This is only the last half of an article but the information is very revealing.

The article's title is actually The Bleeding of the Niger; Justice, Bribecode, and the War Next Time and the source is pasted below.
By Chuma Nwokolo, 20 September 2019

Such knowledge as we have here prepares our minds and hearts for the rescue of our people out of this diabolic entrapment we are in

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Some will seek justice abroad, risking leaky boats that drown them, transit countries that enslave them, and xenophobic states that burn them in their streets, risking the very odium their motherland once reserved for the Igbo. But to achieve true home-grown justice, we must return to the foundations of nation, to an incident in 1900 that predated the Asaba Massacre.

Let us call this the “Asaba Transaction”.

Britain abolished slavery in 1833, starting the moral phase of European civilisation when it was barbaric to enslave and exploit humans, though perfectly legal to enslave and exploit countries with millions of humans. European companies ended their centuries-long trade in slaves and began a new trade in colonies. The star players included Cecil Rhodes’ British South African Company, the Imperial British East African Company, the German East Africa Company, the Portuguese Guinea Company, and George Taubman Goldie’s Royal Niger Company (RNC).

In 1886, Britain gave the RNC a monopoly charter to exploit much of the area that would later become Nigeria. The company operated out of its ‘capital’ in Asaba, employing Captain Lugard for the ‘pacification’ of Borgu. The idea of Nigeria took root here, as a business vision, with country, peoples and resources as assets on the balance sheet of a business whose capital was originally won from the slave trade. The RNC set the prices for commodities it bought from Nigerians as well as the goods it sold to them. Independent-minded Nigerian leaders like King Jaja of Opobo and King Koko of Nembe who tried to continue trading as freemen were deposed and replaced. In 1895, following the Akassa raid by the Nembe to assert their ancestral right to free trade, the RNC retaliated with a raid on Brass in which whole towns was burned and over three hundred people killed.

In 1900, the British government acquired the RNC’s Nigerian investments for £865,000 and formally established a government of colonists, by colonists and for colonists. This was the Asaba Transaction.

In 1914, when the Lagos Colony was amalgamated with the northern and southern protectorates to form one country under the Lugard Constitution, the terms of the Asaba Transaction did not change. None of the next four constitutions, (Clifford’s in 1922, Richards in 1946, Macpherson’s 1951, or Lyttleton’s in 1954) changed the nature of the Asaba Transaction.

The 1960 Independence constitution could have transformed the fortunes of Nigeria. For the first time, government was in the hands of Nigerians, elected from among the people. Yet, something interesting happened: our leaders found common cause with the exploiters, rather than the people. Our leaders ratified the Asaba Transaction by replacing the colonists. Instead of creating a government of the people by the people and for the people, the independence ceremony simply became, like the earlier constitutions before it, a change of baton from colonists to colonists.

Enter the black colonists.

Nigeria’s four republican constitutions of 1963, 1979, 1993 and 1999 are paper tigers. Despite their grandiloquent words, they allowed as much impunity as the military dictatorships in Nigerian history – the white ones exemplified by Fred Lugard and the black ones exemplified by Sani Abacha. They all ratified the spirit of the Asaba Transaction that transferred Nigeria into the hands of a government of colonists by colonists and for colonists. Upon taking their oaths of office, our public officers, whether freedom fighter, politician, soldier or civil servant, acquired impunity and picked up the RNC’s colonial baton of self-aggrandizement. The prime reason for their existence was the exploitation of the territory, peoples and resources of Nigeria.

The war this time is the same old war for resource control. The Asaba Transaction is renewed every election. The prospective colonists say and do whatever is necessary to win control of state resources for themselves and their sponsoring godfather-colonists. The side contracts with missionaries and traditional rulers are renewed – for their centuries-old mission: the pacification of the Nigerian mind to the end that the Nigerian body might actively collaborate in its own exploitation. Intellectuals, activists and touts suffering the oppression of the system are bribed by the centuries-old promise: collaborate with us and defend the colonial system and you too can become Supervisors of Slaves, with privileges that will elevate you above the suffering masses. From stark illiterates to PhDs, all are driven by the same promise: If you defend the iniquity of the colonial system, we will make you Supervisors of Slaves.

Nigeria’s ‘war’ against corruption is a party game.

