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In recent times, psychiatric assessment of leaders and people in position of  public trust has re-surfaced and therefore merits some degree of public discourse.

Sometime last year, Farida Waziri, the EFCC boss, wondered aloud why psychiatric assessment should not be a pre-condition for taking up public appointments, given the level of economic recklessness and public stealing that has almost become a national embarrassment.
She has expressed the same concern publicly this year, but with a more pragmatic call for the imperative of psychiatrists' role in our polity. Waziri made the call recently in Kaduna while delivering the keynote address at a workshop on Transparency and Accountability in the public service. According to her, "Having dealt with many corruption cases, I am inclined to suggest that public officers should be subjected to some form of psychiatric evaluation to determine their suitability for public office. The extent of aggrandisement and gluttonous accumulation of wealth that I have observed suggests to me that some people are mentally and psychologically unsuitable for public office."
Some time ago, Wole Soyinka had also raised the same query, and why not? This is a global problem but there is strong evidence of this scourge among African leaders at a different level. Examples are Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Charles Taylor of Liberia, Aristide of Haiti, and here in Nigeria, the examples are rife and known to all.
There are psychological and behavioural phenomena that could possibly explain some of these stealing behaviours among highly placed people. Without 'over-medicalising' what has now become the bane of our socio-economic development, grand corruption and public stealing are primarily motivated by what everyone knows as greed, irresponsible disposition to exalted position of trust and callous unconcern for the welfare of others.
This is further enhanced by personality traits and psychodynamic issues inherent in those that perpetrate such activities: Effects of poor educational background, abnormal appraisal of the role of public fund and its purpose in developmental challenges, chronically deprived upbringing and life experiences, psychopathic personality traits, obsessive-compulsive disorder resulting in uncontrollable kleptomania, severe anxiety when faced with large sums of public funds, severe phobia of poverty or delusions of poverty in an otherwise wealthy individual and perhaps, senile 'hoarding' or what is technically known as Diogenes Syndrome.
However, this behaviour is not peculiar to political officeholders. Historically, we know CEOs of companies, conglomerates e.g. the ENRON case, Conrad Black, CEOs of failed banks, executives of corporate organisations, stockbrokers, parastatal heads, etc.
Despite the best efforts of the EFCC, it has been observed recently by one of Nigeria's foremost editors of a daily newspaper that probes at the National Assembly have brought up a lot of revelations yet no convictions. I also remember being asked such a question in 2001, during one of my Postgraduate Lectures at the School of Public Policy, UK, coinciding with front page news in the UK Financial Times (Nigerian leader found with a secret £4 billion account in the UK bank). I was asked to explain how one person could siphon £4 billion out of a state fund yet there is no precipitant economic meltdown? Then, I struggled to provide a sensible answer to that poser. But little did I know it was only an evolving sign of many disturbing economic crimes against our national development.
In recent times, we have heard of the banking sector loan scandals and abuse of depositors and shareholders funds, how the $16 billion NIPP power project and N300 billion allocation for roads is yet unaccounted for. It is in the public domain how the N50 billion PEF was mismanaged yet the gladiators were given a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, a boy who stole N5,000 from his friend was jailed for three years with no option of a fine.
We have seen the charge lists of ex-governors released by the EFCC. The N19.5 billion of the Aviation Intervention Funds/Safe Tower Project and £2.6 billion oil block bidding revenue and so on which have remained unsolved, yet the super-celebrity leaders who mismanaged the funds are laughing at government's efforts to get justice for the teeming number of Nigerians.
Given this evolving trend, would one not be right in agreeing with the EFCC Czar that psychiatric assessment and profiling is needed as a tool for selecting our leaders into positions of trust? Again, this is not an attempt to medicalise what has now become a deeply ingrained, culturally appropriate but morally and socially inappropriate public behaviour. But in doing this psychiatric assessments, we can have a baseline for all of them, at least, certify them well or otherwise from the mental-health point of view before they attain that position.
And if for any reason they are deemed normal psychologically before public appointment but are caught engaging in such maladaptive criminal behaviour, then appropriate mental health intervention can be suggested, like treatment in a Mentally Disordered Offenders (MDO) low/medium/high secured unit or mental asylum and therapeutic community. Also, we may then be better informed of the possible causes or precipitants to such deviant behaviour in a previously normal individual.
From the psychiatrist's perspectives, we can then begin to hypothesise whether exposure of some individuals in Nigeria to power, public funds, positions of authority and responsibility is linked to progressive deterioration of their mental health status Should this be the case, our constitution and healthcare system should find a means of addressing such a clinically significant phenomenon, given its prevalence and destructive effects on our socio-economic development.