There is a certain pride that comes with being from a particular country, whatever the country may be. No matter the minutiae or current circumstances surrounding the country, and regardless of its economic status or where it ranks on the world’s list of countries; there is a pride that comes from belonging to a particular place, a sense of belonging to a particular group of people. And it’s no different in Nigeria. It is rich in culture and full of life on so many levels that it would fill up ten blogs just to break it down in detail. Nigerians are generally a happy group of people with a very positive attitude and outlook on life.
But, the jingoism that takes place in Nigeria is a funny one. ‘Proud to be a Nigerian,’ or ‘Nigeria is a great country!’ And yet we all want to run to every other country on earth, even countries poorer than our own, just to be away from Nigeria. The truth is we know that Nigeria is in a very bad state right now, and that things are not working. Most Nigerians dislike the current climate of the country and the government that rules us, with all its corruption.
Now, Nigerians blame the government for EVERYTHING! And yes, it is true that the government here is very corrupt, this is a known fact that has existed since the 1970s. But the thing is; it’s not just the government that is corrupt. EVERYONE is corrupt in Nigeria, one way or the other. Whether you are a Yahoo boy embezzling millions from innocent victims, or you are the Police (and SARS – the (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) that are worse than the armed robbers they claim to apprehend); you are corrupt because you dupe and cheat people out of their money!
Even the little girl on the street selling groundnuts is corrupt, because she knows a cup of groundnuts costs 70 Naira but yet she’ll start the selling price at 100 Naira so you can bargain it down to 70 Naira, if she’s lucky. And you buying the groundnuts are corrupt as well because even though you’ve agreed to pay 70 Naira, you’ll give her only 60 Naira because you “don’t have the sufficient amount” on you. And because she’s young, desperate and hungry she’ll accept the new price. And you go away feeling good about yourself because you got an excellent deal, ripping her off of 10 Naira. And she’ll go away even happier because the groundnuts are actually 50 Naira a cup.
Even the holy men here are corrupt. Pastors, Imams. Many of them embezzle hundreds of thousands from their congregation, they thwart and pervert the holy books they preach, and instead preach lies to their congregation, using every opportunity they have to take advantage of the most vulnerable among their flock.
This is Nigeria’s main problem: every sector, department, person, is corrupt and accepts this corruption as part of the norm. And because the system is broken and nothing is regulated, corruption thrives very well here. The day to day deeds you do lie on you, there is no excuse. Poverty or not, suffering or not, ethics are ethics.
The funny thing is, the same government we blame and call evil, we voted them in! And have done so every four years, for the last twenty something years. We vote the same recycled people into power because of a few false hopes and promises, and then we lie to ourselves that this one will be better than the last, knowing full well that is never the case. Even the valueless-ness of the Naira alone is enough to tell you otherwise. This country has been on a steady decline with regression, lack of jobs, and inflation, plunging many into poverty in addition to how stressful life here already is.
But instead of rising up to fight off the powers that oppress us, we lie back and continue to immerse ourselves in the common lies we propagate, like:
“I’ve not eaten since morning.” “I’m sick.” “I no get shinbaing.”
This is ‘begging for money’ 101. It’s the line everybody uses when they want you to pity them and send them money. The funny thing is, when we hear these lines, we know that more times than not, the person is lying. We know that while they sound desperate, the situation is not that dire. Some probably even had better food than you did for breakfast, but somehow we still send them the money and thereby encourage their begging habits further, along with the begging and receiving culture that already exists in the country.
We enjoy wasting each other’s time with “I’m almost there.” “Turn around, you’ll see me soon.” “I’m stuck in traffic.” Meanwhile you are miles away from the proposed destination or haven’t even left the house. Not considering for one moment how you are wasting the other person’s time, how you have no regard for their plans or their affairs. Because nine times out of ten, you didn’t plan ahead to leave early. You’ve relaxed in the fact that ‘African time’ is the way of life here, abi?
And the worst part is, the same mouth you use to lie, cheat and commit all manners of evil is the same mouth that you use to cry out to God in prayer. You call him your father and lay all your complaints and demands to him, and somehow you think he owes you??
No one does Religion more than Nigerians; faith, fasting, prayer, you name it, we do it and we are very loud about it. (Both Christians and Muslims). And yet ours is one of the most corrupt nations in the world. We sing of the respect we have for our God and for each other and yet human life means nothing here. We rob, kill and hate on each other based on greed, our tribes, and religions, and somehow we think that praying over all our problems, and over Nigeria as a whole, and never lifting a finger to evoke even the tiniest bit of change, will solve anything? Wake up! Calling on God alone won’t help you or anyone, it won’t solve a single problem. Or haven’t you heard: “Heaven helps those who help themselves?”