The powerful Nigerian private sector traces its umbilical cord to an RNC that once ‘owned’ Nigeria. UAC Plc, currently quoted on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, is ‘descended’ from the RNC. Yet, in addition to the billions of US$ annually looted by public officers, the Thabo Mbeki High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows established that in the 38 years from 1970, Nigeria lost US$217 billion revenue to illicit commercial transactions with foreign countries. Annually, public revenues the equivalent of a national budget is looted through the private sector.

The test of the Asaba Transaction is simple: can the public servant act with impunity to prosper self, family, friends and business partners, without consequence? To enthrone justice in Nigeria, we must terminate the Asaba Transaction.

We must tear up the business plan that makes Nigeria the property of a colonial class of public administrators and their collaborators in the private sector. We must recreate Nigeria as a country that belongs to, and works for, her 200 million citizens. We can do this by ending the reign of impunity by those in control of public power in Nigeria. We must ignore (for the moment) the distractions of thousands of petty injustices that are mere symptoms of the Unjust System, and focus on the root solution: we must devise a system that subordinates Nigerian leadership at all levels to the People they serve, by systemically connecting devastating consequence to serious abuse of public office.

One such system is the proposed Bribecode.

The solution must be systemic. We must not subscribe to the cult of charismatic leaders who merely present a more marketable face to the same colonial phalanx of unrepentant looters carrying the colonial baton that the Royal Niger Company transferred in the Asaba Transaction. Our challenge is to create a system that is immune to corrupt public officers. The magic bullet of the Bribecode utilizes the reformative powers of privatization, self-regulation and commercialization to energize good governance by recruiting every Nigerian and public institution into an active front in the battle.

Privatization works by monetizing information, such that every whistle-blower is rewarded for any information leading to the recovery of public funds by a percentage of that recovery.
Self-Regulation works by creating the penalty of Total Assets Forfeiture for private individuals and Liquidation of private companies for serious corruption. This will make both individuals and companies proactively eschew corrupt behaviour as a self-preservation mechanism.
Commercialisation works by the principle of Universal Prosecution whereby any one of Nigeria’s 37 attorneys general have the non-exclusive power to prosecute serious corruption offences. Fines and financial recoveries are payable to any government whose attorney general successfully prosecutes the case. The attorney general for the federation loses his powers of Nolle Prosequi and the resulting competition for prosecutions will drive corruption into extinction in Nigerian public life.
The full Bribecode is available here: http://bribecode.org/a-bill-for-the-corporation-corruption-act/. The result of the proposed law will transform Nigeria through the agency of a reborn justice system. The Bribecode can, for the first time in Nigerian history, subjugate both the private and the public sectors to the interests of the Nigerian public. With the Bribecode in force, our national, state and local government budgets will become sacrosanct and potent forces for transformation. By attaching devastating and inevitable consequence to the abuse of power in the Executive, Legislature, Judiciary and every sector of Nigeria’s socio economy, the Bribecode will trigger a justice revolution that radiates from law and order institutions to end Impunity in Nigerian public and private life. This will impact every sector of Nigeria for the better.

Yet, the proposed law is contrary to the interests of any corrupt incumbent of public office who currently enjoys the dividends of the Asaba Transaction. The onus is therefore on citizens who want a change to make it happen, by visiting www.bribecode.org/signup, signing the petition for the enactment of the Bribecode, and persuading their representatives in the National Assembly – through every possible avenue – to support the enactment of the law.

Had our leaders the courage and vision to try the killers of the first twelve Easterners in the fifties and sixties, thirty thousand innocents would not have died in one month of the pogrom. Three million souls would not have died at war. Nigeria would not have failed. The war this time is raging around us. We must leave the mob. It is time to wake up and find the moral clarity to choose the right side in this war for the future of Nigeria. We must choose right for our present and our children’s future, to the end that Ezinnebuno, and all that have died in the wars of the past, from Akassa to Asaba, may not have died in vain.



SOURCE:
https://nwokolo.com/y/the-bleeding-of-the-niger-justice-bribecode-and-the-war-next-time/?fbclid=IwAR3FqitPHJ3416uBalE2RqU3dhkE4Q2_msmD_MBwHZdWxQFeeQOAjp_u_Ls