Nigeria: Where The “Shakedown” Is Identity And Integrity Is Labelled As Mental Illness -By Psychologist John Egbeazien Oshodi

Today’s News, Yesterday’s Wound: The Story That Reopened a National Scar

In today’s news cycle, US based Australian writer Mark Pollard recounted his experiences traveling through Nigeria, describing what he saw as a relentless pattern of unofficial cash demands at airports and along major highways. According to his account, requests for money occurred so frequently that simple travel became an exhausting sequence of negotiations rather than ordinary movement from one place to another.

His frustration was direct and unfiltered. Speaking publicly, he asked a painful question many Nigerians themselves quietly ask:

“Nigerian friends, is your entire country set up to shake people down? Because coming in and out of the airports there, I was told, you know, you give me cash at least 10 times.”

To many Nigerians, however, his experience was not shocking. It was painfully familiar. It was not news. It was daily life.

Pollard questioned whether the many checkpoints encountered on Nigerian roads actually served security purposes or something darker:

“A lot of the roads have security checkpoints, but are they security checkpoints or shakedown checkpoints?”

Even at what should have been a safe arrival point, his hotel, he felt the same pressure. According to him, officials were less focused on safety and more focused on opportunity:

“Even going into my hotel, people weren’t just looking me up and down to see if I was carrying anything dangerous. They were looking me up and down to see if there’s anything that they could ask me for.”

And then came the most psychologically revealing question, one that struck directly at the emotional reality citizens face daily:

“Am I overreacting? Because this must stress you out on a daily basis.”

For many Nigerians listening, the honest answer was simple.

No. He was not overreacting.

He was describing a lived experience.

Yet Pollard’s remarks were not purely condemnatory. He also expressed admiration for aspects of Nigerian culture, even praising the country’s creative strength:

“I was just visiting and I had a lot of fun. And I would say in Africa, Nigeria, number one in fashion.”

But his praise for fashion could not erase the deeper wound he unintentionally reopened.

Because what Pollard exposed was not merely airport misconduct or roadside extortion. He unintentionally held up a mirror to a deeper national psychological injury, one so normalized that many citizens no longer recognize it as abnormal.

And the pain goes even deeper than the repeated requests for money.

For many travelers and citizens, the real stress often begins when one refuses to comply.

In countless everyday encounters, the request for money is not even presented as wrongdoing. It is treated as normal procedure, almost like an informal service charge, an expected deal between citizen and official. Many officers and gatekeepers genuinely see the exchange as routine.

So when someone refuses, irritation sometimes follows. Suspicion arises. Delays begin. Attitudes change.

Refusal is interpreted not as integrity but as defiance.

In many cases, the official becomes annoyed, even offended. The assumption is simple: everyone does it, so why are you different?

The traveler who refuses payment becomes the problem.

The honest person becomes the obstacle.

The stress, therefore, is not only in being asked repeatedly. The deeper stress comes when refusal makes the situation tense, prolonged, or uncomfortable. Some citizens describe being delayed, questioned unnecessarily, or treated harshly simply because they declined to participate in what others consider normal.

In this twisted psychological environment, refusing to bribe is sometimes seen as irrational behavior.

The person who refuses to pay is whispered about as stubborn, unrealistic, or even mentally unwell.

“They all do it,” people say. “Why are you acting different?”

Integrity begins to look like madness.

From a Psychoafricalytic perspective, Pollard’s story reveals a society where extraction has become part of daily interaction, where nearly every gatekeeper sees human movement and human need as opportunity for transaction.

The issue is no longer isolated corruption.

It is a wounded collective psyche.

The Exhaustion of a Nation: When Survival Devours the Soul

This is the most brutal dimension of the observation. It reveals a society where predatory extraction has become so normalized that exploitation only stops when the exploiter’s body finally collapses and the hunter no longer has the strength to hunt.

In such a wounded national psyche, mercy is mocked as weakness, kindness is treated as foolishness, and honesty is judged as personal failure. Goodness becomes something practiced only when power fades, when sickness forces reflection, when death stands near and survival games can no longer continue.

A nation that reaches this stage has not merely lost governance. It has lost moral direction. It has lost emotional clarity. It has lost collective conscience, replacing empathy with survival calculation and dignity with opportunism.

Pollard’s experience simply reopened a wound that citizens already live with daily, a pain so constant many now mistake it for normal life.

When the Shakedown Becomes the Air People Breathe

To outsiders, repeated unofficial payment demands appear shocking and outrageous. To many citizens, however, they have become routine, expected, almost woven into daily survival.

This is the deeper tragedy. Corruption exists in many parts of the world, but few societies reach the point where exploitation becomes socially invisible and morally unquestioned.

When nearly every interaction demands unofficial payment, when ordinary services require negotiation, when checkpoints expect compensation before passage, the psyche gradually adapts for survival. People stop feeling moral discomfort because resistance feels exhausting and often pointless.

Instead of asking why exploitation continues, citizens simply ask how much it will cost this time, calculating survival rather than demanding fairness.

