Oluwole Ige, Osogbo
A university don, Professor Juliana Taiwo Makinde has said failure to quickly tackle corruption and its debilitating effects may rob Nigeria of her yearning desire to achieve socio-economic greatness among the comity of nation.
She emphasised that corruption, which had almost consumed the fabrics of the country was thwarting the implementation of noble policies, formulated by government aimed at addressing myriad of challenges, confronting the Nigeria, regarded as the giant of Africa.
Delivering her inaugural lecture titled “Policy Somersaults, Poverty of Policy Implementation and Corruption: Obstacles To Development at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Makinde, a professor of Public Administration said “Poverty of policy implementation occurs when the desired result on the target beneficiaries is not achieved”, observing that “such a problem is common in most developing nations”.
According the don, “it is not that government fails to formulate policy, but they fail to enforce rules and in that situation, you don’t expect much. Once there is corruption, so many things would go wrong”
Makinde, who said there had been much hues and cries about the prevalence of corruption in the Nigerian public sector, including its bureaucratic set-ups, recalled that “in 2016, Transparency International (TI) ranked Nigeria as the 136th out of the 176 countries measured. This is however an improvement from that of 2013, where Nigeria was ranked 144th out of 177 countries measured”.
Her words, “lack of, or inadequate sustenance has brought untold hardship to the people of this country. The efforts of government at providing basic needs appears to have been frustrated through corrupt practices. Improved food production through provision of fertilizers to farmers has been frustrated by corrupt officials”.
Makinde continued, “Construction of roads has been abandoned by contractors because of inadequate funds. Perhaps, some of the contractors have given out substantial amount of money, sometime between 10-30% of contract sum, as bribes. This is evident in the poor condition of most of our roads as a result of kickbacks from the original money earmarked for road construction”.
On the way out of the corruptive quagmire, she tasked the government to redouble efforts towards reduction or poverty among the people, contending that “poverty can also lead to corruption as it can also lead to disease”.
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