Once upon a time, I was contacted by former colleagues to help find a temporary hire. As the position was available only for six months in the first instance, the rules did not involve the organization’s hiring manual.
I told them I knew someone who would meet their requirement: a lady who had left the city the previous year after she lost her job. They told me that if I was recommending her, they were hiring her.
The lady was a Nigerian. She was a middle-aged mother whose husband had also walked out on her, and she moved to a distant city to live with relatives.
I was concerned: the overall boss of that department was also a Nigerian. He played no part in hiring, especially for temporaries, but he was the Oga and would endorse the papers. He would see a Nigerian name on the paper in front of him.
It took two days to track down that lady. I asked her if she would be willing to return if she found a new position. As she was still unemployed, she laughed. Of course, she would!
I didn’t tell her the job was hers, only that I had been told of such an opportunity, and that we would put on her resume.
But I knew Oga himself. Of greater importance, his Special Assistant—to whom my former colleagues would be sending the recommendation—was also my friend.
I briefed him. Would he take care of the matter swiftly, as it meant the relocation of an entire family?
He issued that most famous and dangerous of Nigerianisms: “No problem!”
The lady’s name was submitted without delay. And there, and then, died that little candle of hope. As my “friends” spent the next several weeks avoiding me rather than talk about it, I heard the rest only from that office: the endorsement was not given.
The point is not that the recommendation as sent by that office was not accepted, but that my Nigerian friends went into that familiar manipulation mode, ignored me, and eventually hired someone else.
As Nigeria entered her 60th year of independence last Tuesday, it is this default mode: the consistent readiness to work a parallel track or agenda—often a narrow and selfish one—that disturbs me the most.
In the past four decades in which I have written for the mass media, this has been the most pervasive cultural characteristic: Nigerians who proclaim a higher faith—particularly when they are before the cameras or the microphone but who—when the test comes, prove to be extremely unscrupulous.
It is that intersection of our public and personal lives that makes the question of where we went wrong rather challenging. Someone reads this article today, for instance, whose family has “done very well.” They have good education, property, respect. There are indeed families like that who have great reason to be proud.
In most cases, however, it is a farce, and that family is looking down on Nigeria’s meek and humble from the rooftops of hypocrisy, that wealth having come from at least one incident—but often years or decades—in which a member dipped his or her hand into the public till. As a result, very few families that are “well-to-do” can survive a small money-laundering test.
These practices are why Nigeria does not work, as they explain our outbreak of “uncompleted” or “abandoned” projects: roads, rail, hospitals, schools, as well as our poor maintenance culture. Sadly, most project completions are achieved only after repeated, consecutive and parallel budgeting somehow pacify the greed of layers of interested parties.
Even then, those projects are often of dubious quality, with hospitals, ending up with used equipment passed off as brand-new. Sometimes, budgeted equipment is never supplied. In any event, maintenance is culturally ignored.
Sometimes, a new road lasts but one season or even one rainfall. Nationwide, city roads are shamelessly undertaken with no drainage systems. In other words, extensive and expensive flooding is guaranteed. By then, the President or Minister or Governor or permanent secretary or director responsible is somewhere else in the world pretending to be who he is not.
Everyone knows that our educational system, for instance, is on the verge of collapse. Very often, the actual structures in public schools are either not built or have collapsed. Roofs are leaking, children sit on the floor, libraries have no books, roads have been washed away, buildings are never repainted.
Nigeria is the only country in the world where an international airport lacks a functioning elevator, as does our Murtala Muhammad Airport, and where you can be harassed for a bribe nine or 10 times between check-in and boarding.
How many Ministers and legislators have lied to you about a federal project? How many homicides has your police force solved in the last 10 years? It is 2019, and yet your national library system has no digital collection. How many former senior federal officials in the past 49 years do not own illegal property in London?
Nigeria is the only country where obtaining a passport is an act of torture. Visit YouTube, for instance, and watch terrible experiences of Nigerians in our immigration offices worldwide.
In Nigeria, into our 60th year, leadership is not about governance, but about preaching. When we seek office, we see and say the right things. But when we win, we change the narrative. We commence pollution of the drinking water. We want praise we never work to earn.
To be clear: Nigeria is not the shame she is, only because of a succession of misleads, but also because of the complicity of followers who enable and ennoble their decay. If you are on an over-speeding bus and you do not challenge the driver, you have no right to complain when it crashes. If you tolerate or ignore manipulation and injustice because it is “small,” or because those involved are in some way related to you, you cannot complain when a public hospital kills your child.
Nigeria is where she is today because we have spent 60 years being hypocrites, an ailment we sometimes attempt to cover with false piousness.
Prayer is wonderful, and it is recommended to the faithful. But we pray far too much and see far too little beyond ourselves. We would rather offer a million Naira worth of prayer to our starving fellow man or the public good than 10 seconds of effort or help.
Look around you, and into a mirror. What do you see?
Hypocrisy. It is how angels build hell.
• @SonalaOlumhense
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