“I came to the conclusion about 2 years into my assignment that Nigeria is probably the only genuinely classless society I have seen.
Class is very different from wealth. Upper-class people can be dirt poor (bankrupt dukes), and lower class people can be fabulously rich (Russian oligarchs).
Class is about behaviour and attitudes, not wealth (a point made very well in Kate Fox’s excellent book Watching the English).
And insofar as behaviour goes, I didn’t see a shred of difference between the top politicians, down through the officials in the national authorities, through the middle class professionals, through the service providers, right down to the area boys.
The behaviour was identical across all strata: I want more money, and I will do absolutely anything to get it.
If you were to replace the politicians – let’s say our 109 senators from before – with 109 random people from the Nigerian citizenry, you would get no change in behaviour.
You could repeat the experiment a thousand times, and you would get no change. There is no ruling class in Nigeria. There is just a set of rulers. Where any change is expected to come from, I don’t know.
I believe one of the root causes is the bizarre situation where being dishonest is not socially frowned upon. Not really, anyway. If somebody is caught with his hand in the till, he is not shunned by his peers. The whole situation is treated with utter indifference and sometimes admiration (if the scam is particularly imaginative).
Societal pressure plays an enormous role in shaping the behaviour of a population, probably more so than the brute force of the law, and whilst all Nigerians complain about the crime and dishonesty so prevalent in their country (it affects them far more than the expats), they remain utterly silent when a perpetrator is identified from within their peer group.
At best, you’ll get a shrug and a statement to the effect of “that’s just how it is”. If you’re a Nigerian caught running a scam against your employer, your colleagues aren’t going to think any less of you.
In fact, the only behaviour I managed to identify which would cause a Nigerian to be shunned by his peers and made an outcast, is if he decided he wasn’t a believer and therefore wasn’t going to be showing up in church (or mosque) any more.
I don’t think I met a single Nigerian who didn’t attend either church or mosque, and religion plays an enormous – possibly the key – role in Nigerian society.”
_~ Tim Newman (an expatriate who worked in Nigeria’s oil sector. He wrote the above perspective in his valedictory piece published in July 2013. It was his submission on what he observed as Nigeria’s problem during his stay in the country)_
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