At that moment corruption stops being behavior. It becomes culture.

And culture slowly hardens into identity.

The National Chain of Pain: From the Highest Office to the Mortuary

This behavior is not biological. It is learned and reinforced through institutional example, beginning at the very top and flowing downward.

The Highest Office and the Psychology of Extraction

When elections are financed through open vote buying disguised as generosity, psychological damage begins at the level of the nation’s highest political office.

Leadership becomes investment recovery. Public office becomes profit retrieval. Governance becomes extraction management.

The highest office and surrounding ministries unintentionally transmit a devastating lesson: power exists to collect, not to serve.

Citizens then seek their own positions of advantage, squeezing whoever stands beneath them. Society becomes a vertical chain of pressure.

Predation becomes administrative culture.

Employment for Sale: Paying to Earn a Living

In many sectors, employment itself has become transactional. Young graduates, already struggling in a weak economy, are sometimes required to pay unofficial fees just to secure jobs.

Positions in agencies, corporations, and institutions are allegedly auctioned behind closed doors. Merit is replaced by payment. Qualification becomes secondary to who can pay or who knows someone.

A young person learns a devastating lesson early: education alone is not enough. Integrity is not enough. One must pay to work.

And once hired through corruption, many feel justified in recovering their investment through dishonest practices. The cycle continues.

Justice Turned Marketplace

When courts and police institutions become associated with negotiable outcomes, justice becomes purchasable.

Citizens lose faith in fairness. Influence replaces law.

Integrity begins to look foolish because honesty does not win disputes. Money does.

And when justice is sold, moral collapse accelerates.

Hospitals, Doctors, and the Business of Suffering

Hospitals, meant to be spaces of healing, often become places of financial negotiation.

Families sometimes face delays in treatment until payments are secured. Patients worry not only about illness but about affordability of compassion.

In some cases, doctors are pressured or persuaded to write false medical excuses, certificates, or reports to help individuals escape consequences at work or school.

Medicine, meant to protect truth and life, becomes another transaction.

Health becomes negotiable.

Mortuaries: Even the Dead Must Pay

Perhaps the deepest emotional injury occurs in mortuaries.

Families already crushed by grief must negotiate payments simply to see or retrieve the bodies of loved ones.

Funeral arrangements become negotiations. Fees multiply. Processes stall until unofficial payments are made.

Even in death, there is no peace.

The living are squeezed. The dying are squeezed. The dead are squeezed.

And empathy slowly disappears.

Schools and Universities: Education for Sale

Students sometimes pay lecturers for grades, project approvals, or academic passage.

Knowledge becomes secondary. Money becomes qualification.

Young people learn early that success can be purchased. Hard work becomes optional when bribery is available.

Education, which should be society’s moral foundation, becomes compromised.

And corruption reproduces itself in the next generation of professionals.

Faith Houses and Contracts from Heaven

In another painful inversion, many individuals now seek divine help not for moral transformation, but for personal advantage over others.

Prayer houses are sometimes visited not to cleanse conscience, but to secure dishonest promotions, win contracts through manipulation, defeat competitors unfairly, or succeed in corruption without being caught. Special prayers are requested, vigils are organized, offerings are made, all in pursuit of victories built on questionable foundations.

Across different sectors, the pattern repeats itself. Journalists may face pressure to shape stories for payment or influence. Police officers, judges, doctors, and lawyers, professions meant to protect justice, life, and fairness, sometimes become entangled in the same transactional culture, where outcomes can be influenced by money or connections rather than truth and professional duty.

The danger extends even into physical safety. Building inspectors and regulatory officers, whose responsibility is to protect lives by enforcing construction standards, sometimes approve unsafe structures after receiving inducements. Buildings that should never pass inspection are cleared for use, leaving families, workers, and tenants living and working inside potential death traps.

When such structures collapse, killing innocent people, investigations begin, but the chain of compromise that allowed unsafe construction often remains buried under silence and influence.

In some cases, after securing these gains, the same individuals return to religious gatherings to testify publicly, celebrating how prayer helped them obtain the promotion, the money, the legal victory, the favorable report, or the lucrative contract, while the hidden dishonesty behind the success remains unspoken.

Religion then becomes a strategy for winning rather than a path to righteousness. Spiritual spaces risk turning into negotiation halls for worldly advantage rather than centers of conscience and transformation.

In this tragic distortion, even God is asked to bless dishonesty, and success becomes more important than integrity.

Elections: Buying Power from the Hungry

During elections, voters in struggling communities are sometimes offered money or gifts in exchange for votes.

Poverty becomes weaponized. Desperation becomes political currency.

Citizens who feel abandoned accept survival money. Politicians purchase legitimacy.

And governance becomes transactional from the very beginning.

Moral Inversion: When Integrity Is Diagnosed as Mental Illness

The most haunting result is society’s reaction to those who refuse participation.

When exploitation becomes normal, refusal appears abnormal.

