By Frank Tietie
When it is normal for the government to scam its people, scams soon become the norm. Why should it surprise us that Nigeria became the world capital of ‘Yahoo’s scams?
A country where most of its people essentially thrive on how to scheme and dispossess others of their resources primarily through politics and official corruption would continually be on its knees and never truly develop.
Not only that. Its people would soon essentially make lies and deception for gain as a way of life. What has become more troubling is how this zeitgeist of scams has pervaded beyond government relations to personal and social relations. Honour, integrity, fidelity and good faith are scarce and secretly despised as not being smart traits.
Therefore, notice the preponderance of failed business promises, especially in land and estate transactions, being of the same rank as failed government promises.
It is not different from the way an individual advertises plots of land for sale, knowing full well that the land is non-existent but hoping that if the public believes in the advert and makes payments, he will bribe officials of the land department to be issued a piece of land, start allocation, and make stupendous profits by charging infrastructure fees that he knows he won’t provide.
The government operators primarily operate in the same way. They make a budget bearing in mind how it will only enrich themselves. When they successfully award the contracts to themselves through proxies, they still won’t execute them to the optimum in the interest of the people but will place premiums in payments of kickbacks and mark-ups to themselves. Nigerians are used to scamming themselves, and it seems scams have become one of its export commodities from recent statistics of cybercrimes.
As a victim who fully paid for two plots of land in Abuja on different occasions, which turned out to be because of fraudulent misrepresentation of trusted friends and colleagues, I have come to think to the point of realisation that the government is not run by spirits but by human beings. If governance in Nigeria has a history of scams, it is because it is run by scammers.
I mean those people who are not different from my learned, educated and smooth-talking friends and colleagues who scammed me of my hard-earned millions of Naira. It is on record. And they threatened me when I announced that I would come after them.
Others have said I could even be assassinated to settle the scores with silence. They forget the Lord’s injunction not to fear those who can only kill the body but to only fear the one who can kill both the body and soul and cast them to eternal damnation.
Scamming is a national problem in Nigeria, and it cannot be stopped by hunting down individual scammers, as the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission is doing.
There needs to be a kind of national rebirth because people have come to tacitly accept scamming as a way of life, as the government has also exhibited to them for a long time.
Therefore, the day Nigeria gets a leader who can unite the people with a vision of a great country where more people strive to do good than evil, the tide of scams will be turned around.
Frank Tietie, Esq, Nigerian Lawyer and Media Personality, writes from Abuja.
