Corruption is not just a government problem. It is a Nigerian habit.
We keep voting out the corrupt and getting the corrupt back — because we never left the room.

 The story we love to tell

Nigerians tell one story very well: corruption is something that happens to us. It lives in Aso Rock. It lives in the National Assembly. It lives in ministry contract files we will never see. It is a politician disease, and the rest of us are patients waiting for a good government to cure us.

Sweet story. Very comforting. It is also not true.

The number does not say what we think it says

Nigeria scored 26 out of 100 on Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index — 142nd out of 182 countries, far below the global average of 43. We quote that figure every week as evidence against “them.”

But the CPI measures a system — and a system is made of people.

UNODC research estimates that roughly 117 million bribes are paid in Nigeria every year. Politicians are not paying those bribes to each other. They are paid at checkpoints, at counters, at customs desks, to the clerk who can “push” your file, to the man who decides whether your allocation enters this week.

Every one of those 117 million transactions has two hands in it. One of them is ours.

Corruption in Nigeria is not a tree with roots only in government soil. It has branches in every household, every market stall, every offering basket, every WhatsApp group hailing somebody’s new car.

We condemn it. Then we do it. Same mouth.

Here is the part that should disturb us more than it does: Nigerians genuinely believe corruption is wrong. Chatham House surveys found that more than 88 percent of Nigerians say it is

unacceptable for a police officer to demand a bribe. Big majorities also reject judicial bribery and contract inflation.

So we are not confused about right and wrong. We know. We preach it fluently — often in the same breath as we settle a traffic offence with “something for the boys.”

The same research found something else: people agree that “people around here are mostly out for themselves,” while insisting that they personally hold a higher standard. Everybody is certain the rot is in the next person.

And the man who follows the rules exactly? We don’t call him upright. We call him slow. Unconnected. Mugu.

Nobody asks “how did you get this?”

Our politicians did not fall from the sky. They grew here.

The councillor took his first bribe as a student union treasurer. The senator learned to inflate a budget line as a contractor. The LGA chairman currently eating health centre money was, twenty years ago, the bright boy his people sent out to “go and hammer” — go and make money, by any means, send some home, and please don’t explain the means.

Because we don’t ask. The man who returns from abroad with three cars and no visible job is a son who has “made it.” The trader whose shop tripled overnight is admired, not questioned. The pastor whose jet keeps getting newer is evidence of divine favour.

We have built a country where “how did you get this?” is rude, and “when will you get yours?” is ambition. A society that asks no questions at the front door should not be shocked by what it finds at the back door.

Yahoo Yahoo: our clearest mirror

You want to watch a society manufacture the very thing it claims to hate? Watch Yahoo Yahoo.

Nigeria now ranks fifth on the World Cybercrime Index. The Nigerian Communications Commission estimates the country loses several hundred million dollars a year to online fraud — before you count what it costs our name abroad.

But the crime is not the real story. The applause is. Researchers keep finding the same pattern: once the money shows, nobody asks where it came from. Social media is full of the lifestyle — the cars, the fits, the casual flexing. Skits, songs and slang turn the fraudster into a folk hero outsmarting a wicked world. “Yahoo is not a crime,” some young Nigerians argue openly; it is reparations. And reports describe parents who quietly collect from a twenty-two-year-old’s “hustle” without ever asking how a boy with no job is paying rent in a new area.

That is not the government corrupting the people. That is the people — frustrated, jobless and unsupervised — building a whole fraud subculture, cheered on by the same public that will drag a minister on Monday morning.

Corruption is not only a crime committed against Nigeria. In its small, daily, almost invisible form, it is a value system we hand to each other — at home, in church, in the market, online — long before anybody votes.

Just look at the queue

You don’t need a statistic. Stand in any Nigerian queue. Watch the line collapse the moment somebody with the right uniform, the right voice or the right “connection” is waved to the front — and everybody simply absorbs it as how things are. Watch the foreign expatriates clear a one-way with a folded note instead of a fine. Watch the trader with two prices: the real one, and the “who is asking” one. Watch the parent who slips an envelope to a teacher at result time instead of asking why the child is failing.

No senator required. Just a people who learned, through decades of scarcity and dysfunction, that the fastest way through any system is to bend it quietly rather than challenge it openly — and that bending it carries no shame, so long as it works.

Why every anti-corruption campaign flops

Every government since 1999 has launched one. Press conferences. Task forces. One dramatic arrest for the cameras. Then the same CPI score.

Weak enforcement and elite impunity are real and well documented. But there is a simpler reason: you cannot arrest your way out of a factory you refuse to shut down.

If the boy who learns at fourteen that the fastest route to a new phone is a script run on a lonely foreigner becomes a permanent secretary at forty — what exactly did we expect him to unlearn along the way?

If the graduate who sent five hundred applications watches his Yahoo Boy neighbour buy a Lexus before he buys his first proper suit — what has this country taught him about which road actually pays?

Hold the mirror

Let us be clear: none of these excuses the big men. A governor who diverts a state health budget causes harm on a completely different scale from a driver who pays a policeman ₦2,000. Scale matters. Accountability at the top is not negotiable.

But the sweet fiction that corruption is something “they” do to “us” has finished its work. It lets us shout at the system in public while feeding it in private. It lets a whole society off the hook for the values it keeps passing down: that money need not explain itself, that rules are for the unconnected, that getting caught is the only real sin.

A country that wants better leaders has to become better soil for growing them — because today’s corrupt official was yesterday’s ordinary Nigerian, shaped by the same queues, the same checkpoints, the same crowd hailing the man who “made it,” however he made it.

We are not merely ruled by the corrupt. We are the pipeline that produces them.

Until we hold that mirror honestly — in our homes, in our churches and mosques, in our schools, and in the comment sections that turn fraud into comedy — the next anti-corruption campaign will deliver the same score, the same outrage, and the same surprise that nothing has changed.

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Sources: Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2025; UNODC, Corruption in Nigeria: Patterns and Trends (2024) and National Corruption Survey data via the National Bureau of Statistics; Chatham House, “Corruption in Nigeria” (2025) and SNAG Survey 2023; World Cybercrime Index (2024); Nigerian Communications Commission cybercrime loss estimates; Global Voices and academic research (Adesida 2021; Tade & Aliyu 2011; Kolawole 2020) on the social dynamics of “Yahoo Yahoo” culture.