FIGHTING CORRUPTION FRONTALLY: UGANDA'S OPENDI EXAMPLE. By Zik Gbemre.

Illustrative pix

"Fighting endemic corruption in Nigeria is not as easy, but it's not a hopeless situation as Nigerian leaders want to make citizens believe".

"Any government, evasive, pretending or admitting lack of capacity to fight corruption is exposing itself as corrupt".

Fighting endemic corruption, like in Nigeria may not be a walk in the park, but neither is such systemic corruption insurmountable or is it a rocket science as successive Nigerian leaderships want to make the citizenry believe.

In a trending viral video, Ugandan State Minister, Sarah Opendi, disguised under a hijab, exposed damning corruption in one of that country's public hospitals first hand, all by herself.

Inundated by complaints of extortion at the government hospital in the capital city of Kampala, the State Minister for General Duties under the larger Uganda Ministry of Health visited the public health facility, transported on a motor bike to see things for herself.

Covered in a hijab like a devout Muslim woman and using a psuedo name, Opendi visited the hospital as a normal patient for basic health services that were supposed to be rendered free.

At the very first front office to indicate intent to be checked for medical treatment, a nursing assistant on duty insisted that she must pay between 5,000 and 3,000 Ugandan shillings to get registered. When she said she doesn't have such amount, the nursing assistant said she should leave and return for medical attention only when she is been able to pay the money.

Opendi paid with a marked money only for her again to be asked by another medical staff to cough out another 150,000 Shillings (€30 or $40) before she could receive blood test at the same hospital.

Convinced that she had caught the corrupt hospital officials red-handed, Opendi now blew her own cover to frontally confront the indicted hospital staff. The health ministry's corruption monitors indicated that the affected staff would be arrested, prosecuted and expectedly sacked, if not jailed as well.

In Nigeria, if we had been adopting direct monitoring, the Opendi approach, we would have caught red-handed and punish a lot of corrupt people to truly serve as deterrent to others.

All over the nation's public institutions including Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs, there is profound extortion perpetrated with impunity on daily basis. In customs, public hospitals, public schools, police, immigration, at road checkpoints, just about every public office charged with rendering public service, people are being ripped off.

If the heads of these MDAs are not themselves corrupt, if disguised monitors of the EFCC, ICPC, Public Complaints Commission and sundry regulatory agencies can exercise the will to adopt the Opendi strategy of playing participant observer, much would have been achieved of our antigraft campaigns.

Here, we are blind to corruption when it's being committed. The ICPC, EFCC, Public Complaints Commission are hardly proactive in sensing and stopping corruption about to happen. Here (in Nigeria), we allow corruption to happen before we chase after the perpetrators… As experiences have shown, corruption develops more power to fight back if you wait on it to happen before you try to act.

Government at all tiers, relevant regulatory agencies charged with fighting corruption must brace up, shun corruption themselves to be more armed in frontally confronting corruption before it collapses the nation.

Let's face it, any leader or leadership, who still continues to fret, feels and acts like it's  impossible to fight corruption is indicting self as being corrupt and so lacking the will to nip corruption in the bud.

The time has also come to invest effectively in technology to help fight corruption. But on the whole, it takes genuine will, human commitment, like Uganda's Opendi, to fight corruption for best results.

Not much can be achieved if anti-graft agencies and regulatory bodies wait for petitions to act and fight graft. They need not wait for petitions. The public may be unwilling to write petitions because they end up revealing the petitioners identity and become targets of corrupt persons under investigations.

If the anti-graft agencies and regulatory establishments really want to work they can easily identify those public office and individuals that own assets far larger than their salaries can purchase, so they are arrested and prosecuted. Since their legitimate income can't afford those assets being exotic cars, buildings, mansions, etc, should be forfeited and all other desired punishment served on them if found guilty of failure to account for their bloated wealth.

The time to do the needful is now. No procrastinating.

"We Mobilize Others To Fight For Individual Causes As If Those Were Our Causes".... Zik Gbemre.