By Reuben Abati

I ONCE wrote a piece about the character of the average Nigerian. To be added to that, by way of update is what seems to me to be the Nigerian’s lack of originality. It is a controversial point, but there is no doubting the fact that the average Nigerian is greedy; functioning very close to the state of nature. Aristotle it was who had said that “a child learns by imitation”; there is something child-like about the Nigerian lack of originality. As a people, we like to imitate; we lack the capacity to write our own stories, even if as individuals we are among the most gifted human beings on planet Earth. Why are we the way we are? Forever short-changing ourselves. Reducing the national potential in the process. Subjecting the environment to a curious herd mentality. I speak of majority tendency of course, there is still a minority that keeps the country going with its distinction, but the efforts of that majority are dangerously abbreviated by the omissions of the antithetical minority.

You only need to take a look at the organisation of the Nigerian business environment to confirm this. Start a line of business. Build it up. Make it successful. Before long, every Dick and Harry in town will rush into that line of business. Nigerians don’t know how to give credit to pioneers. “Who does she think she is? Is she the only one? I can do better.” But they are not interested in making anything better; they are attracted by what they perceive to be the profit end of the enterprise. Before long, they’d ruin the business, destroy standards, overpopulate it so much that profit will become impossible. It is natural for human beings to measure themselves against each other and to compete, but social competition in Nigeria is driven mostly not by the search for excellence, but greed and mischief!

Ten years ago, you could count the number of fast food joints on your finger tips across Nigeria . The moment it became a successful business, everyone rushed into it. People resigned from their professional careers and set up eateries. Today, there is a fast food joint on almost every other corner. They are becoming almost as ubiquitous as the churches. Standards of service have not improved, rather they have dropped. Nigerians do not believe in investing their energies in areas where they are most suited.

They would try their hands at anything, with the hope to make profit the way the other man has. As it is with the fast food business, so it is with the churches. Church business used to be a very sober business. The clergy were taken seriously because the average clergy man of old actually conducted himself and sounded as if he had been one of the original disciples of Jesus Christ or a witness to the emergence of the Church at Antioch . The moment someone turned the business of Christian worship into something glamorous and eclectic, everyone else jumped onto the bandwagon.

There has been a competition since then over whose church is the most spirit-filled and with the greatest anointing, resulting in an inversion of the Doctrine and the introduction into Christian worship, of pagan practices that belong more to the province of commerce and deception. It used to be the case in this country that if anyone was found to be articulate, others would say of him or her: you would make a good lawyer”. These days, the first career consideration for such persons is: “You will make a good pastor; you can start a church in the future.” Becoming a pastor is the easiest thing of course you only need to claim that you saw a vision, you heard voices, or you were called (by Satan or Belzeebub, nobody ever bothers to check!) .

Go and ask the first set of persons who established the foundations of Nollywood. Twenty five years ago, actors and actresses in Nigeria were looked down upon as unserious people. The moment a few gifted persons raised the profile of the performing arts and it became fashionable for actors and other artistes to live well, become celebrities and be respected by society, everyone rushed in there. Talent didn’t matter. Engineering graduates, architects and lawyers suddenly discovered that they too could look good in front of the camera, and so began the rush of mediocrity into Nollywood. Today, Nollywood is at a crossroads. Every actress is a producer or a would-be producer. Every actor is a potential Local Council Chairman or Special Assistant to a Governor, or President of the Actors Guild. The few who claim to be committed pay more attention to their good looks rather their skills.

There are actresses whose claim to fame is their exposure of their anatomy and the fact that this has set the imagination of paying audiences on fire. Every week, there is a young lady or a young man seeking to get into Nollywood, not to contribute to art, but to become a celebrity and also make quick bucks. There are fewer persons willing to pay the dues, or come up with original ideas that can move the industry forward. When a committed artiste speaks up and makes a case for improvement in standards, he is shouted down by those who call themselves “the rave of the moment.” That is what most artistes do these days. They rave.

