ARE NIGERIANS STUPID OR WHAT?

 Ozodi Thomas Osuji



(Reflections on corruption and lawlessness in Nigeria )



This paper is a response to Daniel Elomba's report on how much Nigerian leaders make relative to how much leaders in industrialized countries make. The outrage in the fact that a poor country such as Nigeria pays its leaders more than industrialized countries pay their leaders calls for something drastic to be done about governance in Nigeria. The paper calls for benevolent dictatorship to straiten Nigeria .


      Today (July 16, 2010), I read a report by Daniel Elomba on how much Nigerian leaders make Vis aVis leaders in developed countries. It said that even Nigerian legislators' salaries are more than English and American legislators and presidents! This is in a country where the average Nigerian lives on about two dollars a day.  The report got me thinking; the following essay is the result of that reflection.

      There are basically two approaches to human beings. One is the religious approach; the other is the scientific approach. The religious approach sees people as loving by nature and urges people to love one another. Love is essentially what Jesus Christ taught his followers. He said: do unto others as you want them to do to you. All of us want to be loved by other persons therefore his logic is that we should love other persons. Love other persons if you want them to love you. In a world where every person loves every person there would be peace and joy. In a world where all persons loved and cared for all persons there would be security for all persons.  This approach to human beings is ideational; that is, it is a product of pure thinking; it is a hoped for state rather than an actual state of any human society on planet earth; there is no place on earth where human beings unconditionally love each other. Religion proceeds on the premise that a deity, God, created human beings and that he created them a loving bunch. There is no empirical evidence that God exists let alone that he created people; the idea of God has to be accepted on faith for it is not proven.

      The other approach to people is the scientific approach; this approach is also called the realistic approach; it is an approach based on empirical observation of human behavior. Here, folks look at human history and observe human beings empirically; from their observations they say that certain inevitable conclusions stare us in the face about human nature. People are said to be self centered with each of them working for his self interests only (and, may be, for his immediate family's interests) and does not care for other persons interests. People are said to be separated atoms, each atom apparently motivated by what is good for it and not what is good for other atoms. Because they are essentially working for their personal interests and could care less for social interests they necessarily clash with each other. Conflict is the inevitable result where folks are driven by self interests only. Human society is thus said to be characterized by social conflict; conflict that must be managed or else there would be no social harmony.

      Thomas Hobbes, in his seminal work, Leviathan, said that in the state of nature each person is at war with other persons and powerful persons enslaved weak persons and the weak banded together and fought the powerful; in nature each person tries to appropriate other persons' belongings and the result was perpetual warfare and insecurity for all persons. People's lives were nasty, brutish and short.

      As Hobbes saw it governments were necessitated by peoples need to obtain a modicum of physical and social security. People banded together and chose from among them a person and made him their leader (king) and gave him power to make and implement laws that protected them and punished those who harmed them.

       As Hobbes saw it the monarch's chief duty is to pass laws, set up courts, jails, hire police and military and go after law breakers; arrest, try and imprison law breakers and generally do whatever protects the people. People are said to be amoral, evil and self interested and therefore if you want to have them live in harmony with each other you have to use the force of law to corral them; you have to watch people closely, monitor their every behavior and make sure that they do not step out of line. Those who step outside the confines of the law are mercilessly pursued, apprehended, tried and punished to the fullest extent of the law (including capital punishment). This is said to be the only way to have a civilized society. Human beings are seen as savages who do not care for each other; therefore, if you want them to peacefully live together you must impose draconian laws on them. This is the real politics approach to human nature.

