The Looting Question: Six Years On, Has Nigeria Broken Its Corruption Cycle?
A Review of a Persistent National Question
“WHY looting may not stop” is an intentionally uncomfortable title.
Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye‘s book, NIGERIA: Why Looting May Not Stop, does not merely ask why public officials steal. It examines the social and political environment in which public resources can be diverted, political power can become a pathway to wealth, and corruption can survive despite repeated campaigns against it.
First published in 2019 by Oasis of Greatness Publishers, the book brings together essays previously published by Ejinkeonye as a journalist and columnist. A detailed contemporary review described it as a collection of 22 chapters divided into two parts and characterised it as a broad examination of Nigeria’s political and social condition.
The passage under review is itself written in the tradition of a book review and tribute. It praises the author while arguing that Nigeria should not return political power to those responsible for past failures.
For a newsroom review, however, the more useful question is what the book’s diagnosis looks like when tested against evidence several years after publication.
Corruption Is Older Than Any One Administration
Nigeria’s corruption debate did not begin with the present government.
Military governments fought corruption. Civilian administrations launched anti-graft campaigns. Special tribunals were created. Later governments established specialised institutions, strengthened financial-crime legislation and introduced mechanisms intended to make public expenditure more transparent.
Consequently, the problem cannot easily be attributed to one party, one administration or one generation.
The persistence of corruption across political transitions suggests a deeper institutional problem.
That is one of the central ideas running through Ejinkeonye’s work.
The Language of the Anti-Corruption War
Nigeria’s political history contains repeated promises to confront corruption.
The quotations presented in the original review — attributed to Ibrahim Babangida, Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu — illustrate different moments in that political language.
Such statements are important historical evidence of political messaging, but they are not themselves evidence of policy effectiveness.
A rigorous review must therefore separate what politicians said from what governments actually changed.
That distinction is particularly important in corruption reporting because anti-graft rhetoric can coexist with both genuine institutional reform and continuing abuses.
The relevant test is measurable performance.
Were stolen assets recovered? Were cases prosecuted? Were procurement systems strengthened? Did oversight institutions become more independent? Did public spending become easier for citizens to scrutinise?
What the Book Gets Right
One of Ejinkeonye’s strongest contributions is his decision to look beyond the individual act of theft.
A corrupt official may be the most visible actor, but public-sector corruption usually requires opportunities.
Those opportunities can emerge from weak procurement controls, opaque government accounts, political patronage, conflicts of interest, weak auditing, ineffective sanctions and limited public access to information.
The author’s journalism repeatedly returns to the consequences of such arrangements.
A review published in Independent described the book as an examination of the Nigerian condition and noted its argument that accumulated illicit wealth can influence the political system and help reproduce the conditions that sustain corruption.
That proposition is particularly relevant to electoral politics.
Where political competition is expensive and patronage networks are powerful, public office can become attractive for reasons extending beyond policy.
The Procurement Pipeline
Public procurement provides a useful example of how systemic corruption can operate.
The World Bank has identified procurement as a major corruption-risk area because compromised contracting can produce inflated costs, inferior services and reduced public trust.
Nigeria’s own anti-corruption agency has reported similar concerns.
In 2025, the ICPC said its constituency and executive project tracking had identified alleged inflated contracts, phantom projects, duplicated contracts, projects placed on private land and abandoned infrastructure.
These findings give concrete meaning to the broader argument in Ejinkeonye’s book.
Looting does not always involve someone physically removing cash from a treasury.
It can occur through a chain of decisions that begins with the design of a contract and ends with the state paying substantially more than the value received.
Reform Has Also Been Happening
A fair review must acknowledge evidence pointing in the opposite direction.
The World Bank’s assessment of the SFTAS programme found significant improvements in several areas of state-level financial management. Thirty-three states linked 95 per cent of civil servants and pensioners to biometric and Bank Verification Number data, while 18 introduced e-procurement systems. Almost all states adopted procurement laws aligned with international standards.
Such reforms demonstrate that Nigeria is capable of changing administrative systems.
