When hunting known terrorists, those who provide different supplies are regarded as accomplices to terrorism. These include the suppliers for weapons, food, shelter, amusement, information, courier, maintenance and even medical services. Though these suppliers could claim innocent to defend their actions as just ‘doing business’, their actions (or profits) enable and sustain terrorism. Some societies and political structures are formed for suppression and exploitation. So, desperation and opportunism make people strive to fit in and take advantage of such exploitative systems as necessary suppliers, using their political, professional or business affiliations.
“It is no measure of health to be profoundly adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Jiddu Krishnamurti
O t’ese le bo (you entered voodoo),
Yahoo ni babalawo (internet fraud is voodoo),
Ole ni everybody (everybody here is a thief)
Eni ile moba sa ni barawo (only he who day breaks on is called thief).
When speaking on Nigeria’s socio-political challenges, some civil servants, businesspersons or clerics blame government and the unemployed for Nigeria’s problems. They absolve themselves of faults as they provide goods, services or support for those who can pay, especially the government and its staff. They intentionally overlook or defend any means through which their clients and employers get the funds, even from other people’s misery or death. These people include civil servants in unproductive jobs[1], businesspersons gaining from inflated government contracts, state mercenaries and recipients of government handouts. As long as they are being paid, they keep defending illegitimate, corrupt and cruel governments and institutions.
True democracy
A democratic country is a group of communities who agree to live and work together for their growth and security. In such countries, individuals and groups create wealth by applying scientific knowledge on their private lands and resources to create wealth.[2] Wealth is “what is produced and consumed: food, clothes, houses, vehicles, factories, tools, schools, books, [gadgets] and churches”[3]. Then, service providers share in the wealth by rendering various professional services. By creating wealth from their resources, people are able to pay taxes from which governments build public infrastructure, even by contracting local producers and service-providers. So, a country’s wealth does not rise from taxes or public spending, but from the people’s production from lands and resources.[4] Tax is just a way through which governments share from the people’s wealth-creation to smoothly run the society.
Dictatorship
Contrarily, dictatorial countries are group of people that are held together at gunpoint. People in such countries lack economic freedom because government seizes people’s lands and resources (means of production), and dictates modes for sharing its proceeds to the people. Dictatorships can be minor as socialism for seizing and redistributing people’s resources, or major as communism for also controlling the people’s lives and choices. Since their resources and means of production are seized, people in such societies depend on government’s mercy for basic necessities. Hence, to get government’s favour for survival, people struggle to fit in as supporters or necessary suppliers of desired goods and services for government and its officials.
Social effect of economic liberty in democracy vs economic suppression in dictatorship
The social implication is that while economic freedom in democracy begets competition for better productivity, dictatorship begets competition for sycophancy and opportunism. For wherever there is freedom, the principle of merit abounds over arbitrary seizure and reallocation of people’s resources.[5] But when a society is formed for seizing people’s resources and sharing proceeds for consumption, people struggle to fit into the consumption-sharing system by acquiring positions or credentials even by age falsification, certificate forgery, exam malpractice[6], violence and other forms of cheating. Such opportunists easily fit into dictatorships since seizing and sharing consumption[7] do not require much productive intelligence; just enough cruelty to outsmart or subdue others.
Nigeria’s rotational dictatorship presented as democracy
British colonialists made Nigeria by merging several unconsented communities and kingdoms[8][9] under a federal government[10] for using some people to exploit others.[11][12][13][14] Unlike democratic countries that freely collaborate for productivity and security, Nigeria is a rotational dictatorship for seizing and selling people’s resources, and sharing the revenue for consumption. So, Nigeria’s colonially imposed government creates ministries and states for sharing proceeds from selling people’s resources. Since then, different people struggle to occupy the colonially-made offices, in order to dictate the mode of sharing foreign proceeds from selling people’s resources.[15]
The main resource upon which Nigerian government depends for sharing consumption is crude oil in some Niger-Delta communities. So, the main jobs in Nigeria are not to create wealth. But to hold the people down so that foreigners can exploit and export their resource. Three major arms for holding people down can be represented as prison warder, babysitter and interior decorator.
The prison guard arm consists of the federal government that uses armed forces like military and police, imposed laws and media to physically hold people from resisting exploitation and from owning and using their various resources for production.
The warder arm consists of ministries, states, commissions and parastatals that distract, console or condition people to cope with the dictatorship using charity, academia and religion. They do so by sharing food or other consumer goods as stomach infrastructure; using religion to distract people to fight the devil, witches or wizards instead of addressing the dictatorship; and using schools to condition people to be timid, sycophantic, opportunistic and unable to oppose the postcolonial system. So, youths strive to qualify and fit into the system for sharing consumption and indoctrination, instead of mobilizing to change the system.
Interior decorator arm consists of private groups, media and firms who dictatorial governments pay to convince people that the government or the society is working. Like interior decorators, they import, install, use and share flashy infrastructures and amenities like buildings, hospitals, roads, streetlights, railways, airports and stadiums. Unfortunately, these amenities cannot be sustained for long because the people who are to use them lack resources for producing, earning and funding its maintenance.
Since dictatorial governments often block people’s access to their industrial resources, people strive to supply products and services, or fit into any arms of dictatorship. Hence, Nigerian system directly and indirectly infects everybody who gains from and within it.
Fallacy of innocence for necessary suppliers
Selling goods and services for people in such dictatorial systems can be excused as just doing business. Yet, defending the system of exploitation that funds the business while knowing its source and effects on people implicates the necessary suppliers. For they too would not support people who benefit from a system that holds and exploits their own loved ones. Supporters of socialism will not want their own children’s inheritances to be seized and shared to other people as charity. Nor will they support a system that holds down their daughters for foreigners to harvest their organs, and compensate them with some percentage of the proceeds. Unfortunately, despite its claim to share amenities equally for all, dictatorships mostly favour opportunists who are connected to those in power. In defence, they insist that Nigeria is damaged, and smartness requires grabbing or running away with what you can.
