Nigeria’s “free market” of corruption
January 18, 2016
There is a link to the introduction and application of the IMF and World Bank’s concepts of “liberalization,” “privatization,” and the “free market” to the exponential rise of corruption in Nigeria. There was always corruption in government, but before the advent of the IMF conditions, corruption in the public system was at its very minimal; what was known then as corruption would today pale in the face of the systemic subversion that has since buckled public governance in Nigeria.
An organized government must have an in-built control system to contain damage to the business of public governance. “Liberalization” was a catchphrase that basically sought to reduce, water-down, or remove government regulations, or the systems of control that kept the “free market” at bay: basically, the policy of de-regulation implied less law, less oversight, less control of the blind phenomenon called “market forces.” Shorn of all euphemism, it is the principle that sees the national economic space as a frontiers space with economic cowboys shooting from the hip to achieve the highest value and profit. It is the legitimizing of profiteering by an oligarchy. Society had to be defined in terms of “insiders” and “outsiders,” and “winners” or “losers. The losers were often naturally, given the limited nature of resource, far more of the population, while winners, because of the rigged process of advantages, necessarily very few in number.
The very idea of a free market by its own very internal logic and nature is extremely corrupt. The destruction of the public system, and all the key institutions that undergirded it, led to the decline of public accountability.
January 18, 2016
There is a link to the introduction and application of the IMF and World Bank’s concepts of “liberalization,” “privatization,” and the “free market” to the exponential rise of corruption in Nigeria. There was always corruption in government, but before the advent of the IMF conditions, corruption in the public system was at its very minimal; what was known then as corruption would today pale in the face of the systemic subversion that has since buckled public governance in Nigeria.
An organized government must have an in-built control system to contain damage to the business of public governance. “Liberalization” was a catchphrase that basically sought to reduce, water-down, or remove government regulations, or the systems of control that kept the “free market” at bay: basically, the policy of de-regulation implied less law, less oversight, less control of the blind phenomenon called “market forces.” Shorn of all euphemism, it is the principle that sees the national economic space as a frontiers space with economic cowboys shooting from the hip to achieve the highest value and profit. It is the legitimizing of profiteering by an oligarchy. Society had to be defined in terms of “insiders” and “outsiders,” and “winners” or “losers. The losers were often naturally, given the limited nature of resource, far more of the population, while winners, because of the rigged process of advantages, necessarily very few in number.
The very idea of a free market by its own very internal logic and nature is extremely corrupt. The destruction of the public system, and all the key institutions that undergirded it, led to the decline of public accountability.
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