THE MORALITY QUESTION

subsidy scandal.

Most recently, there was the Senator Ningi Budget padding scandal of the National Assembly. The presidency presented a budget of about N27.5 trillion to our National Assembly, but controversy has trailed the budget with no solid explanation as to what happened. The story of magical ubiquitous solar lights and boreholes still haunts the integrity of the budget. This budget manipulation allegation is a moral question for the National Assembly. It has brought issues of transparency, abuse of power, the conflict between public interest and personal interest, and issues of fairness and equity to public attention. These issues raise questions about whether our National Assembly has any moral responsibility.

The most disturbing aspect of these scandals is that we do not learn lessons from them, and most perpetrators go unpunished. Nigerians are used to that and expect little accountability and responsibility from our leaders. Impunity reigns supreme, and things have fallen apart. Moral responsibility is an excellent sign of leadership, but this is vanishing in Nigeria. No leader ever takes responsibility for either failure of oversight or being complicit in a failure of the system to compensate morally for the pain associated with such failures.

No one resigns, apologises, or cares about the people, the victims. The reward for corruption in Nigeria is that perpetrators are given better opportunities to ply their trade. They are valuable to the corrupt system that requires the stealing of public funds to prop it up. Nigerians are used to hearing the names of people they believe should be in jail in new juicy appointments. In comparison, in Egypt, the transport minister, Hisham Arafat, resigned on moral grounds in late February 2019 after a deadly train crash in Cairo killed at least 25 people and left 50 others injured. Please understand that the Minister was not driving the ill-fated train. But he resigned on moral grounds.

One of the most striking features of contemporary Nigerian politics and politicians is that paradoxically, political rhetoric is increasingly moralistic while

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the actual ability of public officials to achieve moral ends is in decline. Our public officials see only shades of grey and operate in a world of contradictions, extreme selfishness, greed, deceit and double-speak. The moral corruption of our democratic process contributes substantially to a moral breakdown in all areas of society. Nigeria's societal moral values, which govern the conduct of politics, business, and government, have often been corrupted. A society's moral values define what people see as acceptable behaviour for themselves, what they believe behaviours they exhibit that others will approve of or not and what society collectively accepts or rejects as acceptable behaviour by individuals.

The various crises engulfing the contemporary Nigerian state manifest the breakdown of morality in almost all spheres of the country. The gruesome murder of 16 military personnel last Thursday while responding to a distress call during a communal crisis between the Okuoma and Okoloba communities in Delta State is a product of the failure of morals in the communities. The fact that youths who control both money and firepower in our communities no longer have respect for constituted authority and community elders indicates how low we have gone in morals. Our military, which we should revere for protecting us, has come under attack by the same people it is protecting. Daily, we are bombarded with stories of how our military personnel are dying at the hands of fellow Nigerians – bandits, terrorists, secessionists and now village vigilante groups. This is absurd and shows how low we have come as a society.

Chinua Achebe argued that a functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy, educated, participatory followership and an educated, morally grounded leadership. We do not have either morally grounded leadership or healthy, educated, participatory followership. It is little wonder our democracy has failed to rise in leaps and bounds. The importance of cultivating a solid moral foundation, both as individuals, politicians, and public officials and as a community, should be a priority programme. We must halt the drift, review our current modus operandi, look back into the pressures that have destroyed our public moral standards and values, and seek to rebuild our society based on meritocracy, fairness, and selflessness. We must focus on moral reinforcement rather than materialism.

The decline of moral values in our communities, particularly in politics and public life, should be a central concern. Politics does not rise or fall on the private righteousness of leaders. Leaders' self-interest should always be tempered by moral conscience. We need to strengthen the guardrails of National morality such as the Judiciary , ICPC, EFCC and the Code of Conduct Bureau . We must effectively demand moral uprightness from public officials and celebrate those who uphold such high moral and ethical standards. We should have more role models of people with merit and resounding accomplishments. We must bring back the mantra that morality and hard work are worthy virtues and celebrate successful Nigerians in sports, art, music, science and technology, academia, business and entrepreneurship, and public leaders who shine as beacons of hope for a better, morally stable, and scandal-free society, where men and women of goodwill and conscience will thrive for the benefit of humanity.