      Hobbes political philosophy led to or justified Europeans divine right of kings doctrine. Others political thinkers, such as John Locke (Second Treaty on Government), Charles Montesquieu (the Spirit of Laws),  Jean Jacque Rousseau (Social Contract), Niccolo Machiavelli (The Prince), Utilitarian thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (On Liberty) etc presented ways to have a law and ordered society that nevertheless was not oppressive. These political theorists, by and large, agreed that human beings are lawless by nature and need to be disciplined by the iron fist of the law or else they reverted to their natural amoral liberty (the romantic Rousseau took exception and posited that noble savages, American Indians, were naturally  loving; this is what happens when a scholar is armchair and does not go to the field to observe what he is writing about; if Rousseau had left the salons of Paris and Geneva and gone to the Americas he would have seen that his noble savages were busy hunting each other down, cutting each others throats and using human heads to demonstrate their bravery).

     Science proceeds on the grounds that the universe came into being accidentally (Big Bang) and that chance and randomness determines what happens in the universe. People are seen as the accidental product of changes in the environment. Accidents produced people and they evolve in adaptation to changes in their physical universe.  People are seen as animals pure and simple. The only demonstrable force in them is their desire to survive at all costs and the fact that the fittest among them tend to survive and the weakest perish; Charles Darwin posited this hypothesis. As animals people are driven by self survival and to the extent that they want others to survive with them their selfish genes, Edward Wilson tells us, disposes them to desire the survival of those who share similar genes with them, which happens to be their children (this is not a good argument for, ultimately, all human beings share the same genes therefore if selfish genes drives them it would dispose them to desire the survival of all people). Science tells us that people are what we see, selfish creatures, and that we have to be realistic and structure society with laws that anticipate their inevitable conflicts and deal with them.

       It is clear from all appearances that Nigerians do not love each other and therefore cannot be expected to have a society based on love. A people that for over 1000 years sold their people to either Arabs or Europeans cannot be called a loving people; in fact, they can only be called savages.

      If we rule out the agency of love as the chief means of maintaining social cooperation in Nigeria what we are left with is the agency of law.  Laws made in a dispassionate manner and impersonally implemented would seem to be the only means of attaining law and order in Nigeria . Draconian laws seem the only mechanism for giving Nigerians social security.

      It would seem that the Nigerian National Assembly, the bicameral Legislature (House of Representatives and Senate), ought to be making laws and that the law enforcement agencies (executive branch of government through the police, courts etc) ought to be enforcing those laws. Instead, what we have in Nigeria is a legislature that essentially construes its members function as stealing from the country (each member of this supposed peoples representatives make more money than the president of the United States; a country where the average citizen lives on about two dollars a day pays its deputies more than a country where the income per capita is over $46, 000 a year!).

     The executive branch of government apparently is construed as a prize that the various ethnic groups vie to capture and from it loot the national treasury, big time.  The Nigerian president makes more money than the heads of states of the major industrialized countries; that is correct, a banana republic whose only revenue generating product is oil pays its useless head of state more money than countries producing wealth. (In my opinion no public official should make more than thirty times the minimum wage. If what the individual desires is wealth he ought to go to the private sector where it is permitted to make money and become billionaires. )

     The judicial branch of government, the courts, are as corrupt as the other two branches of government; it takes hefty bribes for so-called judges to look the other way as the politician crooks go about stealing from the people.



      It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that when oil revenue runs out that Nigeria would have no money to pay for any kind of government (the sad part of it all is that the thieving politicians of Nigeria have failed to socialize Nigerians to the need to pay taxes so that when oil revenue runs out they would generate money to run the government; if Nigeria is governed by human being, not thieves, all Nigerians by now would have accepted paying, at least, twenty percent of their annual incomes in taxes; but, no, the thieves ruling the country do not even pay their faire share of taxes, all they do is take from the economy and not give to it). When oil revenue runs out Nigeria would probably descend to the level of Somalia , a failed state. The country would descend to Hobbes state of nature where all are at war with all and life is nasty, brutish and short.

    Could we ask if a people that do this sort of thing to themselves are intelligent? Could it be that Nigerians are not intelligent? Could it be that we are expecting too much from a people that are genetically disposed to be unintelligent?

