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I live in two cities: Abuja, Nigeria, and Regina, Canada. Both cities have similarities in size. End-to-end in both cities is not more than 25 minutes. But one is federal capital of Nigeria and the other is Saskatchewan provincial capital.
That’s all about the similarities.
Both Nigeria and Canada are amazing, but for different reasons.
Both countries have a convention for having the appellation of First Lady for the wife of the President and that of the Prime Minister’s wife. 
While the central objective of the Canadian society and leadership is built on collective wealth, the Nigerian society and wealth structure is built around individual citizens and superpersonalities.
Canada rides on strong institutions, Nigeria glows in superindividuals who invariably become untouchables.
In Canada, it would be impossible for a First Lady to accumulate $8.4 million and N9.2 billion to herself illegally and not be in jail. Patience Jonathan had a free-for-all under her husband and, after this massive recovery, she is not in jail.
Many public individuals before her are also walking free after the blue murder of massive stealing.
Our system permits it.
The Canadian system would, by its service-oriented structure, not permit even the Prime Minister to accumulate wealth through public office.
In Nigeria, the reverse is the case.
The personality superstructure of Nigeria permits all forms of absurdities.
The ministers, directors, heads of agencies as well as National Assembly members allocate public funds and contracts to themselves and their cronies with no regard to the pervasive poverty, the highest in the world, with over 50 per cent of the population living in abject poverty.
No doubt, Nigerian nationhood is younger, at just near 60 years in 2019 than that of a little over 150 years of Canadian nationhood.
The age of Nigeria is no excuse for the failure of leadership and the complicity of the followership.
The poverty gaps in Nigeria and Canada are amazingly in the opposite directions.
In Regina as well as the entire Saskatchewan Province, the province of my residence, there is free health care for everyone, including international students.
In Nigeria, citizens who cannot afford medicare would die of malaria, just like that.
Yet, those who are close to the corridors of power steal voraciously. And what we can only do is to recover some through plea bargaining.
The office of the First Lady all over the world exists merely by convention. It is actually more of an appellation than an office. In Canada, it is an appellation and ceremonial. In Nigeria, it’s a super-office with all the paraphernalia of a structure.
In Nigeria, the office has become a source or origin for power and influence peddling. It is not different even under the Buhari administration. The insider attacks periodically launched by Aisha Buhari has been a resistance to the avowed stance of her husband, Buhari, to tame the office. It is obvious that he has lost the battle, with her recent re-definition of the office by herself.
Even when the office tended to exude positivity in the past, as was seen during the Better Life for Rural Women days of the late Maryam Babangida and the era of Mariam Abacha, with the National Hospital For Women and Children (now National Hospital, Abuja), there was always the undue use of public funds in the office of the First Lady in Nigeria.
Even our anti-corruption laws are shallow and beggarly as they are structured to give a slap on the wrist.
For over four years, Patience Jonathan has been wasting the nation’s legal resources just as the Abacha family has been involved in unnecessary legal trips with Nigeria for over 20 years.
We need to strengthen our anti-corruption laws beyond recovery of stolen assets to imprisonment for those who cannot account for their possessions. But strong anti-corruption laws cannot come from Nigeria’s current structure. A consumptive structure can only breed corruption.
Canada is a confederation with strong autonomy for the provinces, while Nigeria runs a “feeding bottle” federalism, where states are appendages of the federal government.
That’s the difference between Nigeria and Canada in the roots of their existence and in their attitude to corruption and pursuit of money launderers.
•Okhiria is a veteran journalist and executive director of the Progressive Impact Organization for Community Development. [email protected]
