Nigerians and the value of dignity- 1

“I decided long ago

Never to walk in anyone’s shadow

If I fail, If I succeed

At least I’ll live as I believe

No matter what they take from me

They can’t take away my dignity…”

The above is excerpted from “Greatest Love of All’; one of the best songs ever sang and by no less than Whitney Houston, who unfortunately died young, after letting love get the best of her; love for a man, Bobby Brown. She could have at least tried to love herself some more and for a bit longer. Maybe she wouldn’t have done drugs and seen her life go down a one-way-street of misery. But the song, like most of hers, is an all-time classic, and a must-know for anyone in this life. For us here in Africa, it should be our daily anthem. Never should we allow anyone take away our dignity. The slave masters, and to a lesser extent the colonialists who succeeded them, did just that; they stripped the people they met here of their dignity. Whereas I admit that our sense of civilization (meaning the ability to live in large cities among diverse people), wasn’t quite as developed as theirs when they came, but I agree with many who argue that for them to lord it over us, they had to embark on a systematic process of denudation which ensured that our ancestors came out feeling really worthless. Whatever ‘development’ they found here had to be reversed, and obliterated.  

And it is difficult to tell whether anything has changed today, in the year 2017. 

The debate raged last week about whether Hon. Abike Dabiri, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Foreign Affairs and Diaspora Matters, was right to have issued a statement asking Nigerians who don’t have very serious business in the US to refrain from travelling there for now. All I saw on social media and elsewhere, were condemnations of Abike. “Who the hell is she to have bypassed the Minister in making that statement?”, people asked. And then there were the hordes, who simply started defending the USA. “No, the US did not ban Nigerians”, they offered. Then there were the justifiers, including one person who claimed to have been an Assistant Director at the UK Border Agency, who regaled us with how the immigration people reserve the final right to do and undo, and how the Federal Government of Nigeria has not invited people like him to come and assist here. In one thread on Facebook, I was the only one who interjected the series of condemnations of Abike and justification of the USA, with a note of caution; the what-if questions. 

Minister Geoffrey Onyema was out the next day asking Nigerians to ignore Dabiri. He stated categorically that the US had not put Nigeria on any of its blacklists (true), but ended up sounding like he was marketing for the USA. I wondered why he couldn’t let it ride. The man sounded like he was under instruction or pressure from the Americans, whose embassy put out a terse statement a few days later to the extent that it hadn’t put Nigeria on any of its lists and that our people could travel to the USA as they liked, but not explaining why almost many Nigerians had been turned back, detained, humiliated, embarrassed, and made to suffer huge financial losses in the last few weeks. 

The learning moment was totally lost on us, as is usually the case. 

 The other day I was generally browsing to see hotels in Nigeria. I ran into some very bad reviews of the Transcorp Hilton and Abuja Sheraton. But not only that, I came across a standard caveat placed on Nigeria by the US Department of State. For over 10 years now, the US has always advised its citizens not to come to Nigeria. Of late, they have listed the states that must be avoided by every means, which include Delta, Bayelsa, Borno, Yobe, Bauchi, Rivers, Plateau, Kano, Kaduna, Sokoto, Zamfara and pretty much everywhere else in Nigeria. Perhaps the reason only Ethiopian Airlines of all the international airlines agreed to fly into Kaduna and cooperate with our government currently, is that that state is one of those they have been told to avoid. See https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/alertswarnings/nigeria-travel-warning.html. Every year this list is updated and there is no reprieve for Nigeria for as far as the eye can see. Which foreigner will come here to learn how to play hopscotch with his life by skipping from one non-terrorist state to another in a sea of violence? Will it not be best to just avoid the entire warzone country? But is that the case? Is Nigeria really that bad?

Meanwhile, I know quite a number of Nigerians who have been gunned down in the USA for no reason. How many Americans, if any, have met with such fate here in Nigeria? There was this boy of 16 I know, whom his mother sent to the USA to get the golden fleece. He was gunned down in New York. A Nigerian Taxi Driver, Cyril Efobi, was shot from behind while he drove, by some cranky passenger he picked up. A close friend of mine whom we were in university together was coming out of his car in front of a 7/11 (supermarket) in Baltimore when he was shot point-blank by fleeing robbers who probably thought he was a policeman because he always wore a suit to work. He lost his eyes, not his life. Thank God. Another Nigerian, Matthew Ajibade, was snuffed out by the hopelessly clumsy and excessively violent American police for struggling with them. A friend of mine on Facebook, from Ekiti State was killed last year by unknown gunmen around his house.  Add to this, the dozens of Nigerian men who kill their sometimes overbearing Nigerian wives just because they have access to guns, on a yearly basis. Now tell me which country should be giving no-travel advice on the other? We haven’t even counted school shootings, cinema shootings and the rest. In 2013, there were over 73,000 injuries by firearms in the USA, and more than 35,000 deaths. In 2015 fatalities were about 13,500. Which country is really at war? Boko Haram did not even achieve such an ignoble feat in any year did they? The proliferation of guns in the USA is an insurmountable problem.

But we still see the USA as one of the safest places on earth, and we all desire to go there, because life is all about perception and the USA sits atop the world, bullying whoever it chooses and covering up its own flaws.  I like many places there too, though I’m cautious when there. It’s the spontaneity of violence that beats me. I was once in a Mexican restaurant in Houston when a physical fight broke out between a Latino and Black guy, over a girl! Luckily no one pulled a gun as I made my hurried escape. People started shouting ‘fight, fight, fight!!’ as the Latino slammed the black guy on the ground and rained punches on him.  They get like that often; primitive, even though sitting on top of the world.