Is The ‘Resourceful’ Nigerian Blessed Or Cursed?

In 2015, I had reason to visit Ghana’s capital city, Accra – four times.

As a Nigerian, I found the city’s somewhat leisurely pace to be very amenable compared to the gra-gra of my home-city, Lagos.

But that is not the subject matter of this discourse.

In the same 2015, Ghana was experiencing unusually-frequent blackouts, albeit nothing compared to the Nigerian situation.

Interestingly, unlike in Nigeria, whenever the power was out at night, large swathes of Accra remained subsumed in darkness.

The landscape wasn’t dotted with the generator-powered lighting I was accustomed to in Nigeria.

My initial suspicion was that because Ghana had hitherto enjoyed relatively uninterrupted power supply, the habit of private power generation was yet to catch on.

In my mind, the proliferation of portable household generators in Ghana was about to begin.

I took up the matter with a Ghanaian friend whom I’ll call Kwame.

Our discussion:

Me: Kwame, I see you guys are enjoying the blackouts, eh?

Kwame: The power situation is terrible, my brother.

Me: I bet generator dealers would be making a killing any minute from now.

Kwame: [Scoffs] Not at all. The government must fix this power problem. Generators are not an option.

Me: But isn’t it wise to have a generator as backup so that whenever an outage occurs, you can still function.

Kwame: [Laughs dryly] Tobe, here lies the difference between us [Ghanaians] and you [Nigerians]. Ghanaians would never ‘adapt to the abnormal’ just because the government has chosen to be incompetent. We would always demand that they find a way to fix the problem. You guys, on the other hand, know how to – how do you say – ‘manage’.

Me: [Trying not to lose face] The way I see it Nigerians are resourceful people. We always find a way to adapt while demanding performance from our leaders.

Kwame: [Shrugs] If you say so. But you have to wonder: Is your resourcefulness proving to be a strength or weakness?

Four Years Later

“You can lie to the world, but you cannot lie to yourself.” – Anonymous

Days, weeks, months and years later, I cannot help but continue to ruminate upon the instructiveness of the Ghanaian disposition.

Try as I did to shake it off as yet another ‘rant of the entitled’, it has become clearer, by the day, that what we term “Nigerian resourcefulness” might be nothing more than an acclimatization to deprivation and relinquishment of our patrimony.

Nigerians have more or less accepted that those entrusted with administration and leadership owe us little to nothing. We have chosen to provide for ourselves that which should normally be provided to us.

How else do we explain the following instances of Nigerian ‘resourcefulness’:

No light (epileptic power supply): run generator; install solar

Potholes: buy SUV; replace shock absorbers with bigger shock absorbers; pray for the rains to stop

No water supply: sink borehole; patronize mei ru wa (water peddler)

Near-moribund refineries: accept, as normal, the importation of refined petroleum products [even though Nigeria is a global top 10 oil producer]

Police harassment: have a senior police/military/political officer on speed dial; stay away from dreadlocks/piercings/tattoos/nightclubs/universities/laptops

ASUU (university lecturers’) strike: accept that you would spend at least 1 year than necessary studying in university; pray it doesn’t exceed 1 year extra

Poor healthcare access: self-medicate (the middle-class to poor); seek healthcare abroad (the wealthy); pray for healing (everyone)

Rampant kidnapping: restrict self to ‘safe cities’ like Lagos/Abuja; travel around with armed escort; pray for divine protection

Port inefficiencies and uncompetitive tariff regime: ship consignments to neighbouring countries and import (smuggle) overland into Naija

Poor sport development: seek out and remind foreign-born Nigerian athletes – on social media – that the ‘land of their ancestors’ needs them more than the countries that invested in their development

General government underperformance: emigrate to ‘greener pastures’; pray for Nigeria and those left back home

Questions Worth Answering

1)     How did we get to the point of readily adapting to, what can be universally agreed to be, the abnormal?

2)     Maybe I jumped the gun by not asking this first but, do Nigerians even consider the status quo of ‘adapting to the abnormal’ a blessing or a curse?

Would be interesting to see the answers that come through, if any.

Till we do this again, eziokwu b’undu. Truth is life.