Saturday, 1 September 2012

Are we a nation of scammers?



By Aliyu Musa

A few years ago a British acquaintance of mine drew my attention to his plight in the hands of Nigerian scammers. He had received an email from someone who claimed to be seriously ill and desperately in need of money to foot medical bills. The Briton who’s in his late 70s had saved a lump sum of money he would need if he became too weak to be on his own and ended up in a nursing home. Now faced with this request he felt someone needed the money more than him and did not give it a second thought before parting with a large chunk of it.

I don’t know exactly what transpired. But I understand there were further contacts between him and the supposedly ill person in Nigeria as well as a third party who claimed to be medical personnel. It was only after he had transferred money to a nominated bank account in Nigeria that he realised it was a scam.

Similar or worse tales are told by people that have fallen prey to Nigerian scammers. And today almost every Nigerian is a suspect until proven otherwise. Although a few people brought all this upon us, we do not play our roles well too. For example, many of these scammers often succeed because our system provides incentives for fraud.

As chairman of Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) Malam Nuhu Ribadu was able to considerably restrict the activities of fraudsters especially the ‘Yahoo!’ boys. But after his exit they bounced back to life fully because no one seems to care about their menace as long as one is not directly affected. So fraudsters’ activities have grown from strength to strength.

As much as we blame these scammers we also need to introspect; how much have we contributed towards making fraud an effervescent industry in Nigeria, second only to oil in terms of export?

Role models appear to be in short supply, so young people often do not have those to look up to, to inspire them other than people of questionable integrity. Political positions or public offices are seen as means of amassing quick wealth because most of the wealthy people in the society are either retired or serving public office holders.

Elections are decided through massive frauds and the electorate hardly complain because they are always part of the fraud; they are bought over, hoodwinked and/or cajoled into playing cheerleading roles.

Most politicians, because they come to office courtesy of a chronic clientelistic culture, do not care about fulfilling pre-election promises. They come to power by means of fraud, fraudulently enrich themselves and continue to retain their positions by endlessly scamming the people and the system. So fraud is our way of life.

I have heard people suggest that the only reason Nigerians do not care about corruption or fraud is because most of us are potentially corrupt and hope to become rich irrespective of the means. In the 1990s I went to visit a friend at his place of work and was surprised to hear he had resigned. No one volunteered any more information. On my way out, still too shocked, someone managed to whisper to me that my friend had suddenly found his ‘blessing’ and decided there was no point keeping his job. It was nearly a year later that I found out that he had actually defrauded a customer of a large sum of money and eloped to a distant haven. Such is the manner of ‘blessing’ we envy and hope to emulate.

It explains why our fraudsters conveniently swoop on the social media and successfully prey on unsuspecting users. The late Cynthia Osokogu’s ghastly story is fresh in our memory. There are several other equally tragic cases we might never hear of. And many more might happen, unless we all work hard to run these fraudsters out of business.

We cannot continue to fold our arms and watch a handful of criminals ruin our collective image. We need to expose every act of fraud, successful or not, as I notice a friend does these days. While I received dozens of messages in my inbox from pretend admirers and ignore them, he doesn’t. He circulates the messages and names of the senders.

Even if the EFCC seems too ineffectual to curb the activities of these scammers we can help ourselves by creating awareness. Perhaps we might be able to save more lives too. This is the least we can do to tell the world we are not a nation of scammers.
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