“Driving through any major city in Nigeria, one is awakened to the recklessness, and total disregard for the traffic lights, driving rules and driving safety regulations on our roads which causes unnecessary holdups, and traffic jams and leads to numerous accidents and carnage on our roads. “
NIGERIANS are a wonderful and generous people who wear their faith on their sleeves and no matter the challenging conditions in the nation or their harsh personal economic realities, they will often defer to GOD seeking his intervention to make all things whole for things that require individual and collective positive actions to resolve. While the importance of spirituality and God’s Grace is not lost on me, the solutions to the various problems and challenges that face us as a people are not spiritual, but physical and man-made, thus the general attitude of deferring to the intervention of celestial powers engrained in the average Nigerian irrespective of their faith, whether it is Christianity, Islam or African Traditional Religion is no panacea.
However, this engrained thinking is already part of our DNA and has conditioned us as a people to accept mediocrity in government, corruption, lawlessness and impunity by public officials and criminals in our nation. These problems facing Nigeria have for too long defied solutions because the root cause of the problems has been improperly analyzed and misdiagnosed. After an unbiased critical analysis of the Nigerian question arrived at a theory that better explains our challenges as a country and people which we believe is not entirely a leadership or structural problem, but a cultural problem. We will explain this with our “basket of rotten tomatoes theory”.
The country is blessed with abundant human and natural resources including a large diverse, well-educated population that is young, mobile, aspiring and adventurous, but despite all these the country has failed to develop or reach its full potential as it is still bedevilled with corruption, waste, fraud and abuse in all areas of the nation. Many renowned scholars, critics and activists have looked at the Nigeria situation and concluded that the nation’s problems are that of poor political leadership and the existing political structure of the country, which has led to calls for restructuring of the nation.
However, while it is an acknowledged fact that Nigeria has had uninspiring, failed and corrupt officials elected to the top public offices since independence which has stagnated the nation’s growth, and contributed in no small ways to where we are today, to point the fingers exclusively at our failed political office holders and the present structural and administrative configuration of the country misses the point and would seem to absolve society of any role or responsibility in creating this mess we are all in today. Our national culture has been very hospitable to societal vices, including corruption, impunity, lawlessness and recklessness, which has fostered a national atmosphere of a culture of permissibility for all things no matter how egregious, thus for our nation to move forward and develop, we as a people must embrace CULTURE CHANGE.
Culture is defined as the value system, ways and traditions of any group of people, organizations, individual(s) or entities. It is a total summation of the character of the society or people that transcends anything else, in terms of how the society goes about doing things in public or in private. Society on the other hand is the aggregation of people of similar or diverse backgrounds or orientations living together with sets of rules, acceptable values, customs, norms and traditions to govern themselves.
Fundamentally speaking, it is the acceptable culture of any society that shapes the society and its people, as the prevailing culture of a society forms the bedrock of the character of that society and its people. In developed countries, culture has played a very vital role in how those countries evolved over time and built their nations to where they are today, both in terms of their political governance and national development. In many of these developed nations accountability, ethics, personal and collective responsibility including atonement and justice conveys the foundation upon which their various societies are built upon.
In our society, we also do have the lofty ideals of accountability, integrity, transparency, code of conduct and ethics well defined in our governing documents, but our society does not place a premium on them, but places a higher premium on forgiveness without the need for atonement which taken in context with our historical legacies promotes corruption, repeat offenders, fraud, waste and abuse of authority in our nation. We have a very permissible culture, a culture of anything and everything goes: because of our willingness to forgive without atonement and a general lack of consequences for erring actions by offenders.
Driving through any major city in Nigeria, one is awakened to the recklessness, and total disregard for the traffic lights, driving rules and driving safety regulations on our roads which causes unnecessary holdups, and traffic jams and leads to numerous accidents and carnage on our roads. Because of this penchant by our people for not following rules, you often witness avoidable accidents, and with no insurance, the drivers who may have been warned earlier by other road users to be careful and not to dent their vehicle, but shouted obscenities at them only to now to be prostrating on the ground and begging a few minutes later for forgiveness after rear-ending another car and causing severe damages.
The driver will continue his begging, along with the passengers in his van and others nearby using the three most dangerous and harmful words impeding our progress as a nation “OGA I BEG”. However, if the owner of the damaged vehicle refuses to forgive and instead demands the driver should pay for fixing his vehicle as atonement for his recklessness, the passengers and onlookers will turn on him calling the victim all sorts of names for being unforgiving. What we all forget, however, is that allowing the driver, in this case, to go free, means we are condoning his behaviour and he will do this again multiple times in one day because there are no consequences or accountability for him.
Similarly, the corrupt politicians or corrupt civil servants when caught and taken to court by EFCC for arraignment often collapses immediately and feign illness, but instead of our people and institutions continuing the prosecution and demanding justice be served, we begin to show empathy and have pity for the criminals over fake health conditions, a similar scenario to the bus driver which seems to show official and public mercy, an act that perpetuates the wrong culture, impunity and corruption to the highest levels. The corrupt politicians, corrupt civil servants and their types have now perfected their deceptive games and shame on us for falling for their deception and not recognizing that by allowing their shenanigans we are complicit as a people in advancing corruption in our land.
The significance of the examples above is that no matter the circumstances, whether it is the case of corrupt civil servants (Nigerian Civil Service is littered with the highest levels of corruption top to bottom, that will make the most corrupt politician look like Mother Theresa or an Angel for lack of a better analogy), a company worker or relative who steals from public coffers, his boss, or office or a day labourer stealing bags of cement meant for construction and are caught, instead of facing the consequences they resort to the popular refrain “OGA I BEG”, please “OGA I TAKE GOD BEG YOU” and more often than not and because of our forgiving nature we let them go without demanding any accountability or any consequences for their actions.
In our beloved country, we have become conditioned to believe that no matter the crime, we can beg, and beg and ultimately we will get away with it and be forgiven without atonement, thus the culture of permissibility which in essence encourages criminality at all levels of our society has become part of our traditions and custom unfortunately.
Osaikhuiwu is a project manager and trainer based in Houston, Texas, USA
Comments are closed.