After high-profile robberies, policemen often invade the area to arrest young men they see in the area. They manipulate or torture these young men until the young men admit knowing or being part of the robbery gang. Due to its deficiency in getting actionable truth, human-right groups oppose the act of extracting criminal confessions through torture and mental manipulations in the absence of a lawyer. By constantly repeating the falsely obtained confessions, some victims start accepting responsibility for things they did not even do.
The speed with which some Nigerians admit or generalize the responsibility for Nigeria’s dysfunctional system suggests a mental conditioning.[1] They blame farmers for increasing food prices during fuel price-hike without considering that farmers use fuel in transporting their harvests and still depend on other hiked products. They blame students for not taking education seriously, even when first-class graduates are hopelessly unemployed. They identify, generalize and blame people’s desperate actions for survival in the colonially-rigged system as the root cause of Nigeria’s problem.
Part of solving social issues requires accepting responsibility for past faults. It is like clearing unwanted plants from a field before planting new ones, so that the new ones can grow uninterrupted. The new farmer could charge the previous farmer to uproot the unwanted plants, or take responsibility for uprooting them himself. Likewise, people who wish to reorder a failed society can blame pioneers or former administrators or simply take responsibility just for progress. People can take responsibility for other people’s actions and deeds for some factors.
Factors for taking responsibility for other people’s actions
Timidity: due to the intellectual, financial, social or military inability to defend themselves or challenge accusations, some people can accept responsibility for other people’s actions. This can be called intimidation. Such could be seen between policemen and suspects, tough lecturers and shy students, bullies and snowflakes.
Stockholm syndrome: after interacting with their captors for some time, some people develop some affection for their oppressors. This occurs when hostages or victims of abuse bond with their captors or abusers.[2] In such emotional disorder, captives can even shield their captors by taking responsibility or excusing their captors.
Magnanimity: when you understand the situation and yet offer to take the responsibility to liberate a weaker person or as personal sacrifice for social growth and progress. For instance, a father takes responsibility for his child’s vandalism, a man for his wife, a mother for her children and so on. Also, a man paying for damages incurred by a homeless person or clearing a littered road.
The speed in accepting, generalizing or diverting responsibility for Nigeria’s dysfunctional system to the victims cannot be attributed to magnanimity. The postcolonial defenders neither understand the foundational effect of colonialism, nor the requirements for progressive society. Instead, their defence follows from either Stockholm disorder (in admiring foreign lifestyle) or timidity (historical fear and ignorance). So today, “the African himself has doubts about his capacity to transform and develop his natural environment. With such doubts, he even challenges those of his brothers who say that Africa can and will develop through the efforts of its own people.”[3]
Before colonial invasion, the different ethnic groups in Nigeria were living, growing and managing their areas separately.[4] Unfortunately, the British colonialists invaded to uproot the different people’s social orders over several decades before merging the people under a colonial rule. The British killed those who resisted colonization,[5] and trained the controllable ones to uphold the colonial rule.[6] Hence, the different unconsented people have been fighting one another in the colonial structure. By violently merging and holding dissimilar, unconsented and unfriendly communities under their colonial system even after independence, British colonialists made Nigeria as a prison or forced polygamy. The effect of such a union without agreement for common purpose is constant crisis, instead of collaborative productivity. Noting the devastating effect of forging a union without common purpose, Thomas Hobbes writes:
“For being distracted in opinions concerning the best use and application of their strength, they do not help but hinder one another; and reduce their strength by mutual opposition to nothing: whereby they are easily, not only subdued by a very few that agree together; but also when there is no common enemy, they make war upon each other, for their particular interests.”[7]
The present desperation, crises, crimes and feuds in Nigeria are results of an extractive union imposed on disparate peoples. The different communities had their faults and challenges like people in other continents. But the postcolonial government structure, powers and institutions are purely exploitative creations of colonialism. No indigene of any of the merged communities was involved or consulted during the foundational amalgamation. We were all born into colonialism, and all the “bad” politicians were groomed and positioned in a colonially-programmed system.
Though we were all born into colonialism, colonialism was not born inside us, and must not pass down to our children. And as you keep making sincere effort to reorganize the imposed system,[8] you are not responsible for it. You are being magnanimous, and the Spirit of humanity will always assist you.
“One of the easiest ways of avoiding responsibility for a problem is vaguely generalizing blame instead of specifying, allocating and evaluating responsibilities for solving the problem. For when everybody, including dependents, victims and kids born into a society, are blamed for a fundamentally malformed social structure, nobody can be held responsible for anything. When everybody is equally judged wrong, nobody is wrong, and nobody can be held accountable.”
[1] Chukwunwike Enekwechi, “Defining Africa: for development or for limitation?” in Restartnaija, 16th October, 2018. www.restartnaija.com/2018/10/16/defining-africa-development-or-limitation/ retrieved 8th August, 2019
[2] Kimberly Holland, “What is Stockholm Syndrome and who does it affect” in Healthline, November 11, 2019. www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/stockholm-syndrome/ Retrieved 14th November, 2019.
[3] Walter Rodney, How Europe underdeveloped Africa, 2009 Edition (Abuja: Panaf press, 2009) p.25
[4] Cf. Mogobe Ramose, “Discourses on Africa” in The African Philosophy Reader, Second Edition, Edited by P. H. Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux (New York: Routledge, 2003). p.3
[5] Oladele Fadeiye, European conquest and African resistance (Lagos: Murfat publications, 2011) pp.64-65
[6] Walter Rodney, op. cit. p.317-319
[7] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Edited by Michael Oakeshott (New York, Macmillan: 1962) p. 130
[8] Chukwunwike Enekwechi, “Organizing the true national conference for a new Nigeria” in Restartnaija. restartnaija.com/2019/02/05/organizing-nigerian-national-conference/ retrieved 5th April, 2020.