I once wrote a piece about the misleading theme in PSquare’s Bank alert video?
In it, I said a huge number of Nigerian men caught for drug trafficking abroad are Igbo, and many people were angry.
Once I was gisting with a friend and we noted that the number of Nigerians arrested for ‘yahoo yahoo’ fraud are mostly Yoruba boys.
It’s as if they had a meeting, like the Berlin West Africa conference and partitioned the crime – you guys take this side, we will handle the other part.
But does this mean that all young Nigerians, or that even the majority of Nigerians are fraudsters? Of course not.
When I was in school there was this guy, CJ, who ran a hair salon. He was the best in my campus. If you don’t book on time, sorry o, you won’t do your hair throughout that weekend.
CJ was also a student, he was studying economics. Soon another friend joined him, that one fixed eye lashes and nails. His business boomed of course, and because of him other hair salons sprang up around us, ran by men.
CJ came to mind because over this weekend I had to drag myself to braid my hair. The Salon I was directed to is owned by a man. He has over 10 younger people working in the salon. He was courteous to customers, salon was neat and I was just generally very impressed with the customer service. Although he spoke fluent Yoruba, from his accent, I knew he is an Igbo man. I won’t even blink if you tell me he has other shops around Lagos.
When singer Dammy Krane was arrested in the US for fraud and kept saying he was innocent no one believed him? It is as if being Nigerian is already a crime.
I stumbled on the South African side of twitter and saw as they talked about Nigerians – Nigerians are criminals- all 170m of us, drug dealers, running prostitution rings, doing credit card scams, corrupt people who just want to give bribes and bribe other people. I sighed.
For every yahoo boy arrested, 1001 others are doing honest work.
For every drug trafficker there are 100,001 others doing honest work.
For every Evans arrested, we have a million people who have never committed crime.
Nigerians are good people it’s just the rats that are causing wahala for us.