The pain and shame Nigerians outside the country face

I must first let you know that I write this piece of note (or maybe article) with so much pain and shame as my heart aches for a change. I think it is high time we put ourselves, as Nigerians, in check. However, before I continue I must let you understand the fact that I am Nigerian and I am poud to be a Nigerian, come rain come shine. As a matter of fact, my children must grow up in Nigeria and understand the way things are done there, it only makes them smarter.  I saw a flash image recently that says, "Speak-English, Kiss-French, Drive-German, Dress-Italian, Fight-Chinese, Spend-Arabians, Party-Caribbean, Think-Nigerian". The picture made me smile and made me proud once again to be a Nigerian.

However, it is a different ball game when you are outside the country with the image Nigerians have portrayed to the world. It is really heartbreaking when you talk to five foreigners and what all five foreigners can tell you about Nigerians is how fraudulent they are or how they know at least someone that had been defrauded by a Nigerian. And to be honest with you, it is very saddening that these people don't even know about the good sides of Nigerians, but do we blame them? No. It is what we have portrayed ourselves to be over the years. When you meet them and they finally know you are a Nigerian, the next statement you hear is "I heard that there are lot of 4-19 (yea, they call them four-nineteen) guys in Nigeria", "I know someone who just recently got scammed by a Nigerian", "I read about the Nigerian scammers and how they operate", and the list goes on and on. I recently went for an interview and even though I had screened out everything that states ‘Nigeria' out of my resume, the interviewer still managed to link me with Nigeria through the classified ad website (www.isaleeko.com.ng, you should check out the website to post free ads) project I am currently working on, through the domain name, .ng. She then said that we should digress a little from the interview while she told me about how she went on a classified ad website to check for a cottage, as she will soon be going on vacation, and she couldn't help but notice someone's post that was warning people about cottages on the website and how she just got scammed by a Nigerian there. Again, i was very sad to hear such a story, in an interview for that matter, "hope she doesn't judge me based on this" as that was what was running through my head. Anyways, she then continued to ask me what I thought about the whole situation.

The first thing I told her was that sometimes it is greed on the part of the people that got scammed. But really, in their defense, like a friend, Destiny, would say, every human is greedy and we are all trying to find ways to acquire more wealth or at least spend lesser if possible, it is just human nature. So, they being greedy is not a justification that they deserve to be scammed. I then continued to tell her that most of these fake posts usually have some flimsy mistakes in them that can actually be enough reason to flag off the posts, but the greed in people won't let them notice it. There's this saying I grew up hearing from my parents, "When an offer seems too good to be true, then it's not true" and it is just sad how many people just don't get it. Whenever, anyone is offering you something that is outrageous, it is time to thread with care or totally back-out of the deal.

I further went ahead to explain to her another mistake most of the Canadian and western people make, if the deal ever involves you having to send money outside the shores of your country, then don't do it, no matter who they claim to be. I just get crept out when I hear that they meet someone on the internet that is offering a service they want and he tells them he is on a business trip to somewhere outside the country, at worse Africa, and that they should send the money to him via Western Union, "who does that?"  If he claims he has a service to offer you, then he should have a payment method that is within your country because the honest truth is, once the money leaves your country, it is not coming back to you. But thank God for the good record keeping systems, databases and security systems they have in this part of the world, if you send money to someone within the country, it's traceable to some extent and if you do get lucky, you'll probably get your money back.

However, I don't want you to get me all wrong, these things happen here too, there are fraudsters here in Canada and western countries too, I have heard and read a couple of stories, and piece of advice for those travelling to the western countries, you still have to be careful. But what makes the westerners different from us is that the society here frowns at such incidents while our society embraces or rather indifferent about it. What I however, wonder the most is this "why is Nigeria the most tagged with fraud?" This is the part I really don't understand. There are other African countries that major in this fraud business but they aren't ever tagged with fraud. As a matter of fact, I received more spam mails having links to other African countries than those having links with Nigeria. I probably want to guess it is because of the population and how dispersed over the world we are and as such people get to talk more about the encounters they have had with Nigerians rather than other African countries or maybe it has just gotten to the point where they don't even care about the origin of the scam, once it's from Africa, it's from Nigeria.

Another thing that baffles me about this whole saga, is the amount of effort, talent and skill the so called ‘Yahoo boys' put into this their chosen line of business. I have met some of these guys in time past and I must say they are intelligent in their own way. Some of these guys know the whole states and cities of the countries they deal with and sure some citizens of these same countries don't even know they exist.  Most of these guys don't even sleep at night; they are awake all night sending spam mails and following up with the previously sent mails. How about the cost of connecting to the internet? Well that's not cheap either, to get a reliable, fast 24 hours internet in Nigeria should cost at least 20,000 Naira a month. Well, what's the essence of having internet connection when you don't a laptop or desktop? A fairly used laptop with a good processing power will cost around 40,000 Naira. All I am trying to buttress is that these guys invest a lot of time, money and effort into these things and if they could just but re-channel all these time, money and effort into something more productive, Nigeria will definitely be heading for greatness.

I believe it is not too late to retrace our steps, embrace what is right, channel our efforts to the betterment of the nation and think of the consequence of our actions as it affects not just us but as Nigerians at large. I am a proud Nigerian and Nigeria is my home. Long Live Nigeria. 

#proudlynigerian #occupynigeria #ilovenigeria #nigeriaishome #youthsofnigeria #hopefornigeria #greatnationgreatpeople