The Truth Hurts: Nigerians Need To Look Closer To Home

I am so proud and will always be proud to be British – born and mostly bred.
But I am also Naija to the core.

I understand both of my worlds – completely.

Barely 24 hrs after the Tory party election for a new PM, ministers were announced and they got straight to work.

No thanksgiving
No aso ebi for owambe victory parties🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢
No stupidly flamboyant eagles square swearing-in ceremony
No dilly-dallying for months around self seeking ego filled Godfathers BEFORE you can appoint your own commissioners or ministers.
No hordes of “special assistants” made up of mistresses, drop out cousins, drinking buddies and olodo children!

My fellow Nigerians whose country is gradually melting down the abbys of economic oblivion are sitting at their laptops, glued to their phones criticizing the leader of a WORKING DEVELOPED COUNTRY.

The reason many of us hate PM Boris Johnson is because of the tag of racism we have stuck on him. Admittedly, BoJo gets carried away and is prone to exaggeration.

He also sometimes talks too much. And he probably also loves his country too much. But since when did loving your country or talking too much become a crime?

Our own leaders in Nigeria might want to emulate that quality of loving your country above yourself!!!

Unfortunately folks who talk too much inadvertently say some things which even if not entirely wrong, can come across as nasty – often taken as racism if coming from a white fellow.

And tell me, as stinginly hurtful as the words of the PM about us, which almost every other leader of the Western world is thinking about Nigeria(ns) but too much of a coward to say out loud (except Trump) might sound, tell me which one of them is untrue?

Past sneaky PM David Cameron did not mince words when he described us in what was meant to be a whispered conversation as “Fantastically corrupt”. Unfortunately, that whisper was picked up by microphones on live TV and beamed across the world! Nigerians almost shite ourselves castigating and vilifying “Dagenham Dave” for his words.

But was he wrong?

My dear friend Ayo Akinfe in this morning’s edition of his daily writes-up spoke about Boris while inserting interesting tags such as xenophobic, inept, doomed to fail etc, also in the same article called on or rather made it a mandatory obligation for the new PM to drive investors towards Nigeria citing the example of Siemens who have launched a power producing plant and the Chinese who are building a transformer manufacturing plant.

These are good developments….

But these are new investors.

The possible reason Britain is not encouraging investment could be past bitter experience of dealing with Nigerians. If they built a wind turbine farm stretching from Badagry to Calabar, like Ayo suggested, Nigerians will steal the blades in one month! Every single blade!!

And let us look at just a few of Nigerians’ work ethics:
*Lazy workers who will turn up at work when they please and steal materials and funds from their employers?
*Educated but painfully illiterate workforce who will not read, talkless of trying to understand simple instructions?
*Or greedy employees who will bribe potential clients out of their eyeballs before even as much as a penny…sorry Naira has dropped into their employers coffers???
*Rude workers who see their positions as a favour to clients
*Nauseating customer service
*Lying, scheming, cheating, ritualistic, sycophantic, superstitious and over religious tendencies

Should I continue???

Here in the UK, Nigerians in the 90s almost single handedly broke the welfare benefits system, housing, credit card and Euro cheques banking system – to mention just a few.

Is it just fine if we say or know these things to be true about ourselves, but a crime when someone else says it??

Nigerians – we are like a 60 year old man with only 1 eye which is also riddled with astigmatism & glaucoma, pointing fingers at a man with 2 eyes with a tiny little speck in one of them.