Does God even love Nigeria? I can’t help but wonder at times. When it comes to the millions of church-going Nigerians, how many actually listen to the word and take in what it says? And yet every Sunday we are all in church, dressed in our Sunday’s best, judging all the ‘heathens’ who don’t go to church. It’s fascinating and sad. Now God can be found almost everywhere, but unless something fundamentally changes soon, I’m unsure he can be found in most Nigerian churches.
And on top of our twisted notions of religion and faith, Nigerians are too superstitious! Beliefs are often spewed out as facts. Them say, them say. Never an eye witness to the things you so strongly believe in. Even though we clearly live in a physical world Nigerians choose to see the spiritual in everything; someone dies, instead of doing an autopsy to determine what killed them. Nah, it’s village people that spiritually attacked them. Someone walks into a forest and doesn’t return, instead of thinking maybe a snake bit him or an animal took him, or perhaps bandits got to him, OR he’s still lost! No, no, no, it was evil spirits that took him. And so on and so forth. It’s borderline psychotic at times.
One evening, a woman comfortably narrated to me how she ran over her dog on purpose. Apparently, it was a ‘local’ dog and it had a knack for bolting out the gate whenever it was open (as dogs often do), and it would be gone for hours (as local dogs often do). On this day, she drove out the gate and unknowingly to her, the dog had been following her a while. She paused at a red light, and when the light turned green she noticed the dog standing in front of her car. She was about to hit the brakes when a voice said to her, “you will have an accident and die if you hit the brakes.” She realized in that moment, she said, that the dog had been sent to her and that it was either the dog or her. And so she stepped on the accelerator and ran over her own dog.
I asked her if it didn’t occur to her that the reason the dog followed her was because she was its owner and it knew her. She said, “No, I know what I’m talking about, they had sent that dog to me.” Who’s they? I often wonder. I could see she felt no regret or remorse over what she had done. I could also see it wasn’t her first time sharing the story, she felt justified in what she had done just by her sheer belief.
I wasn’t even mad at her, I just felt sad, for the dog and for other animals, and people at the mercy of such senseless, unnecessary cruelty. I felt sad for people like her who don’t know any better, despite having received a formal education and being well traveled, in her case. It begs the question, how can you see the world and yet take none of it in you? How can you still remain ‘bush’ after all your life experiences?? It’s very sad to say the least. Especially that such a person prays fervently every day, goes to church every Sunday and believes that they are a good person whom God loves, listens to, and forgives their every sin.
Nigerian culture innately propagates violence. A while back, an ‘older’ man said to me, because I wouldn’t budge to his cajoling and do what he said, he said: “Don’t let me slap you o.” I responded, “O-kay.” Now, I wasn’t upset, angry or even scared of getting slapped, no. Because I know it was just a Nigerian thing to say. “I’ll slap you,” we say in a friendly tone, to a friend or someone we are comfortable with. “I go beat you o.” “Make I no vex slap you.”
Why?
How is casually suggesting violence an okay and normal thing? Is it because we expect it? After al,l we are used to being beaten from our childhood, by our parents, by our teachers in school, by our seniors, by strangers etc.
It doesn’t make it okay though. Because even though we laugh about it, and our culture teaches us to down play it, believe it or not, it affects us all in one way or another, trickling down to even our animals. (Dogs in Nigeria (and other third world countries to be honest) are generally more aggressive than dogs in the first world, the U.S. for example). That’s simply because over there, there is a general dog culture. Dogs over there are used to taking walks and interacting with other humans, dogs and pets, generally.
While here, they are often chained up, treated as ‘guard dogs’, they typically see no one except the family they guard and their few close friends that come over to the house. And, they are often maltreated, unloved, underfed, and no one in the household typically plays with them. All these build up aggression in the animal and eventually leads to violence. Dogs also learn from people and if the people around them are violent… well, the rest is history.
If we shun all types of violence, starting with our speech, it would do the country as a whole, better in the long run. We are too aggressive, even casually. We talk to each other anyhow and for a country that’s very showy on the great respect we have for our elders, we have zero respect for each other, in the way we treat each other and the way we talk to each other, especially when the person is perceived to be ‘beneath us,’ like beggars for example. It especially breaks my heart when I see how the poor ‘helpers’ e.g. house helps, gate men etc. are treated by their bosses. It’s just plain awful. It’s inhuman at times.
The reason it’s like this sometimes is because most Nigerians live for the show and for appearances. They put too much emphasis on it. “It’s all about packaging,” they say. I may not have eaten today because I don’t have a Kobo in my bank account but I’ll be damned if I don’t wear my snazziest outfit just to walk down the street to buy a loaf of bread.
Packaging. It’s part of what’s killing us. Now I’m not saying you should live and look like a pauper (even if you are one), no. But tell me now, what’s the wisdom in dashing a gate man, who has a job (you don’t), 200 Naira when you only have 300 Naira and part of it is your transport? Or how can you squander 300K in less than a month, when there were no emergencies or pressing issues, and say, “That’s money, it always goes.” No it doesn’t, if you spend it well. Eating meals or buying drinks of 10-15K in one sitting, when you’re not earning anything is spending your money uselessly. There is zero wisdom to a lot of the things young people, especially, do.