       In most Western Intelligence testing instruments, such as Stanford Benet, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales (WAIS) etc the average Nigerian scores as if he is mentally retarded.  In the West IQ of 70 and under is considered indicative of mental retardation.  The average Nigerian scores less than 70 on these tests! That is correct, these people score on IQ tests as if they are mentally retarded!

      Could it be that Nigerians are mentally retarded and, as such, cannot govern themselves? Could it be that we are expecting morons to govern themselves well? Are these people destined to revert to savagery and perhaps resume selling their people to whoever wants to buy them for slaves? Their leaders apparent disinterest in their peoples welfare, their not working to provide their people with jobs continues their peoples' history of selling Africans into slavery; if they cared for their people they would not leave them to suffer and starve to death.

      (Those they sold to the Americas , African-Americans, tend to score a bit higher than them but lower than white folk. The average African-American scores about 85; the average white person scores about 100; there is a 15 point difference in the two races IQ scores. Asians generally score higher than both blacks and whites.  IQ scores are reflected on scores on standard scholastic aptitude tests, SAT; Asians average score is over 1200, whites over 1100, African Americans about 850 and Africans too little to be mentioned. Given Asians high performance on these tests is it any wonder that they are doing well economically and are on the curve of overtaking Europeans and Americans economically, whereas poor scoring Africans sink to the bottom of everything!)

     It does not take much intelligence to realize where Nigeria is heading to: Somalia's lawlessness, yet the leaders of Nigeria (if the criminals pretending to be in leadership positions in Nigeria can be called leaders) do not see what is coming their way, what is staring them in the faces.

      Kidnapping for ransom is these days the only way unemployed university graduates can get money in the Southeastern part of the country; here, unemployment runs as high as 80%.

      Are Nigerians born unintelligent or what?  Why can't they see what is coming their way and do something to avert it? Why must they only busy themselves with stealing from the oil money that multinational corporations that mine oil give to them (they are so dull that they cannot mine the oil by themselves or engage in other industries that the country can possibly make money from).

      The masses of Nigeria's over 100 million persons languish in poverty and their pseudo-intellectual s account for that poverty by blaming the white man. They are always pointing two accusatory fingers at Europeans and the West, ignoring the three fingers pointing back at them. They say that slave trade and neocolonialism underdeveloped Africa . May be so. But the question is: who sold Africans to white folks and to Arabs? Africans did. Therefore, Africans were equally culpable in slave trade and if we must blame white folks for slavery we must also blame Africans for selling their people.

       (Interestingly even though they sold more Africans to Arabs than they sold to Europeans, Africans do not blame Arabs for slave trade; they only blame Europeans. One suspects that they understand that the religion of Islam does not encourage guilt feeling hence Arabs do not feel guilty for their past crimes and thus it is a waste of time blaming them for slavery. Christianity, on the other hand, makes Christians feel guilt for their past sins hence white folks feel guilty for the sin of slavery. Africans recognizing white folks proneness to guilt feeling take advantage of it and make them feel guilty by blaming them for slavery; they shake white folks down for money, economic aid, money which, of course, they redirect to their thieving pockets and never use to help their people. In so far that folks must feel guilty for slavery it must include Africans and Arabs; no one should allow African sociopaths to make him feel guilty for the crime Africans participated in committing.)

     Slave trade ended over a hundred years ago (the British Lord Lugard stopped it in 1902 when he destroyed the last slave selling syndicate in Nigeria, the Aro slaving syndicate). 

     Fifty years after they obtained independence from the British, the schools and other infrastructure built by the British are decayed and dilapidated! Nigerians do not see it fit to maintain their inherited British built infrastructure talk more about increasing them.

      Before our very eyes, these people are reverting to the jungle that the British tried to extricate them from. Soon they will be living as their forefathers did: roaming around the jungles of Africa, capturing each other and selling their people to whoever wants to buy them and use them as slaves (if there were no international laws against slavery these people would today be actively capturing and selling their people; in fact, some of that is actually taking place behind our backs).

