A Choice-less Conundrum, by Kene Obiezu

True to form, Nigeria continues to flail and fumble at a crime that is fast evolving, striking branch and stem while leaving the roots firmly tucked into the ground.

Operatives of the Benin Zonal Directorate of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, recently arrested 46 suspects over alleged involvement in internet-related fraud in Delta State. The suspects popularly called yahoo boys were arrested in Warri, Ubeji and Jeddo communities in Delta state on September 8. About 13 exotic cars, laptops and mobile phones were also recovered from them.

Now, in the face of yet more arrests of young Nigerians for internet-related fraud, the natural reaction is to flinch and rail at the process and proceeds of a crime which consists in impersonating White people on the internet and mining such impersonation to milk the unsuspecting but ultimately gullible among them of their money.

This crime which is as widespread as it is lucrative on its way to become the crime of choice among Nigeria’s young people, many of whom have improbably found a way out of grinding poverty by ripping off White people. It is also proving to be a nightmare for Nigerian authorities.

It may be argued that those going into ‘yahoo yahoo’ are doing so as a matter of choice, but even a cursory scratch at the surface of a financial crime gaining ferocious popularity would yield a choice-less conundrum.
How much crueler can conditions get in a country where families exert themselves, exhaust their resources, sell off ancestral lands to put their children through school only to be confronted with debilitating unemployment at the end of the day?

In a country where soaring cost of living, spiraling insecurity and deepening despair are conspiring to extinguish the light at the end of the tunnel for many young Nigerians, it is difficult to brand anything that puts food on the table as a crime. It becomes impossible when one considers that while relentless hunger convulses the land, a vicious gang of kleptocrats continues to assault the national treasury.

The truth is that with rampant unemployment, Nigeria is leaving an entire generation without choice, and the consequences are as gripping as they are sobering. It is also providing dangerous justification for the kind of immorality that scalds the soul of a country.
Churches and mosques litter every nook and cranny of the country, yet they fail to lit up the corridors of power.
Government officials lecture on morality only when convenient while assiduously refusing to practice what they preach.

What’s the difference, if any, between the moral bankruptcy of the ‘yahoo boy’ who fleeces unsuspecting White people of their money, and the corrupt security personnel who systematically enriches themselves by exploiting the ‘yahoo boy’?

Since systemic immiseration became the lot of an entire generation, morality also became a luxury, such that it has even become immoral to ask the poor not to survive, or take measuring lines to the morality of the enterprises they embark upon.

Now that the government has also taken to systemically seed fear in those who would speak up, what hope remains, what light flickers still, even if faintly, at the end of the tunnel?

But the government which considers itself cunning in the chess game of state intimidation is one which continues to misjudge the calculus of survival. As long as Nigeria’s young people remain with neither options nor opinions about decent, dignified living within a state that prefers to dissemble before it discerns, ‘criminals’ and their crimes of survival will continue to reach for survival, no matter how far it is placed beyond their reach.

The solution Is a simple as it is complicated. No matter how dead a conscience is, it often retains a spark of morality. No matter how hardened those knee-deep in internet crimes are, there is a tale of desperation that simmers just beyond the surface.

What options are available? Former President Muhammadu Buhari may have ill-advisedly described Nigerian youths as ‘lazy’ in 2018, but it is beyond doubt that the country has some of the most enterprising young people in the world. What options exist for these young people brimming with ideas who want to earn honest living? What are the alternatives to crime in a country where nothing really works but crime? Unless these questions are honestly and completely answered, and options provided, Nigeria will remain a country whose young people are sacrificed to the gods of financial and economic promiscuity and impropriety because there are no other plans for them.

The reality Is that the wildly dysfunctional, but prolific machine of the Nigerian state is steadily churning out a stream of cunning and crafty internet thieves who are dragging Nigeria’s name through international slime. It is only a matter of time before they drag out the entrails of the Nigerian state and splay same on the barbed wires of international opprobrium.

Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com