Why do we care so much about physical appearances and nothing more? We all want to be big men and women with all the wealth and power in the world, without even wanting to lift a finger in an attempt to change anything. But instead we complain day and night and lazily do nothing about anything. While we drive big cars we can’t afford, or wear clothes we have literally emptied our bank accounts to buy, and walk through the streets in the latest designer shoes that instantly get buried in mud or soaked up in stagnant rain water because the roads are so run down and lack serious maintenance.
Where exactly is the sense in any of this? What is your flashiness for? Just to show that you are doing well when in actuality you are far from it. Can’t you see that it’s utter rubbish?!
“I want to enjoy my life,” so you order a chicken of 2,500 Naira that you know you don’t have in your bank account, but it’s no problem, your entitled self will just expect the friend you are with, or whoever, to pay for you, without any thought of what might be in their own back account, and this is absolutely normal to you? In your mind, you have arrived, you’ve gone out and eaten beta chicken and drank malt, and shamelessly eaten to your fill on somebody else’s bank account and budget. And some people think this is their birthright. They fight you when you speak out against it, they call you greedy and selfish (aka-gum) without seeing that they themselves are leeches.
Who are you deceiving? You’re just being delusional. Cut your coat according to your size. It’s not hard. Stop leeching off of others; it gives you no self-respect!
And I swear to God I will blow my top off, if another woman pushes her “You should buy a girdle” or “You should buy a wig,” agenda on me. You don’t need those things to be beautiful! You are beautiful the way you are, with your God given African hair! You don’t need Eurocentric ideologies to be beautiful, this is 2020 for crying out loud. And if you don’t have a flat tummy, you don’t have a flat tummy, embrace yourself and flaunt it. You don’t owe anyone shit! Be happy with the way you are, and if you’re not, then do something about it!
Now, I understand that because of the bad state of the economy the country has turned people into hungry hustlers, who will get their fill from anywhere, any source. But the reason we are too money hungry is due to our need to appear perfect all the time. It is due to our entitlement. The average Nigerian is so fucking entitled and it’s sick!
The world should empathize with Nigeria though, and here is why: In Nigeria the suffering is so intense, unfathomable and incomprehensible, it is no wonder Nigerians run away to other countries, it is no wonder they engage in crime and corruption. When you live in a country where your government does absolutely nothing for you, and you weren’t born with even a metal spoon in your mouth, you do whatever you can to get the money, you do what you can to hustle and survive. Yes, it doesn’t justify bad behavior but it most definitely explains its existence.
Most Nigerians long for the day they get another country’s citizenship. Even if it’s a tiny country that most haven’t heard about. A country far poorer than Nigeria itself. The reason is, Nigeria has such a bad rep in most countries around the world and it’s heartbreaking for all the upright people who have done nothing to contribute to that reputation. And because Nigerians travel a lot, they have such a definite presence around the world which is one that often draws negative attention to itself. And, as foreigners in most countries, Nigerians have more than filled up their quota.
Many Nigerians would just love to slip in under the radar and live the authentic life that they crave, in a stable environment that allows their talents to thrive. An environment that encourages and brings forth their creativity, and appreciates them for who they are on the inside. Most Nigerians don’t know what that’s like because this country suppresses you, frustrates you, and kills your dreams. And most times the only options of truly making it is either to leave Nigeria or to descend into the murk of crime and corruption, and most Nigerians choose the former, or some, a crass combination of the two.
Now, I do not write all these to mock my fellow citizens, to condemn my country as a whole or because I delight in airing out Nigeria’s dirty laundry. No. I write with such passion because I care. I know we can do better as a nation. This country is too rich, too educated, too enlightened to still be in the dark ages. (Seriously, how is electricity still a problem in this era?) We just need to believe in ourselves and in the power of unity. And most importantly, we need to shed off all the aforementioned things that hold us back and contribute to why our nation remains this way.
The pressure to make it, at all costs, is the driving force of most Nigerians; it’s the paradox we all have to live with, I know. But this does not always have to define us. We can each strive to be better. I know the bad in the country is overwhelming at times and most have no idea where to start fixing the numerous problems this country has.
Start with YOU. You cannot change your country as it is alone, you cannot change the minds of your fellow citizens, but you can change yourself and the thread of corruption that was sown in you. You may not be able to fix all the bad roads, for instance, but you can fix the road on your street. And if everybody thought and did like this, before you know it, the entire country wouldn’t look so bad. After all, like the great Nigerian writer, Ken Tsaro-Wiwa, said in the last stanza of his poem, ‘Little:’
Little deeds of kindness
Little words of love
Make this earth an Eden
Like the heaven above.
zizbaby 