A way out
Addressing the effects of opportunism in exploitative societies requires a systematic change. Hence, people that desire sustainable and prosperous society, especially in Nigeria, can consider the following step
- Cultural distinction: culture means peoples’ beliefs about life, nature, community, human origin, interactions and destiny. The different cultures that are distinguished as ethnic communities and kingdoms have to look inwards to re-establish their cultural identities, destinies and elements of productivity and social responsibility. This involves their human and natural resources.
- True socio-political contract: progressive nations rise from the consent of different communities to live and work together as one political unit for their growth and survival. Without free consent to live and work together, communities that are held together by force will keep hindering each other. Hence, to get a better Nigeria, the different communities have to discuss in their senatorial districts to choose delegates to represent them in a national conference.[16] There, they can agree on terms, institutions, powers and methods for a mutually progressive national union.
- Technological networking: economic growth rises from industrially processing and using different resources as tools or raw materials to create items. The different resources that can be used to create needed items in Nigeria are contained in various communities. But the colonial tradition that became laws seizes them for export.[17] Thus, after the socio-political contract, the different communities have to retrieve ownership of their lands and resources, and can then obtain loans for labour and machines to extract, process and market their agricultural/mineral resources. This provides materials for other firms to produce more consumer and industrial products for the society. Then government can regulate and tax people’s production accordingly.
The belief that a bird at hand (government allocation) is better than ten in the bush (private industrial profits) holds many of us from looking inwards to build sustainable systems of productivity. Also, the desperation to survive and provide for loved ones in Nigeria’s economic uncertainty reduces our ability to resist opportunism. In this desperation, those who are already in the system fight to stay in it. Yet, nothing great comes from bowing to fear, but from confronting and eventually overcoming fear. Thus, a group of Africans will arise to enable people retrieve their resources and to establish systems of productivity pride. But till then, those that are stuck in moral dilemma of this systemic opportunism must keep acknowledging its inadequacy while preparing for a transformation.
Supporting and working with opportunists in a dictatorship is like working with mercenaries, who only care about their own survival. And they would not hesitate to ruin you once their position in the dictatorship is threatened. So, defending an exploitative system because you benefit from it is like appeasing a crocodile by feeding it with other people and hoping to escape or be eaten last. That’s the legacy that core opportunists invite for their children, a legacy of parasitism.
“Your lack of concern and your defence for the evil done to pay or patronize you indicts you as an accomplice to evil.”
Restartnaija
[1] Chukwunwike Enekwechi, “Creating jobs without creating wealth: the illusion of government performance” in Restartnaija, https://restartnaija.com/2020/01/14/creating-jobs-without-creating-wealth/ retrieved 28th May, 2020.
[2] Cf. Walter Rodney, How Europe underdeveloped Africa, 2009 edition, (Abuja: Panaf press, 2009) p.23
[3] Cf. Henry Hazlitt, Economics in one lesson (New York: Pocket books, Inc. 1946) p.149
[4] Walter Rodney, op. cit. p.294
[5] Milton Friedman, Case against equal pay for work, YouTube https://youtu.be/hsIpQ7YguGE
[6] Damilola Banjo and Habeeb Oladapo, “Investigation: inside a Lagos state school where A1 can be bought (Part 1)” in ICIR International Center for Investigative Reporting, 18th July, 2020. www.icirnigeria.org/investigation-inside-a-lagos-state-school-where-a1-can-be-bought-part-1/ retrieved 20th July, 2020.
[7] Chukwunwike Enekwechi, “Sharing consumption breaks and enslaves people” in Restartnaija, 17th December, 2019. https://restartnaija.com/2019/12/17/sharing-consumption-breaks-people/ retrieved 24th January, 2020.
[8] Richard Dowden, Africa altered states, ordinary miracles. (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), p.3.
[9] Ogban Ogban-Iyan, Re-inventing Nigeria through Pre-colonial traditions, in Issues in contemporary political economy of Nigeria, (ed.) Hassan A. Saliu. (Ilorin, Sally & Associates, 1999). P77
[10] Walter Rodney, How Europe underdeveloped Africa, 2009 edition (Abuja: Panaf press, 2009) p.318.
[11] Nigerian minerals and mining act 2007 act no. 20, chapter 1, Part 1, Section 1, paragraph 2 “… all lands in which minerals have been found in Nigeria and any area covered by its territorial waters or constituency and the Exclusive Economic Zone shall, from the commencement of this Act be acquired by the Government of the Federation…” “No person shall search for or exploit mineral resources in Nigeria or divert or impound any water for the purpose of mining except as provided in this Act.” “The property in mineral resources shall pass from the Government to the person by whom the mineral resources are lawfully won, upon their recovery in accordance with this Act.”
[12] Nigerian minerals and mining act 2007 act no. 20, chapter 1, Part 1, Section 2, paragraph 1
[13] Nigerian minerals and mining act 2007 act no. 20, chapter 1, Part 1, Section 1, paragraph 3
[14] 29th March 1978, Land use act. P7
[15] Chukwunwike Enekwechi, “Sharing consumption breaks and enslaves people” in Restartnaija, 17th December, 2019. https://restartnaija.com/2019/12/17/sharing-consumption-breaks-people/ retrieved 24th January, 2020.
[16] 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.
[17] Chukwunwike Enekwechi, “Sharing consumption breaks and enslaves people” in Restartnaija, 17th December, 2019. https://restartnaija.com/2019/12/17/sharing-consumption-breaks-people/ retrieved 24th March, 2020.