Is there any point reminding us of the number of persons who wished they could play football and actually tried to play it by force when Nigerians gained a foothold in professional football in Europe and elsewhere? And should you assume that I describe an elite tendency, how about the okada business. The okada is a product of both expediency and necessity. As soon as it became a lucrative business, there was a big scramble to get into that line of business. Even University Professors abandoned research and became okada entrepreneurs. When you visit a typical Nigerian university campus these days, I mean those ones that still have staff quarters, you would be pleasantly surprised to discover that the once serene staff quarters populated by contemplative minds and their once upon a time, equally sober families, have been taken over by kiosks, pepper soup joints, recharge card retail sheds. Those businesses are not necessarily owned by the Professor’s wife, but by the Professor himself! The aluminium business is trying to catch up. When ordinary people do not buy the okada, they try to learn how to play around with aluminium windows and roofs. There are fewer persons willing to learn such trades as bricklaying; mechanical engineering, vulcanizing, painting …too strenuous.

As it with trades, so it is with fashion styles. It takes only one woman to wear something nice; before you know it every other woman is copying the same style. That is why fashion pictures and magazines are so popular: female readers are interested in fashion styles. I once attended a society function where more than 20 women wore the same design and this was not the notorious aso ebi, just a display of lack of originality, every Janet trying to look like Jane. The urge to belong, to be seen to be part of the crowd, childishly interpreted in some circumstances as being progressive has also since affected the NGO community.

NGOs used to be extremely effective in this country; their potentials and achievement were demonstrated during the struggle for Nigerian democracy in the 90s. Foreign agencies supported Nigerian NGOs with donor funds. But that was also the undoing of the NGO concept. Before long, too many Nigerians had set up NGOs, so many of them inside the briefcases and bank accounts of their promoters. It became so notorious that every wife of an important government official found it necessary to set up one. In their case, it is a special purpose vehicle for raising funds from their husbands’ friends and associates and the public treasury. Although two or three First Ladies showed how much could be achieved through good intentions.

I assume that it is the same copycat syndrome that drives Nigerians who experiment with homosexuality and bisexuality. And the militants who have adopted Western methods of terrorism. And the latest revelation that there are Nigerian children who are signing up as suicide bombers. Do we say all of this is human, all too human? Perhaps, But it is also a reflection of the corrosive environment in which Nigerians have found themselves. Our society is so dangerously lacking in higher values, the environment is so harsh it allows for very little creativity. Innovativeness is discouraged and so the young and the not so young can be easily recruited onto available bandwagons.

To imitate is human but we can encourage the scope for creativity and originality by expanding the scope for human expression through good governance. In more progressive societies, young children asked what they would like to become in life could answer: “I’ll like to be a fireman.” A teacher. A nurse. A salesman. A diver. A driver. Plumber. Horologist…knowing full well, that whatever he or she chooses to do, society will offer him or her the best opportunity for growth and fulfilment. Should a Nigerian child make such a suggestion, the mother is likely to scream with every ounce of energy within her: “I reject it in Jesus name. No child from my womb will end up as a fireman or plumber in Jesus name!” It is a pity that this is so.

by Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo

When you strip Nigeria of all its borrowed and illusive attires, what will be left is a wretched half-child-half-man nation on the verge of implosion. Nigerians and the rest of the world are beginning to ask themselves serious questions in the wake of a Nigerian man’s attempt at bombing an American airline over Detroit on Christmas day.

Nigerians, for so long in denial about the dangers of their floundering country, are beginning to rethink. Whether Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was a crazy young man or the first Nigerian to be named a member of an international Islamic fundamentalist group, Nigerians are sure that nothing will remain the same.

As far back as June 1, 1969, the then Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu stated in his Ahiara Declaration that,

“The Federation of Nigeria is today as corrupt, as unprogressive and as oppressive and irreformable as the Ottoman Empire was in Eastern Europe over a century ago. And in contrast, the Nigerian Federation in the form it was constituted by the British cannot by any stretch of imagination be considered an African necessity. Yet we are being forced to sacrifice our very existence as a people to the integrity of that ramshackle creation that has no justification either in history or in the freely expressed wishes of the people.”

For those who have the eyes to see, Nigeria remains that eye-sore of the African continent. It is also the open-sore of the wider Black world. That it is irreformable is proven day after day since Britain granted it independence on October 1, 1960. Unfortunately, signs of that have been under the radar for many observers.

That the son of a former top Nigerian bank manager, who schooled at a top London University, tried to set a bomb inside an American airplane over Detroit, is all that is needed to refocus the attention of the world to Nigeria.

