What Makes You A Nigerian? - by Ojaje Idoko

The New Masquerade TV drama series was every child and indeed every family’s delight in 1980s as I was growing up. The pivot of the whole drama was Chief Zebrudaya Okorigwe Nwogbo alias 4.30 (am or pm, and how did he come about that name?). He had no respect for the rules of grammar and tenses. He said anything that came to his mouth and it made meaning to Nigerians. He never let anyone in doubt that he was a Nigerian and an African man original! He had an encounter with Mr. Bankrobich or Frogbench, who was a White foreign investor, who had come to Zebrudaya’s village looking for African Mosquitoes and Cockroaches. Zebrudaya accused the man of making every good thing “Oyibo” and everything bad “African”. “Bird are get good feather, aahhhh! English bird! Rat are get pointed nose, Scotland rat! But chimpanzee are get hunch back, this are Nigerian chimpanzee! Monkey are waka with one leg, aahhhh African monkey”. It makes sense.

I think it is time we define what and who can be a Nigerian. A trend has been building on in Nigeria for some time now. Politicians, top ranking military men, business men and women and recently, civil and public servants who have access to government funds, General Overseers of churches and their big pastors, make their wives to go and give birth in North America and Europe. Such persons know that being born in such countries confers on you citizenship by birth. Some of these children are rarely brought to Nigeria here to stay with the parents but the parents themselves do not want to leave Nigeria. Not because they love Nigeria but because this is where they find it cheaper and easier to make their money which they go to spend in these foreign countries where their children live, grow up and school. Some of these persons have houses in those countries. Some of them still allow the children to school in Nigeria up to high or secondary school level before the parents take them to “their countries of birth and real origin”. Then the parents “work hard” in Nigeria to keep these children in those foreign schools abroad. And working hard here means doing everything possible, from the unimaginable to criminal, to be able to foot the bills of the lifestyle of his family over there. They inflate contract sums, award fictitious ones, give employment to ghosts and while collecting their salaries and allowances, oil bunkering, political assassination contracts, etc.

In order to keep them close to the public funds either through election or political appointment, they take out a few tens of millions of Naira from the huge amount they had embezzled, organize a jamboree in his or her primary constituency. He parts with a few millions, in some cases, thousands of Naira, buys a Tokunbo car for the traditional ruler, and he is invited to receive a traditional title in the community. During the ceremony, he gives out scholarship award to some of the children of his cronies. They are in the university but the scholarship is never more than N20,000 per person. The student needs over N50,000 for accommodation, depending on the State of the country and university or institution you are in. He pays about same amount if not more for tuition, not talking of feeding and lecture notes and other sundry charges. But the big man or politician has done his show. The pressmen and television stations carried the news that he gives scholarships to indigent children in his community. Now the children are left to their fate. That is not the end of the story.

He announces his desire to sink a borehole in each district of the local government. They are only five of them districts. The borehole is to be located at headquarters of each district. Some of the villages in the district are about 10 or 20 kilometres away from the borehole. Finally, he goes to the church on Sunday for Thanksgiving and the priest or pastor is beaming with smiles from chin to chin as he pours the power of the Holy Ghost to “protect this one which is God’s own”. What did the man do? He just announced a cash donation of One Million Naira for the development of the church. The man does all these to make way for his children and family who must live in luxury in the United States of America, Europe or Canada while the children in his own community live in squalor, disease and pain. The teachers, PHCN, medical personnel continue with their strikes. That is not the end of the story.

Then the man’s position in government is threatened, and so he cries marginalization! The villagers in their ignorance are ready to take up arms and fight on “behalf of their community or ethnic group” which, they have been told, has so been marginalized. If not for this kind of brainwashing and economic hypnotism I cannot imagine how some politicians in Nigeria are still able to get young men and women as thugs and political Youth Wings. Have you ever wondered what these political technocrats go to do overseas after some political fireworks in Nigeria? After every heavy political campaign and convention they travel out of Nigeria. They simply go to relax with their children in these countries, sleep and rest well, check the blood pressure and do comprehensive medical checkup after making it difficult for us to sleep in Nigeria. But that is not the end of the story.