       These people are primitive and it is about time we said the obvious out loud and stopped allowing political correctness preventing us from saying what we see with our naked eyes. We must stop trying to make these people feel good by not telling them how we see them. Good self esteem is based on truth not lies, not telling Nigerians that they are descent folk when we see them as criminals.

     What Nigerians seem to know how to do best is stealing and engaging in massive corruption and with the money they stole engaging in vain behaviors; each of them wants to be seen as a very important person, a VIP, a chief, a doctor, professor do nothing. These people masquerade around as if they are important human beings. You ask: important for what? What have they contributed to human civilization to make them important? In physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astrophysics and astronomy they have contributed zilch. They are not known for their contribution to the art of good governance. We might as well have our dogs govern any social organization than look to Nigerians to do so.

      If importance is judged by what folks have contributed to humanity, Nigerians are unimportant, unless, of course, we are talking about importance derived from stealing.

     Not long ago, James Watson suggested that may be these people are too unintelligent to govern themselves well and we set on him and chased him out of his job. Could it be that the man was correct in his unguarded expression? Are these people unintelligent?

      If they are unintelligent should we waste our time expecting them to do what common sense says that human beings should do, govern themselves properly? May be we should wash our hands of these people and look the other way as they continue making a royal mess of their land and eventually degenerate to the level of Somalia. If we did that in a few decades these people would probably wipe themselves out of existence and then leave their land for wild animals to roam on? Nigeria and indeed all of Africa would be transformed into one humongous wild life preserve and folks from all over the world would come and enjoy life in the wild.

      A people who cannot govern themselves well have no business asking other persons to sustain them alive; other people have no business helping them to stay alive. We ought to leave these people to steal to their hearts content and then take the consequences of transforming their country into a criminals' paradise. We should not give them any kind of economic aid and let them die off. At present they present their disease ridden bodies to our sights and make us feel guilty hence help them; may be we ought to stop allowing sympathy to dispose us to help them.



CONCLUSION





      Observation shows that a few Nigerians are carting away the wealth that belongs to all Nigerians and devoting them to themselves alone. Experience shows that most Nigerians are too fearful, too cowardly to challenge those stealing their wealth. When the masses make noise about the need for equity and justice in the distribution of national wealth the criminals ruling them send their goon squad to go kill a few of them and cow the rest of them into silence. Fire bullets into a crowd of Nigerians and kill some and the rest run away and like terrified rats go hide in underground burrows and from there make noise about the need for justice for all (killing some of them ought to make them enraged and fight for liberty if they were a courageous people but they are a people that tolerated slavery for over a thousand years so we know that they are a cowardly people).

      Given Nigerians fearfulness and the fact that if left alone they would not rise up and fight the kleptocrats robbing their country down it seems to me that Nigeria needs a benevolent dictator to seize power and use coercion to shape the country up. Such a dictator must be authoritarian and totalitarian and for, say, fifty years do things that would drag Nigeria into the twenty first century, especially industrialize her.  I have developed this thesis in another paper and merely mention it here; it is the antidote to Nigerians current lawlessness and rampant corruption. The alternative is to behave like the ostrich and hide their heads and pretend that nothing is wrong with their country until it degenerates to the like of Somalia .

     A criticism of this recommendation could be the fact that Nigeria in the past was ruled by military dictators and those did not improve the lot of Nigerians; indeed, many of them were as corrupt as today's political class. True. Yet, it is conceivable to have a dictator do the right thing for Nigeria . The alternative is worse, is it not? Can Nigerians afford to have their present corrupt political class keep on ruling them? They can if a failed state, such as Somalia , is their choice! The other criticism is that democracy needs time to develop and that we do not need to abort its development in Nigeria . This is also true yet if what passes for democracy, looting of the economy by a few, is the only path to democracy I say that a dictator that consciously does what needs to be done for a few decades before real democracy is practiced in the country could not be worse.

      One is simply tired of making excuses for Nigerians and Africans; one is tired of explaining why they do not seem able to do any thing right; one has come to the conclusion that they either get it right or disappear from existence.