Since independence, Nigeria has had a civil war in which 3 million people died, mostly Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria. In the four decades since the Biafran-Nigerian war, there had been perennial massacres of people of Southern Nigeria in the North. Over 40 incidents had happened, some small, some large. Meanwhile, nobody had ever been arrested, persecuted or jailed for any of the killings. Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab will experience a different kind of justice in America.

In Nigeria, the Christian –Muslim conflicts often get a political disguise. Until recently, the Muslims of Northern Nigeria seemed more satisfied exerting their blow on Christians on the cloak of political reasons, be it in Jos in 1945, Kano in 1957, all of northern Nigeria in 1966, Kano in 1980, Maiduguri in 1982, Jimeta in 1984, Gombe in 1985, Kaduna & Kafanchan in 1991, Bauchi, Kastina, & Kano in 1991, Zango-Kataf in 1992, Funtua in 1993, Kano in 1994, Kano riot in 2000, Kaduna Sharia riot 2001, Jos 2004, Kano 2004, Kano 2007, Maiduguri 2009.

A careful look at the nature of the massacres, the choice of targets and the motivations behind them show the Islamist elements that desire to establish a pure form of an Islamic North that will not be adulterated by infidels. Within this period, the Muslims sporadically made it clear as when in December 1994 they captured and murdered Christian trader, Gideon Akaluka, who was under police protection. He was accused of tearing pages of the Koran in the northern city of Kano. Muslim group beheaded him and hoisted his head on a pike and paraded through the streets of Kano. On December 12, 2001, a Nigerian Christian truck driver, Saint Moritz, reversing his truck in Kano accidentally ran into an area occupied by Koranic study group. As students fled, one dropped his Koran. The truck trampled on a copy of the Koran. Muslim groups pursued the man into a police station, overpowered the few cops on post and killed him.

In 1999, the first predominately Northern Muslims state of Zamfara came out to declare its desire to have Sharia law fully observed. On January 10, 2001, while the rest of the world watched the Luna eclipse, hundreds of Muslim youths went on rampage in the northern city of Maiduguri. The youths blamed the eclipse on sinful activities committed in the city by Christians. They attacked hotels, bars, brothels, churches, burning and killing, screaming: “God is great!” “We want Sharia.” On October 15, 2001, as America began air strike against Afghanistan, riots broke out in northern Nigerian city of Kano against the air strike. Hundreds of non-Muslims were killed by mobs carrying the picture of Osama bin Laden. To date, thirteen states of the North have declared Sharia law. Since then, over 10,000 people have been killed in religious conflicts.

There is an ongoing war in the oil-rich Niger-delta area of southern Nigeria that influences the price of crude oil worldwide. In the Niger-delta area oil firms are polluting the waters of rural dwellers and armed youths of the area are fighting back, kidnapping expatriates and bombing flow stations and oil pipelines.

The Islamists in the North have made no qualms about their worldview that excludes the rest of the people of Nigeria. When they kill Christian Nigerians, as they always do, the rest of Nigeria make up excuses for them. Hardly were such incidents classified as terrorism, which is what they are. Before Osama bin Laden, there was Mohammed Maitatsine in Kano State of Nigeria who championed the elimination of non-Muslims in the north.

Meanwhile, what many people remember about Nigeria is the scourge of fraudulent proposals for fortunes unearned that flood emails and faxes across the world. It had since been seen as a minor irritation. Few people see it as a symptom of a deeper ailment. The Christmas Day bombing attempt has changed that. The tragedy of Nigeria is shaping up to be the tragedy of the world.

Currently, the Nigerian president has been on his sick bed in far away Saudi Arabia for over a month. He did not hand over power to his vice president because the man is from the south and as such is seen as a second class citizen by some Islamists in the North. So, for a month, the country has no leader. In his absence, politicians plunder the country’s treasury with increased impunity.

If Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia taught the world anything, it is that the world cannot sit back and watch a corrupt and unprogressive ‘ramshackle creation’ like Nigeria as it rots. It will eventually export its evil. Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab has finally exported the evil of Northern Islamist fundamentalism. This is just the beginning.

For the Nigerians, the time has come when they will stop sacrificing “their very existence as a people to the integrity of that ramshackle creation that has no justification either in history or in the freely expressed wishes of the people.”