Some months before I left Nigeria, while on my way to an assignment outside Lagos, I fell into a conversation with the driver about travel and future plans. He excitedly revealed that he had a visa appointment coming up very shortly at the U.S. embassy. By God’s grace he said, after getting the (tourist) visa, he would immediately relocate and become an Uber driver. He could practically count the $200 per day he would make, like his secondary school friend in New York. “Once tí vísà yen jáde,” he said excitedly, life would be awesome!
At this point, I would normally have pointed out that the U.S. at any time, but especially under a Trump presidency, was really not the place to risk carrying out an immigration offence like unauthorized work. I thought about pointing out that it was very unlikely that he would be granted the visa in the first place. I mean, in what universe would the U.S. embassy seriously grant a two-year visa to someone who had every incentive to overstay, and nothing to come back to except a job as a driver?
That one time however, I held my peace and kept quiet because it felt like I already spend so many of my waking hours informing full grown adults that Santa isn’t real. Who made that my job? So I smiled and kept quiet, allowing him enjoy his moment as he mentally counted, slaughtered, plucked, grilled and ate his unhatched chickens with a side of leaving this suffer head work. “Learn to let people enjoy things, David,” I mentally whispered to myself. When I ran into him a few weeks later and asked him how it went, he refused to give me a direct answer and he sounded a bit deflated.
This was probably the least surprising visa refusal in the storied history of unsuccessful USA visa applications from Walter Carringnton Street, but I tried to sound sympathetic. Within a few minutes however, he was back at it, this time chattering excitedly about Finland. “My guy talk say the place make sense and their visa no dey hard…” At this point I realised that the interior of this fellow’s head worked like the catchphrase at the end of every episode of The Pinky and The Brain, and I found an excuse to take my leave.
ArRacist’s description of Africans
Writing in 1926, British colonial officer and notorious racist Frederick John Dealtry Lugard presented his impression of Africans as follows:
“In character and temperament, the typical African of this race-type is a happy, thriftless, excitable person, lacking in self-control, discipline, and foresight. Naturally courageous, and naturally courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of veracity […] Perhaps, the two traits which have impressed me as those most characteristic of the African native are his lack of apprehension and his lack of ability to visualize the future.” [The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa – 1926, Frederick Lugard]
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Objectively, this is an inaccurate statement based on little more than cultural tropes and crude racial stereotypes. It is comparable to saying that British people all have bad teeth and discuss their disappointing sex lives over tea and crumpets; or all Germans have the sense of humour of a tipper truck offloading gravel; or Frenchmen are all perverts with curly moustaches who secretly use their baguettes to masturbate. Maybe Lugard did in fact meet a number of Africans who displayed these traits individually, but it is hardly scientific to label an entire continent with thousands of vastly varying cultures, with the alleged behaviours described by someone who had a legendary and unhidden contempt for all things African.
The trouble though, is that across the continent both at ground level and at government level nowadays, there appears to be a strong effort to not only prove Lugard right, but apparently to use his racist caricature of the “thriftless African incapable of visualizing the future” as something of an instruction manual. The title of this article makes reference to a popular Nigerian Ponzi scheme but the problem is deeper and more fundamental than faulty financial investments.
Whether it is regular people putting money into one transparently fraudulent scheme or the other, or governments taking foolish economic decisions and hoping they will work out this time after failing a jillion times before, I would argue that these are mere symptoms of a wider cultural crisis facing Africa. I call it ‘MMM Culture.
In Nigeria for example, there is about half a century of data showing what works, and more importantly what has not worked in terms of economic policy decisions. It is common knowledge that imposing import bans and using the Naira exchange rate as a political tool is a fool’s errand. That has not stopped every administration in my lifetime from doing exactly that. The effect that these decisions will have is not considered because while making the policy, the future is not really visualized. Policy makers simply gamble and hope that the ticket will not cut.
On a cultural level, we all technically know that nobody has ever become a billionaire by performing “rituals” with human parts or female underwear. And yet everybody knows someone who has heard of someone whose uncle’s son’s friend “hammered” through such means. It works and it is definitely real in the manner of the famous India vs. Nigeria match that ended 99-1 and supposedly claimed the life of Samuel Okwaraji or Thunder Balogun, depending on who is telling the story – no one has ever actually witnessed it.
These things are glorified urban legends which have been souped up into an entire underground industry. This industry exists because hundreds – maybe even thousands – of people continue to gamble on the possibility that they will somehow come into money that they didn’t work for. What is more, looking at this phenomenon from a Nigerian point of view only tells part of the African story.
