THE SERVICE USERS’ ROLE IN CORRUPTING PUBLIC OFFICIALS: A Study of Legal Practitioners’ Accounts of Interactions within the Lagos Lands Bureau

This research examines how legal practitioners discursively construct corruption from their experience as users of the services of a public institution. In the legal field, corruption is a word rarely used in connection with practitioners, it is substituted with a less felonious alternative, ‘misconduct’. As a result, this research focuses on how legal practitioners talk about their interaction with the public institution, especially their construction of corrupt transactions.

Contrary to the popular assumptions that participants in corrupt transactions are unwilling to talk about their involvement, the findings revealed that participants are willing to talk about their involvement in corrupt practice, but mainly through the use of euphemisms. The empirical contribution of this study suggests on one hand that the extensive use of euphemisms in the construction of the self, processes of corrupt interaction and actions, illustrates the significance of language use in the study of corruption. On the other hand, it emphasises the extent of ‘ethical fading’ and moral disengagement amongst professional service users which is due in part to their popular typecasting as victims, and the inherently contradictory principles of practice within the legal field.