Perpetuating the Propaganda Ourselves

In these posts (here, here and here), I talked about how other peoples sometimes work to create a negative opinion or prejudice about us among their people.

But we very often do the same thing.

Most countries in the world are able to maintain a public image in the rest of the world that is built on whoever is perceived to be the "best" of their population. Until recently, there was a global image of the British "gentleman" and "lady", even though there were many people in Britain whose conduct was closer to that of a football hooligan. The Japanese are known for being good at technological products, for being good at exporting things, and for the "salary man" in the world of business, even though there are many Japanese who do the most scandalous of things (some of the stuff they show on Japanese television is ... legally and without much fuss ... is downright weird, and that is putting it extremely mildly).  The United States also projects an image to the rest of the world that is not really congruent with reality.

It is true that all of these places are richer than Nigeria. What is not true is the very loudly unspoken idea that they are richer than us because their people are "superior" to us, better than us at an inherent level, or that their culture is "superior" to ours.

Many of us tend to perpetuate these sorts of ideas. When a Nigerian does something bad, we the Nigerians react as though the person and the person's actions were symptomatic of all Nigeria and all Nigerians. Conversely, when someone does good, it gets dismissed or is not talked about quite as much as the bad person/thing.

It is strange that we label ourselves with negative things, and then talk about foreign countries, even African countries, as though they are completely innocent of those negative things. In reality, if you pick any particular negative act, and assign a Naira or Dollar amount to the absolute magnitude of however much of that act is done by Nigerians, and then do similar analyses of the "perfect" foreign lands, you will find that they do far more of it than we do.

Let me give you and easy example. For a while, the word "Nigerian" and the phrase "potential drug pusher" were used interchangeably by the immigration authorities at airports all over the world. The United States even went so far as to "decertify" Nigeria at some point for supposedly failing to act to control the illegal narcotics trade. Today, you still see the casual equation of "Nigerian" with "drug dealer" in the South African media (and I still regret the $10.00 I spent watching the South African-produced District 9).

But even at the high point of Nigerians being involved in the illegal narcotics business, the total "Nigerian" involvement was microscopic when compared to the United States, the various Western European countries and Japan. There were more of their citizens involved in the business than ours, a higher proportion of their citizenry involved than ours, and the Dollar amount of their involvement made ours look like 50 kobo groundnut money by comparison.

Yet nobody treated their citizens in total as if they were all guilty of drug crime until proven innocent.

This type of negative stereotyping is bad when it comes from foreigners, but we do it to ourselves.

Treating an individual person's crime as though it was a crime committed by his or her entire ethnic group is a recurring theme in our recent political history. And assuming that bad Nigerians epitomize all Nigerians is a standard reaction to any bad news about a random Nigerian in Nigeria or anywhere in the world.

Indeed, there is this mysterious tendency to question everything about ourselves and our society any time we hear that one of our number was caught doing something bad abroad. At best, he or she is said to be giving all of us a bad name. In the meantime, people from abroad have done, are doing, and will do far worse things on the African continent and in the wider world without any fear of being prosecuted for it. And nobody gives their whole country a bad name because of it.

Take all the snide comments about the so-called "Nigerian Scam" (a.k.a 419) on the internet.  If you add up all of the money scammed by every Nigerian scammer that has ever existed, it would add up to less than what a single American (Bernie Madoff) scammed off of the people duped into investing in his Ponzi Scheme. Should we call such schemes the "American Scam"? Or should that term be reserved for the various exotic financial instruments and derivatives that nearly wrecked the entire global economy?

Look, before anyone start shouting insults at me, I am not trying to get people to place negative labels on foreign countries. Just pointing out that we Nigerians should stop accepting the negative labels other people place on us and should stop creating/propagating negative labels of our own.

Believe it or not, the super-majority of Nigerians are kind, decent, good people. If this weren't the case, the Federal Republic would have collapsed into anarchy a long time ago. Most of the things that are supposed to enforce the political "order" are dysfunctional or nonexistent, likewise the things that are supposed to support the economy (for example our banks lend only to "safe" borrowers like the government, import-exporters and Big Business), yet there is an "order" to life in Nigeria that is built on we the people effectively governing and "policing" ourselves.

Life in Nigeria often involves interacting with the institutions of state only insofar as there are certain things you have to give them (e.g. an extorted sum of money at a police checkpoint). Beyond that, it is often as though we don't have a government (or a "formal" private sector), yet we still manage to get things done. We generate our own electricity, provide ourselves with water, construct our own "roads" and generally get things done in an economic system built substantially on trust because nobody has the time or resources to enforce contracts through the court system. It is all on trust, something that doesn't exist if you believe the negative stereotype.

Yes, there are scammers who take advantage of the situation, but if the scammers were in the majority, everything in Nigeria would have long since ground to a halt. Life is able to proceed in Nigeria because we Nigerians mostly do the "right" thing without compulsion or coercion, and where we fall short it is usually because of the reality that condition bends the crayfish.  There are situations in which doing the "right" thing is either difficult, impossible or metaphorically masochistic -- for example, a certain element of nepotism, kinsman-ism, clique-ism and ethnicism comes into play in an economic and political system built on knowing someone enough to trust them, rather than relying on impartial and effective judicial enforcement of contracts.

But we are not fundamentally bad people.

And don't let them get away with convincing people otherwise.

I often say that "communal violence" in Nigeria is predictable and avoidable, but for various reasons the powers that be refuse to do what is necessary to avoid it. Under normal circumstances, we the people should have reacted with anger to their failure to do the necessary, but we have allowed the discourse to be dominated by those who work to convince us that the entire sociocultural group to which one side or the other in these incidents belong are "bad people" who attack the other side because of the sheer "badness" of their entire sociocultural group. This is how "they" behave, is the basic response, and since there is nothing you can do to change "their" behaviour, we just have to live with the fact that "they" will keep doing this.

Do you realize that Nigeria would be an entirely different type of country if it was true that every member of every ethnic group hated every member of one or all of the other ethnic groups?

What we have now, in terms of violence, is what happens when the violent few are allowed to plague the peaceful majority from every sociocultural background.

We are also dealing, separately, with the fact that the most desperate economic groups in the country don't have anything other than violence to defend what few economic rights they have. Most "communal violence" in Nigeria revolves around land disputes between communities, about ownership of land, about who is or is not an indigene (i.e. has or doesn't have right to a portion of the land), and about the competing land-linked interests of farmers and pastoralists.

We are good people. And it is time we start believing that about ourselves.