The “other side” of whistleblowing practice: Experiences from Nigeria

Whistleblowing, the act of reporting or disclosing wrongdoing, is widely proven to have a practically useful mechanism in fighting corruption in public and private sectors. Within the ambit of the whistleblowing framework, the disclosure of corrupt practices is primarily justifiable only on the ground that the action is genuinely directed towards protecting the interest of the public. The usual benefit of financial reward to whistleblowers is secondary, as it basically aims at encouraging individual employees to expose unethical misconducts in their organizations. Regardless of this, whistleblowing intrinsically benefits the public as well as the individual(s) who raises the alarm against any dishonest acts. However, despite its benefits to the public and the individual informant, whistleblowing attracts certain heavy costs, mainly on the part of the whistleblower, mostly in the form of victimization or witch hunting, retaliation, denial of work-related benefits, recrimination, suspension from work and even dismissal, for their involvement in disclosure wrongdoing. Impliedly, besides its valuable attributes as an important anti-corruption weapon and mechanism for incentivizing the citizens, there is the “other side” of the whistleblowing practice. Using some practical examples and experiences from Nigeria, this paper demonstrates that there is the “other side” of whistleblowing, and concludes that the practice, indeed, has distinct dual sides, especially in the absence of a well-articulated legal framework for protection of whistleblowers, as in the case of Nigeria. Thus, in this paper, we basically argue that the Nigerian government should take immediate actions to enact a comprehensive whistleblowers' protection law, so as to guarantee adequate protection of informants, who risk their lives to expose corruption acts in the interest of the public, from likely abuses. As this study is a qualitative and theoretical research, we adopt the documentary methods of data collection and analysis. These approaches were preferred as they will allow for the objective interrogation of the subject matter under consideration and the achievement of the study's objective.