The fact that the corruption index says Nigeria is highly corrupt is quite subjective. A lot of us have had lots of experience in other countries; generally every country has the problem of corruption in various forms.
I think what we need to do is to do the little we did when we were in office, try to find out the source of corruption and then block it.
Back in 1986, Cooperative Boards as we knew them then was an institution bedeviled by corrupt practices. An ordinary farmer brings his products, the board is there to assess it as either grade one , two or three.
A lot of things went wrong, so what we did was to encourage the farmer to go to the end users, negotiate. The end user will also inspect what you have. So the farmer is talking to you directly, no middle man or anything because the corruption starts where the middle man is.
Once you have identified areas that are prone to corruption, the next thing is to eliminate them and get the people educated.
In the case of foreign exchange for example, you needed to go to the Central Bank or to the banks before you could get foreign currencies but by establishing the bureau de change, you could walk in there, exchange the money and put it in your pocket, go on with your business and you are not robbing anybody.
One of the things to avoid, especially in government institutions, is too much control, where there is a lot of control corruption easily manifest itself.
So you look at where there is a lot of control, try to do away with it and then things will work for the people.
I think my government was able to identify corruption prone areas and checked them. If you remember in this country, there were things they call essential commodities.
These are also sources of corruption; you go and buy omo or food or whatever it is and we got government to take its hands off such activities.
Let people use their own brains, hands and labour, nobody has to do it for them. So we did but I am proud to say that was much more effective.
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