Fake Agency: The Dog-Goat Praxis (II) 

The second part of this piece focuses on the political sociology of accountability: who actually pays when the system fails? The Igbo proverb - Nkịta richaa nsị, eze eree ewu - suddenly becomes even more revealing. A genuinely independent forensic audit will leave Nigeria with another, perhaps more difficult, question. When the truth is finally discovered, who will pay for it? The crisis of government is not exhausted by the problem of diagnosis. There is also the problem of consequence. A forensic audit may identify the loopholes. It may trace the fictitious names. It may expose the ghost workers. It may establish how an entity acquired official recognition without a clear legal foundation. It may identify those who manipulated payroll systems. It may reveal who opened the gate, who controlled the keys, who removed the fence and who looked away while strange animals entered the government compound. But after all the evidence has been assembled, another ancient Nigerian question will remain: Whose head will roll? And here the editorial pivots from the medicine man to the animals: from dibia anaghị agwọ onwe ya to another profound proposition in Igbo proverbial lore - nkịta richaa nsị, eze eree ewu (when the dog eats excrement, the goat's teeth decay).

The proverb contains, in one devastating image, an entire sociology of injustice. The dog commits the offence. The goat suffers the consequence. The appetite belongs to one animal. The punishment is transferred to another. The culprit and the casualty are separated by a cruel arithmetic of power. This is the dog-goat praxis. And nowhere is that praxis more visible than in hierarchical systems where wrongdoing occurs at the intersection of power, privilege and institutional opacity. The powerful make decisions. The vulnerable process them. The influential authorise arrangements. The dispensable implement them. The system collapses. An investigation begins. And suddenly, consequences begin searching for the nearest available neck. That is how the dog eats—and the goat's teeth begin to ache.

And it is not merely an Igbo story. It re-enacts the global grammar of scapegoating. Across classical literature, sacred traditions, political history, corporate scandals and modern institutional catastrophes, the same pattern keeps reappearing. The names change. The countries change. The centuries change. The institutions change. But the grammar remains disturbingly familiar: Somebody causes the problem. Somebody else becomes visible. Power looks for a culprit. And the nearest expendable victim is presented with the bill. The dog eats. The goat pays.

Let’s begin the chronicle with Sophocles, the first politics of the bearer of bad news. The drama of scapegoating is as old as political authority itself. In Sophoclean tragedy, power repeatedly encounters uncomfortable truths through intermediaries—messengers, guards, prophets and subordinate figures who become vulnerable precisely because they stand closest to the revelation of wrongdoing. The lesson is psychologically profound. The powerful may be unable or unwilling to punish the truth itself. So anger searches for a human carrier. The bearer of the bad news becomes the immediate target. The Nigerian bureaucracy understands this danger intuitively. A scandal erupts. A file appears. A signature is discovered. A memo is leaked. The lowest visible official becomes exposed. But visibility is not the same thing as responsibility. The person who carried the message may not have written it. The person who processed the file may not have conceived it. The person whose signature appears first may not have possessed the authority that made the transaction possible. Sophocles therefore supplies the first warning for the forensic audit: Do not confuse proximity to the evidence with authorship of the crime. The goat may simply be the animal closest to where the dog ate.

Then comes the biblical scapegoat and the politics of suspension. The very word “scapegoat” comes from an ancient ritual imagination of transferred guilt. A community symbolically places its sins upon a designated victim and sends it away. The ritual is ancient. Its political descendants are modern. A government scandal erupts. Public anger rises. Somebody must demonstrate that the state is acting. An official is suspended. Another is removed. A third is arrested. The headlines announce that heads have rolled. The public receives the reassuring theatre of consequence. But suspension is not the same thing as truth. Nor is visibility the same thing as culpability. The politics of suspension becomes dangerous when it substitutes for the politics of investigation. A government may suspend the people easiest to reach while the persons who designed, authorised, enabled or benefited from the arrangement remain beyond the radius of consequence.

That is the bureaucratic version of transferred guilt. The scandal needs a victim. The institution provides one. And the goat's teeth begin to ache. The fake-agency controversy must therefore be investigated beyond the immediate drama of suspensions and announced arrests. Every affected official deserves due process. Every allegation deserves evidence. And every chain of responsibility must be followed beyond the most convenient point of termination.

Dreyfus and the danger of institutional certainty adds another layer. The Dreyfus Affair remains one of history's most enduring warnings about what happens when an institution becomes emotionally invested in its own conclusion. Alfred Dreyfus was condemned within a toxic mixture of prejudice, secrecy, manipulated evidence and institutional self-protection. The lesson for modern accountability is severe: An institution can be wrong and still be convinced that it is defending justice. Once an agency publicly announces a spectacular discovery, another danger arises. The institution may begin defending the announcement rather than continuing to interrogate the evidence. That is why the conflicting accounts surrounding the alleged fake agency matter. If an office says it was a legitimate project rather than a government agency, the claim must be tested. If ICPC says it was unauthorised, that conclusion must be supported. If officials allege sabotage and bureaucratic rivalry, those allegations must be investigated. If files were suppressed, the suppression must be traced. No conclusion should become sacred before the evidence is complete. Forensic integrity means possessing the courage to revise an early conclusion. The dog-goat proverb demands no less. Before punishing the goat, make absolutely certain which animal ate.

