How the Blockchain will help eliminate corruption in Nigeria

Everyone will agree that corruption in public service and administration is one of the most dangerous problems with Nigeria. I am not saying in anyway that corruptions is not in other countries. No not at at all. But i am a Nigerian, and i have lived in the country for over four decades so i understand the peculiarity of what am talking about. From civil servants to political office holders to political appointees, all have one thing in common; they reek of corruption. Let us for the moment, pretend that the corruption in private section is not as endemic as the ones mentioned above, but we all know and see too well, except we choose to be voluntarily blind.

Blockchains are enormous catalysts for change that will affect governance in profound ways. It could improve transparency and check corruption in governments worldwide. In fact, Estonia has become notable for its e-government system, which was established in 1997.

Now to my point. the following to my view are the key avenues through which huge amount of public funds are siphoned off the system;

1. Over bloated budgetary allocations

Here the method is to add several useless and unthoughtful projects and allocate very huge funds to them, with little or no avenue to monitor and validate the actual execution of the said projects. Often when monitoring teams are set up, they join the looting spree! Public servants involved, typically conive with bank officials and fake/ scammer contractors, by presenting bogus invoices and job completion certificates with which they use to move the funds to unverified bank accounts or literally cash out the loot. This is exactly how our Hospitals ended up without drugs, bad roads across the country, poor/ no electricity supply, police, military and essential services sector without funding, contaminated and undrinkable water everywhere, collapsed educational system etc.

2. Judicial/ Institutional corruption

This one is the “killer app” of Nigeria corruption case. The most common methods of practising corruption in the Judiciary as follows:

• Fabricating rulings in exchange for money
• Blackmailing litigants into paying for, or excluding evidence
• Making decisions based on instructions from local government, party or senior judicial officials, rather than the law or facts
• Assigning, dismissing, delaying or refusing to accept cases, or refusing to properly enforce court decisions
• Extorting kickbacks from intermediaries for passing cases to certain judges
• Trading law enforcement services for personal gain
• Taking bribes from the plaintiff and defendant (or their lawyers) or both
• Manufacturing court cases
• Embezzling court funding
• Bowing to the demands of local officials, criminal networks, local clans, social networks or economic interests
• Abusing the power of judges to order suspension of business operations, the confiscation of property, the eviction of tenants, or fair compensation and labour rights.

3. Civil Service: A Study of Payroll corruption

In this category you find corruption perpetrated through ghost worker tactics. Thousands upon thousands of non-existing name are assigned jobs and designations with known identity process in place to verify authenticity of personalities. Billions of Nigeria naira are looted yearly through this scamming technique.

4. Recurrent and operational expenses

The Nigerian budget is usually 80% recurrent expenses and 20 capital development projects. When they say recurrent, the are actually referring to the usual avenues through which they loot Viz; office materials, cars, transport & logistics, housing & accommodation, travel & hotels, training & conferences, entertainment medicals, power, fuel, diesel, generating sets gas, office maintenance etc. In this case they include the most absurd and ridiculous items to justify huge allocations. Most of the funds always ends up in private pockets.

Now my solution. Blockchain Smart Contracts!

Define all that is qualified for funding in a smart contract. Define the conditions that must be met before funds are released. Ensure that all spendable funds are in escrow accounts. Set thresholds for unused funds to be returned to originating account based on defined timeline for project completion. Make it extremely difficult for projects to be funded except for the exact purpose for which they are meant for. Use blockchain to verify individual identities of everyone in the system. This is the method that they use to catch "monkeys" far back!

The first Blockchain and Cryptocurrency conference in Nigeria is planed to come up from the 14th to 15th of August 2017. Details of how this Smart Contract thing will pane out in real life situations will be shared.

Plant to attend!