The Problem With Nigeria

It is said that if you want to destroy a nation, attack its moral values. The moral values of our great nation has been under attack, and in the best part of the past fifty years its been on a drunken reel.
A prominent Nigerian once narrated her delight at visiting a state-of-the-art public convenience somewhere in the west. She told her listeners that she liked it so much that she felt like “taking it home.”
Now, that is the problem.

If she had felt like coming home and building something like that in her capacity, she probably would have made a difference. But because uprooting such installation and bringing home was both a pipe-dream, and a wishful fanning of her vanity – the experience was pointless.

That is one deficiency prevailing in the psyche of most Nigerians; we always want something made for us! China is producing – we become their biggest trading partner. Dubai is developing – we flood their economy with our oil money. Ghana’s got their education right – now that is the next education destination. With all our resources and beautiful, talented people, we are still like a giant looking up to pigmies!

We have become comfortable in this destructive habit of waiting for every other country to get it right, and then we rush in, while our very nation remains stunted, decadent.

We always want to carry other peoples’ efforts home. That is why we hope and dream that someday a developed nation will parcel their technology in UPS and deliver to us – china will dash us technology since America and Europe didn’t; now we love China. That is why some of our (miscreant) youths are only on the lookout for vibrant nations where they will set-up scam schemes. We just want to bring something home, good or bad. How very unfortunate.

Another poison is that the average Nigerian wants to impress, belong to the “happening-class.” Nobody asks the source of your income, just display it and earn instant respect and recognition. The church will give, the mosque, even the elders will abandon their birth rights and announce you! Without verification.

It would also not be unfair to say that we comprise of the most unpatriotic people in any nation of the world. Some will want to argue with the flitting cohesion that football brings, but even that is gone, if you observe recent trends. People want to rule the nation just to butter their own side of the bread, and not to take the whole nation to greater heights. 

A typical Nigerian will pay twice for an item if only it is not pronounced “made in Nigeria.” There are bananas that sell above the mark just because they are brought in from Cameroun. There is a brand of bread that sells hot just for the tag “Ghana Bread” even though it is made here. A serving minister wouldn’t mind sending in aides to welcome a minor in the name of foreign investor, just because he is “foreign”. We just don’t believe in our people, because we have an esteem problem as a nation.

You can see it every day in the life of our so-called leaders, people who are only there because they belong to the politically right clique, people who have proved their corruptibility and are being rewarded - you could see it in the aura of impunity they command, the waste they sponsor across the nation. 

How they borrow monies on behalf of the poor only to return such monies to rich nations as private investment, and the poor will spend years in depravity repaying what they never had.
How they engage in national completions to loot the treasury and become super millionaires.
Every day, a new criminal outgrows the penal law, the court rolls out a red carpet, the media gives them their best shot, to sell the news to a salivating masses who brace in the hope that someday, just somehow, they just might get the opportunity to be crooked and famous and acceptable, too.