Stalin’s lesson underscores the fact that systemic failure loves a single villain. One of the recurring political lessons of authoritarian systems is the extraordinary usefulness of a single villain. Complex failures are difficult to explain. A saboteur is easy. A failing system can become a story about an enemy. An administrative disaster can become the work of a traitor. A structural failure can be compressed into one guilty face. The Nigerian state is not Stalin's Soviet Union. But the bureaucratic psychology deserves attention. A complicated failure involving multiple systems, layers of approval and years of weak controls may be politically inconvenient. A rogue official is easier. A fake promoter is easier. A ghost worker is easier. A single permanent secretary is easier. But if an allegedly unauthorised entity could move through government corridors, obtain institutional privileges and survive for years, the explanation cannot automatically end with one person. A system capable of permitting the anomaly must itself be examined. This is why Tinubu's forensic audit is potentially important. It shifts attention from: who is the villain? to: what made the villain possible? The answer may include individuals. But it may also include systems. And systemic failure must not be concealed behind the convenience of a single villain.

Challenger shows that responsibility rises with the power to prevent. The Challenger disaster offers a crucial principle for institutional accountability. Responsibility cannot be measured merely by who was closest to the final act. It must also be measured by who possessed the power to prevent the act. A junior employee may see a danger. A supervisor may receive the warning. Management may possess the authority to act. Decision-makers may overrule caution. When catastrophe follows, responsibility must rise through the hierarchy of power. This principle should guide the Nigerian forensic audit. Who possessed access to the systems? Who had authority to approve? Who had power to override controls? Who received warnings? Who ignored anomalies? Who could have stopped the process? The answer cannot always be found at the lowest signature. Responsibility rises with the power to prevent. That is precisely where the dog-goat praxis becomes politically dangerous. The goat is often punished because it is visible. The dog survives because it possesses access to the compound's inner chambers. The audit must follow power as carefully as it follows paperwork. 

Abu Ghraib and the barrel problem comes next. The Abu Ghraib scandal generated one of the most important questions in institutional ethics: Was it the work of bad apples or evidence of a rotten barrel? The metaphor matters. Punishing a few “bad apples” may be necessary. But replacing the apples without examining the barrel solves nothing if the environment itself produces misconduct. Nigeria must ask the same question. If ghost workers can survive inside payroll systems, are the individuals alone responsible—or is the verification environment defective? If fictitious entities can acquire official privileges, is the promoter alone responsible—or did institutional controls fail? If access can be manipulated, who designed the access architecture? If controls can be overridden, who possesses override powers? If anomalies were visible but ignored, why? The forensic audit must examine both: the apples and the barrel. Otherwise, Nigeria may remove a few officials while preserving the architecture that produces their successors. The dogs will change. The compound will remain open. And the goats will continue paying.

And here comes Bhopal and the architecture of failure. The Bhopal catastrophe remains a devastating lesson in the difference between an immediate failure and the larger architecture that makes failure catastrophic. Disasters rarely emerge from one isolated act. They grow through neglected safeguards, weakened systems, cost-cutting, poor maintenance and failures of oversight. The Nigerian bureaucratic equivalent is clear. The person who enters data may not have designed the system. The person who processes payroll may not control verification. The official who approves correspondence may not have created the institutional framework. The final visible action may merely be the last point in a much longer chain of failure. The forensic audit must therefore reconstruct the architecture of failure. Not merely: Who did this? But: What conditions made this possible? Who designed the process? Who weakened the safeguards? Who failed to update the controls? Who knew the vulnerabilities? Who ignored warnings? Who benefited from institutional confusion? That is how the investigation moves from the dog that ate to the compound that made the meal possible. Wells Fargo and the invisible pressure above falls in place here. The Wells Fargo scandal demonstrated another uncomfortable truth: Visible misconduct may have invisible pressures above it. Employees may perform improper acts. But institutions may create targets, incentives and pressures that make misconduct predictable. The individual still possesses moral agency. But the environment in which the individual acts must also be investigated. Nigeria's forensic audit should therefore follow incentives as well as transactions. Why did someone seek to create or maintain an unauthorised institutional structure? Who stood to benefit? What resources were involved? Who gained influence? Who gained access? Who gained money? Who gained political or bureaucratic advantage? And what pressures made other officials reluctant to challenge the arrangement? Fraud does not survive on greed alone. It requires opportunity. And opportunity is frequently institutional.