“The darkest hour in any man’s life is when he sits down to plan how to get money without earning it” – Horace Greeley
As I write this, a foxy Nigerian youth is glued to his laptop computer, using a pseudonym of a NATO soldier in faraway Afghanistan, in a bid to defraud unsuspecting foreign women in dire need of affection and emotional warmth. Another Nigerian youth is negatively deploying his information technology skills to clone fake credit cards, in a bid to hijack the identities of hapless denizens, in order to make fraudulent online transactions.
One would be shocked to the marrow to discover that a handful of young Nigerians are fully engaged in what is known in street parlance as yahoo yahoo. The activities of this army of internet marauders are grossly under-estimated. Internet fraud is gradually gaining currency as the mainstay of many young Nigerians. It is a huge and highly organised criminal network that many young Nigerians have embraced as a full time occupation.
Several others are racking their brains to come up with novel methods of concealing drugs in their luggage and on their persons with a view to circumventing security checks at various airports across Asia, Europe and Africa. In the same vein, human trafficking syndicates are fine-tuning their strategies to ship their next sets of victims to Europe for sexual exploitation and prostitution. In spite of the awareness created to highlight and expose the antics of human traffickers and to dissuade our young ladies from falling prey to these monsters, it is disheartening to note that some parents willingly sell off their landed properties in order to raise funds for their female children to travel to Europe and ‘hustle’. Many of our young girls are warming up to be next in line for shipment to Europe via Libya, after days of risky sojourn across the Sahara Desert. Baby factory phenomenon is a recurring decimal in the south eastern part of the country.
As you read this piece, abduction kingpins popularly known as kidnappers are making last minute efforts to ensure that their plans to abduct their next targets go hitch free while family members of kidnapped victims are making frantic efforts to raise ransom to secure the release of their loved ones. Across Asia, Europe and the Americas, thousands of Nigerians are guests to the gulags dotted across the length and breadth of these continents. They are often associated with a flurry of criminal activities ranging from advance fee frauds, romance scam, robbery etc.
Prisons around the world are bursting at the seams with Nigerians forming a sizeable percentage of inmates. It is reported that there are over 16,000 Nigerians in foreign jails held for drug related offences. In Canada, over 3,000 Nigerian women are cooling their feet in the prisons. The situation is not different in the West African sub-region. Ghana’s forty-six jail houses are homes to hundreds of Nigerians serving mind-boggling prison terms, with some having up to 100 years jail terms.
The country’s civil service is a cesspit of graft and unprecedented malfeasance. Institutionalised corruption reigns supreme in the civil service. It is almost impossible for one to conduct any business in government ministries, departments and agencies without subtle requests for gratifications. If the pliant public officer senses any airs of ‘uncooperative’ nuances from his or her target, then the file or documents of the visitor awaiting attention may be suddenly banished to perpetual obscurity.
It is a norm that palms must be greased before one gets a satisfactory level of service from public servants. From airport counters, police stations, sea ports, Immigrations, Customs to private organisations, one is surreptitiously coerced to part with some money before service is rendered. What is more, the judiciary is deeply marinated in corruption and has become a temple of monumental sleaze. Senior lawyers that are supposed to be held in high moral standing have been reported to be the conduit that large sums of money are funnelled to depraved and rogue Judges in order to suborn justice. judicial officers are pre-occupied with pecuniary interests as opposed to dispensing justice.
We must admit and come to the incontrovertible realisation that Nigeria has a debilitating “crime problem”. According to Femi Odekunle (1977), a Nigerian criminologist, a crime problem is a “chronic and recalcitrant situation in which the occurrence of crime is systematic rather than random; in which the incidence is high and the phenomenon prevalent; in which crime takes a definite character, complexity, and organisation; in which all sections and sectors of the population are participating in its perpetration ;in which control and correctional instrumentalities are rendered virtually ineffective and are consequently driven to self-defeating repressive measures.’’
Different sociological theories have been advanced as possible reasons for a people’s susceptibility or predisposition to crime. Robert Merton, an American Sociologist advanced a theory of how cultural values could possibly lead to crime. According to him, “it is only when a system of cultural values extols, virtually above all else, certain common success-goals for the population while the social structure rigorously restricts or completely closes access to approved modes of reaching these goals for a considerable part of the same population, that deviant behaviour ensues on a large scale.”
Merton goes further to argue that all the major agencies of the socialisation such as the family, peer groups and the schools place emphasis on success defined purely by monetary terms. Regrettably, there is no corresponding emphasis on the approved or legitimate means for attaining the much cherished goal of success in the society.Merton’s thesis aptly describes the situation in Nigeria where there is yawning chasm between the rich and the poor.
This situation is exacerbated by the veneration of materialism as our national ethos. Material wealth is the major yardstick for measuring success in Nigeria and the people have no regards whatsoever for the rules of the game. Our warped value system has created a society that has become a breeding ground for all kinds of crime. Government must take practical steps to address social inequalities and the grinding poverty that the lower class is presently steeped in.
Nigeria is neck-deep in the murky waters of corruption and it is my considered opinion that the propensity of Nigerians to be involved in crime is reflection of the jaundiced and notoriously corrupt leadership the country has been plagued with since independence.
Many may misconstrue the thrust of this piece as an attempt to infer that all Nigerians are corrupt. This is far from the truth. Nigeria is endowed with an array of honest, hardworking and resourceful individuals who are making gigantic strides in their chosen endeavours, across the globe. Regrettably, it is the deviant demographic that has become the poster image of Nigeria.
Akanimo Asuquo Sunday,
Lagos