They also expose a central challenge: implementation and continuity.
The World Bank found that reforms capable of disrupting established patronage networks were among the hardest to sustain.
In other words, building a reform mechanism is one task.
Protecting it from political pressure is another.
Enforcement Is Producing Results — But the Problem Remains
The ICPC reported significant enforcement activity in 2025, including 263 investigations, 61 cases filed in court and ₦37.44 billion plus $2.353 million recovered through seizures and forfeitures.
The EFCC’s current institutional statistics also report thousands of investigations, court cases and convictions since the agency’s establishment.
These figures demonstrate that the state is not standing still.
At the same time, Nigeria’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index score of 26 out of 100 indicates that international perceptions of public-sector corruption remain poor. Nigeria ranked 142nd of 182 countries in the latest index.
The two realities can coexist.
An anti-corruption agency can record convictions while the wider system continues to generate new corruption risks.
Why Punishment Alone Is Insufficient
This is perhaps the most important analytical question raised by the book.
If corruption is treated primarily as a criminal matter, the natural response is investigation and punishment.
Those measures are essential.
But prevention can be equally important.
A system that automatically publishes procurement information, tracks government projects digitally, verifies payrolls, discloses beneficial ownership, strengthens auditing and protects whistleblowers can reduce opportunities for corruption before investigators become involved.
The World Bank’s assessment of Nigerian fiscal reforms supports this approach. It found that digital and administrative reforms improved aspects of financial management but warned that sustaining them requires continued institutionalisation and citizen engagement.
The Social Dimension of the Problem
Ejinkeonye also examines corruption as a cultural and social problem.
His essays argue that Nigeria’s relationship with wealth can sometimes obscure the question of how wealth was acquired. The book’s discussion of what he calls the “I-better-pass-my-neighbour” mentality links conspicuous advantage with the desire to distinguish oneself from others.
This is an interesting sociological argument, although it should not replace institutional analysis.
Corruption is not caused simply by social attitudes.
It requires opportunities, incentives and insufficient consequences.
A society may celebrate wealth, but a functioning legal system can still require public officials to explain unexplained assets and prosecute proven wrongdoing.
What Should a New Edition Examine?
The original review suggests that Ejinkeonye could consider an expanded edition.
That suggestion has become more relevant with time.
A new edition could examine the evolution of the EFCC and ICPC, asset-recovery mechanisms, procurement reforms, digital financial management, state-level accountability, political financing, whistleblower protection and the changing relationship between corruption and elections.
It could also distinguish between allegations, convictions and politically contested claims — an important distinction for any contemporary work on corruption.
Such an edition would not need to abandon the book’s original argument.
Instead, it could test it.
Has Looting Really Become Permanent?
The title asks whether looting may not stop.
The evidence offers no simple answer.
Nigeria has developed stronger anti-corruption institutions than it possessed decades ago. Government financial systems have become more digital. Procurement regulation has expanded. Agencies report investigations, prosecutions and recoveries. States have implemented measurable fiscal reforms.
Yet corruption remains a major governance concern. Nigeria’s latest international corruption-perception score remains low, while domestic institutions continue to identify weaknesses in public contracting and oversight.
The evidence therefore points neither to inevitable failure nor to victory.
It points to a continuing institutional contest.
The Real Test Is What Survives Political Change
The strongest lesson from revisiting NIGERIA: Why Looting May Not Stop is that corruption cannot be defeated by slogans alone.
Neither the declaration that corruption will end nor the promise that looters will be punished is sufficient.
Durable progress depends on institutions that can survive changes of government and constrain whoever controls public resources.
That means transparent budgets, credible procurement, independent oversight, effective courts, professional civil services, public access to information, strong financial controls and citizens willing and able to demand accountability.
Ejinkeonye’s book remains relevant because it asks an uncomfortable question that Nigeria has not yet fully answered.
The question is not simply whether Nigeria has looters.
It is whether the country can redesign its institutions so that political power stops being such an attractive route to unearned wealth — and so that public office becomes harder to exploit than it is today.