Officials who refuse bribes are mocked. Workers who insist on honesty are labeled foolish. Citizens who follow procedure are dismissed as naive.

But it goes deeper. In many spaces, those who refuse dishonest practices are whispered about as mentally unstable, unrealistic, or psychologically unfit for survival.

Integrity becomes suspicious behavior.

A person who refuses to cheat is treated as if something is wrong with them. Someone who refuses unofficial payments is seen as mentally weak. Someone who refuses exploitation is judged as lacking sense.

The honest person becomes the abnormal person.

Society begins mistrusting goodness.

And psychological collapse deepens.

Children Raised Inside the Hustle Economy

Children grow up watching adults pay unofficial fees to survive. They observe negotiation as survival skill.

They internalize a brutal lesson: honesty leads to suffering while manipulation leads to comfort.

By adulthood, extraction becomes instinct.

Not because they are immoral, but because survival taught them so.

The cycle renews itself generation after generation.

Emotional Numbness: When Shame Disappears

Repeated exposure to injustice produces emotional anesthesia. Citizens begin preparing for corruption rather than resisting it.

People budget for bribes. They joke about exploitation.

Humor replaces outrage.

And when shame disappears, reform becomes almost impossible.

Pain becomes invisible.

The Deathbed Awakening: Virtue Arriving Too Late

Many people abandon predatory behavior only when illness, disability, or old age removes the opportunity to continue exploiting others. As long as strength remains, the hustle continues. Extraction continues. The conscience remains silent.

Even when sickness arrives, the instinct often does not immediately disappear. Stories circulate of individuals hospitalized, visibly weak, sometimes facing death, yet still calling colleagues or associates to ask, “Where is my share?” or the familiar cry, “Where is my share ooo?” The reflex to collect remains alive even when the body is already surrendering.

Then the condition worsens. Movement slows. Hospital visits become permanent. The same person who once squeezed others now depends on the mercy of strangers. Only then does reflection sometimes begin. Regret surfaces. Generosity cautiously awakens.

Only when the body collapses completely, when sickness confines a person to a bed, when death stands visibly at the door, does morality finally return, as if humanity were meant only for life’s closing scene.

But morality should not wait for weakness. Conscience should not awaken only when power disappears. Virtue should guide life daily, not merely decorate its ending.

When goodness becomes a last minute act instead of a lifelong practice, society has inverted its values, rewarding predation in strength and celebrating repentance only in helplessness.

This is not redemption.

It is biological surrender.

Citizens Forced to Prey on Each Other

At the bottom, citizens exploit one another. Drivers overcharge. Officials demand unofficial fees. Landlords inflate rents.

Not always from cruelty, but from pressure flowing downward.

Pain travels from the highest office through institutions to the streets.

Everyone becomes both victim and perpetrator.

Neighbors prey on neighbors simply to survive.

Healing Requires Psychological Reconstruction, Not Cosmetic Reform

Infrastructure alone cannot repair this wound. Leadership changes alone cannot heal it. The damage is psychological.

Integrity must regain value. Honesty must regain reward.

Communities must rediscover indigenous wisdom where character defined status and leadership meant accountability.

Village ethics must return as psychological foundation.

Reclaiming Humanity Before the Body Fails

Humanity must be rediscovered before deathbeds force remembrance.

Goodness must become strength again. Integrity must become intelligence again. Compassion must become power again.

A nation cannot survive when predation becomes its bloodstream.

Pollard’s story is painful because it reveals reality. But pain also marks where healing must begin.

The African soul is not naturally predatory. It has been conditioned into survival mode by institutional failure.

Recovery is possible. But it demands courage, honesty, and collective awakening.

About the Author

Prof. John Egbeazien Oshodi is an American psychologist, an expert in policing and corrections, and an educator with expertise in forensic, legal, clinical, and cross-cultural psychology, including public ethical policy. A native of Uromi, Edo State, Nigeria, and son of a 37-year veteran of the Nigeria Police Force, he has long worked at the intersection of psychology, justice, and governance. In 2011, he helped introduce advanced forensic psychology to Nigeria through the National Universities Commission and Nasarawa State University, where he served as Associate Professor of Psychology.

He teaches in the Doctorate in Clinical and School Psychology at Nova Southeastern University; the Doctorate Clinical Psychology, BS Psychology, and BS Tempo Criminal Justice programs at Walden University; and lectures virtually in Management and Leadership Studies at Weldios University and ISCOM University. He is also the President and Chief Psychologist at the Oshodi Foundation, Center for Psychological and Forensic Services, United States.

Prof. Oshodi is a Black Republican in the United States but belongs to no political party in Nigeria—his work is guided solely by justice, good governance, democracy, and Africa’s development. He is the founder of Psychoafricalysis (Psychoafricalytic Psychology), a culturally grounded framework that integrates African sociocultural realities, historical awareness, and future-oriented identity. He has authored more than 500 articles, multiple books, and numerous peer-reviewed works on Africentric psychology, higher education reform, forensic and correctional psychology, African democracy, and decolonized models of clinical and community engagement.