is within this conceptualization of corruption that its incidents, endemic nature, and prevalence can be understood and efforts to eradicate it can yield results. It is within this conceptualization that we can understand that corruption is in a systemic relation to each other, one begets the other and so any attempt to tackle one while leaving the other will end in futility.

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