These children are left in foreign land with access to so much money. Much more money than they need and can manage. They live rich and idle lives. There is no parental control because the parents are in the political forest in Nigeria hunting. So the children join every available train. Some become homosexuals, lesbians, addicts and carriers of drugs and recently they started becoming terrorists. Those who succeed in such countries are celebrated as citizens of those countries where they live. The bad ones are called Nigerians. Haba! Okay, we understand that their parents were born in Nigeria. They still control the political and economic landscape of this country. But they spend their quality times in those countries. They give birth to their children there, educate them there, feed and grow them there. They do not speak our language and even when they speak English, they do not speak like us. So how are they Nigerians? We must take this to the United Nations. They must tell us what makes one an indigene of a country. Americans should have no problems with that. That is why Barak Obama is today the president of the USA though his father lived, and his half brothers and step mother are in Kenya. One even contested election recently in Kenya and lost. If Obama is American, most of these people should be citizens of these countries too.

These children are left without parental guidance and mentoring. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the young boy of 23 years popularly called the “Underwear Bomber” in his year in school in London, spoke about being lonely. He was the youngest of 16 children of the family. His good father, a responsible, respected businessman of no mean wealth, was also worried about his son and reported it to the appropriate authorities. But the deed had been done. The story of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale all in their twenties described as British of Nigerian origin is not different. They are children who should have a sound background but they went their own ways. On 22nd May, 2013 they attacked Drummer Lee Rigby, a White British soldier of the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich Southeast London, killed him, asked the on lookers to invite the police and they waited for the police to come. They tried to attack the police and they got shot in the legs to demobilize them. They were charged to court, found guilty, Adebolajo was sentenced to life imprisonment while Adebowale was given 45 years in prison. What is the difference anyway? Then recently Aminu Sadiq Ogwuche co-masterminded the dastardly bombing of the bus station in Nyanya, a suburb of Abuja. His father is a retired Colonel of the Nigerian Army. He had studied in the University of Glamorgan in South Wales. At the time of the bombing, he was a student in Sudan. Now he is caught and they are linking him to the place of his father’s origin in Benue State. That poor village in Benue State now bears the stigma of having a son who is being linked to international terrorism. But truly, is he a child of that community? There are many others like these three who have caused both their roots and countries pains and sorrows. However, there are others too who are doing very well and bringing honour and good name to same.

What is annoying in all these is that it is because of people like this that corruption is walking on four legs like a colossus in Nigeria. Many primary and secondary schools are starved of teachers and teaching aids because the parents of people like these clean up the national, state and local government accounts to provide for them. Our roads are in deplorable state, our national carrier Nigerian Airways was liquidated, Nigerian Railway Corporation and NITEL went comatose, NIPOST is non-existent and Electricity is epileptic because parents of this category of children are “working very hard” to give them the best outside the country. But see what the nation is getting as the reward. It has become very bad that even Chairpersons of Local Governments now train their children outside Nigeria.

These children get into the wild world of the Western life, not prepared for it, they come back to Nigeria embarrassing everything and the parents continue to regret the atrocities committed against humanity in Nigeria for the sake of their only four children. For the sake of the four children, over 10,000 children of school age in the local government cannot get good education because the money meant for education in the local government has been used to pay the school fees and the upkeep of his delinquent children in foreign land.

Well, for me, these children are simply made in those western countries and Nigeria should not be linked in anyway, either by name or relationship. This dog is not a Nigerian dog because it does not bark like, Nkita, Kare, Omo, Aewo and Pepeye. We know our children and our children know us. So who is a Nigerian?

...Rev. Fr. Idoko is Director, Pastoral Affairs Department of Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria.