Anyone who has related to Nigerians knows that they are a very intelligent people. Based on that perception of them most people expect them to do what other people do to develop their country. If they did what folks had expected them to do when they got their independence from Britain they would today be at the same level as the Asian Tigers!
Instead, what we see is a country in chaos, a country where nothing works, a country where the political leaders construe their office as from which they are given the opportunity to loot from the national treasury. The civil servants, bureaucrats use their offices to extort bribes from people; policemen use their positions to extort bribes from the people; judges are appointed to steal not to render justice. It is safe to say that most Nigerians seem to think that they exist to take money from someone else and use the money for their personal good.
The idea of performing public service and serving social interest is not part of Nigerians mental set up. Give a Nigerian a job and instead of looking for a way to use it to serve his people he uses it to steal money from his people. He rationalizes his criminal behavior by telling him that all Nigerians are doing it so why shouldn’t he do what everyone else is doing?
Thus, it came to pass that most people have written Nigerians off as thieves and don’t even bother with them. A country of thieves is how folks now refer to Nigerians and actually do not expect any Nigerian not to be a thief; they avoid Nigerians as much as it is possible and only deal with them if they have to do so, such as buy their oil knowing that the money is going into the pockets of the presumed leaders of the country. The Nigerian head of state is actually called the chief thief of the country! This is very sad.
Nigerians of goodwill such as the late Chinua Achebe left the country and from outside wonder what went wrong? Achebe wrote a pamphlet called “The Trouble with Nigeria”. His explanation for the thievery going on in Nigeria is that Nigeria lacks committed leaders. If only Nigeria could produce leaders who can rein everybody in things would go well with Nigerians.
Obviously, poor leadership has something to do with Nigeria’s present social decay but that is not all the problem. Leadership has to do with commitment to public service. One has to be committed to doing something for those that one leads to be a good leader. The problem is that Nigerians, as we all know them, are not committed to social service; each Nigerian seem only committed to doing what he, and maybe his immediate family members, need to survive.
Nigerians are not committed to society but to the individual’s ego; Nigerians want to survive at the ego level and do not want to do what they have to do for their entire society to survive.
Put starkly, Nigerians are unbridled egotists. The trouble with Nigerians is that they have unbridled egoism; Nigerians egos are not disciplined to serve the public. In a manner of speaking each Nigerian is like an animal in the bush doing what he has to do to survive as an animal but not working for what his nation needs to survive.
The question before us is how did it come to be that Nigerians (and by generalization Africans and black people worldwide) are pure egoists and not socialized egos who place public good above personal good? This is a question that this paper endeavors to answer.
I have observed human beings worldwide. Each human being is an ego hence the problem of egoism is not limited to Nigerians, Africans and black folk. All Human beings have ego problems.
The ego is the belief that one has a separated self-housed inside one’s body; the ego is belief that one is not connected, unified and joined to other people; the ego is belief that when push comes to shove each of us is alone and that life is a struggle for survival in which the strongest individuals survive and the weaker ones die off.
The ego is the belief that one is alone in the universe and that one ought to do what one has to do to survive. All human beings at root have such egoistic beliefs and, as such, are egotistical.
The difference between the raw ego and its drive to survive as an individuated self and the socialized ego is that the socialized ego conjoins his survival with the survival of other people and while working for what is good for his survival works for what is good for his society’s survival. The properly socialized ego works for his and other people’s survival. In ideal cases, the properly socialized ego can sacrifice his life for other people (this is done every day by soldiers who sacrifice their lives for their comrades). The exemplary behavior of Jesus is that he sacrificed his life for the good of humanity.
In the Nigerian (African, Black folk) there is a failure in the socialization of the ego to serve the public good. The Nigerian is that animal ego that lives to serve only his ego (and, at best, his children’s interests) but not to serve other peoples ego interests. This is the real trouble with Nigerians.
Nigerians serve the individual’s interests and, as such, have unbridled egos, primitive egos and un-socialized egos (we can come up with other adjectives to describe the same phenomenon).
Clearly, no people can do collective work if each person looks only after his self and does not look after the collective good.
A Nigerian literally will see an accident where folks are hurt and would do nothing to help the victims; he would not get them to hospital. He must be bribed to call an ambulance to take the victims to a hospital; the ambulance personnel must be bribed before they take the helpless victims to a hospital; the doctors and nurses must be bribed before they treat the patients (if what they do can be called treatment, Nigerian medical folks have the devil’s I do not care attitude towards their patients and those die right and left and they do not seem to care).
Simply stated, Nigerians are animals that are not yet made human beings, for human beings are those animals socialized to care for their fellow human beings.
So how did it come to be that Nigerians were not socialized to serve their fellow human beings; what happened to leave them raw animal egos that have no social interest? This is the real question. What I present below is what seems to me to be the cause of the Nigerian problem of amorality. You may call it speculation and if so it behooves you to come up with the correct answer.
Other groups of human beings, such as Europeans, Arabs, Hindus, Chinese etc. went through long periods of tutelage in a universal religion that socialized them to believe that to be a good human being is to serve other people as well as their self-interests.
For two thousand years Christianity has been hammering into the heads of Europeans that the good lived life is the life dedicated to loving God and one’s self as one loves other people; Christianity teaches a life dedicated to social service, as its founder, Jesus Christ was said to have done; the man is said to have sacrificed his life for humanity and his followers are encouraged to do the same.
Arabs were socialized into Islam; Islam teaches its followers that they belong to a community, Uma and ought to work and die for the community’s good.
Hinduism teaches Hindus that they all share one literal self, atman (son of God) who is one with Brahman (God) and that they should serve all people to serve themselves.
Buddhism teaches Asians that to attain enlightenment one must transcend one’s ego and merge with other egos in Nirvana or Satori; in practical terms this translates to serving the public good to serve ones good.
Africans did not develop a universalizing religion that taught them to curtail their egos and serve society. Each African tribe had its own religion and like primitive religions elsewhere those merely talked about how the individual could please his god and that god helps him to survive. African tribal religions did not talk about serving all humanity’s good.
Each African religion is unique to a particular tribe and could be construed as serving the tribe but certainly not other tribes. It takes a universal religion to teach people to transcend tribe and serve the whole humanity.
African tribal religions perhaps held members of the tribe together through taboos but not through strongly reasoned theology.
Moreover, the putative tribal religions in Africans minds break down as soon as they migrate from their tribal areas and go live at cities. In urban centers tribal religions breakdown for they were meant to serve those living in traditional villages, not cities. In urban centers tribal men who were hitherto controlled by taboos find the taboos irrelevant to their new situation and they feel liberated and embark on living amorally.
Africans tribal religions do not teach them to work for the good of members of other tribes but for only their tribes’ members so they do not see why they should do what is good for people from outside their tribes.
It is not only religion that serves the purpose of helping people to curtail their primitive egoism and serve public good. Political ideologies can serve similar purposes.
Communism, socialism, fascism etc. are known to socialize their members in such a manner that they work for the community. But these political ideologies are absent in Africa.
Africans neither have universalizing religions nor political ideologies that socialized them to care for public good. Thus, they ended up living as primitive egotists who like animals seek ways for the individual’s survival and seldom for the survival of the entire public.
Christianity is less than two hundred years in black Africa (except in Ethiopia) and that is not long enough to have curtailed Africans primitive egoism and transformed them to serving public good. I suppose that in the next four hundred years Christianity would have been in Africa for over five hundred years and that is long enough to have reshaped the Africans mind, and transformed it from primitive egoism to socialized egoism.
This may be wishful thinking for the so-called educated African, upon reading Karl Marx’s observation that religion is the opium of the masses, superficially sees religion as a means of controlling people and decide to throw Christianity away. They consider themselves sophisticated persons because they do not belong to any religion. Since they have not embraced any political ideology to use in guiding their lives they end up living as in a lawless jungle where all behaviors are permitted.
In the lawless jungle called Nigeria, the politicians are not guided by political ideology or religion; they seek public office to go steal as much money as they could. Nigeria is properly considered a Republic of thieves.
Clearly, the solution to this problem is to find a way to socialize Nigerians, Africans and black people into an overarching ideology, political or religious that teaches them to place social service above individual good. Until this is done we might as well forget the emergence of modern polity in Nigeria.
Nigeria would muddle along for as long as there is oil money to steal but when that oil money is gone the country probably would collapse and become like Somalia; total chaos and anarchy would reign. The same scenario goes for other African countries.
What would save Africans is to instill some discipline into them, the type of discipline that asks them to work for public good, and not just live like animals that live only for the individual’s good.
At present, the typical Nigerian is so egotistical that no amount of ridiculous titles is enough to satiate his ego’s craving for importance and power. Thus, if he has some kind of professional education he calls himself by it, such as say: I am engineer Njoku, or Lawyer Njoku, or architect Njoku or medical doctor Njoku; if he is a teacher at a university he calls himself Professor Dr. Njoku; if he is uneducated he buys a chieftaincy title and calls himself chief Njoku. If he is a Hausa-Fulani and has gone to Mecca on the Hajj he wants you to know that fact and call himself Alhaji Mohammad (if a woman, Alhaja Fatima). People from all over the Muslim world go on the Hajj as their religion enjoins them to do but they do not give themselves titles reflecting their performing their religious obligation. These people are not egotistical Nigerians.
The pursuit of empty titles, apparently, makes Nigerians seem important; we all feel existentially like we are nothing and right minded persons try to give their lives some worth by serving the public but Nigerians try to give their lives value by attaching vacuous titles to their primitive egos.
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