This paper reiterates the familiar refrain that many Nigerians resort to scamming behavior to get what they want from life but find it difficult to do anything to help their fellow human beings. It wants to know if their tendency to criminality is genetic or learned behavior; more importantly, it wants to know what can be done to ameliorate these people’s tendency to anti-social behaviors? 

MANY NIGERIANS ARE SCAM ARTISTS 

Ozodi Thomas Osuji 

         The greatest scam perpetrated on the world is that Africa’s so-called scholars instead of hiding their heads in shame at what their ancestors did for over 1000 years, sell their people to Arabs and white men, wrote that they were innocent victims whom white men victimized.

       (If you ask why contemporary Africans should feel guilty for what their ancestors did and pay reparation for it, why then do you want contemporary white folks to feel guilty for what their slave holding ancestors did and pay reparation for it? What is good for the goose must be good for the gander!)

       They do even have the courage to blame Arabs to whom they actually sold more Africans to than Europeans. Why so? It is probably because they know that the Muslim religion does not make people feel guilty for their crimes hence Arabs are not about the feel guilty by being told that they enslaved Africans. Instead, Arabs are more likely to continue enslaving Africans, as they are still doing in Sudan and Mauritania, if told that they are guilty. In the Arab unconscious mind is a deep rooted belief that Africans are inferior creatures, animals really, people who ought to be enslaved.

      Africans talk about how Europe underdeveloped Africa. They do so because they are aware that Christianity makes Christians feel guilty for their sins so they want to make white men feel guilty for the sin of buying African slaves.  Africans want to exploit Christianity induced guilt feeling in white folks.

      And while taking advantage of Christianity they rail against it as a foreign imported religion.  It is this same religion that taught them how to read and write! If they were real adults they would be grateful to Christianity. These people are an ungrateful lot; they bite the fingers that feed them!

       They got the white men, especially white liberals (white conservatives are Africans fellow criminals and do not feel guilt from exploiting other persons), to feel guilty for their part in the crime of enslaving African-Americans. Out of that guilt White folks sought ways to make amends for their ancestors’ criminal behavior.

       Africans wanted to shake down white men by making them feel guilty and out of guilt give them money.

       (Africans must pay reparation to those they sold, African Americans and African Arabs. For however long slavery lasted Africans must be forced to set aside at least ten percent of their annual budgets for Africans in the new world and elsewhere African slaves were sold to.)

        Because white folks were feeling bad for their past evil, Africans undertook to scam them, to get money from them.  Of course those Africans who got such economic aid on behalf of all Africans spent it on themselves but not on their fellow Africans.      

       In the present Africans do not feel guilty for selling their people. That is correct, those who committed the greater crime of selling their people (it is a greater crime to sell ones children than the crime of the stranger who bought them, for the stranger doubts Africans humanity and could easily justify enslaving Africans; he might say that to him they are more like monkeys than people; white racists rationalizations for slavery and racism is understandable but what are Africans rationalizations for selling their people?).

       Africans go around fancying themselves innocent people, seeing themselves as those white men wronged. If you care to listen to them they would fill your ears with information on how the metropolis, the center, the West, exploits the periphery, Africa.

        Given independence see what they have done with it. They have transformed the art and science of governing society for society’s benefit to robbing society for the benefit of the thieves in African governments. African leaders and public officials are nothing but highway robbers. They are today’s equivalent of yesteryears Africans who ran around the African jungle capturing their people and selling them to whoever wanted to buy them. They do not feel guilt or remorse for their criminal behaviors; yesterday their ancestors did not feel guilty for selling their people, today contemporary Africans do not feel guilty for stealing from their people today.

              The description of antisocial personality disorder, aka criminal is a person who engages in anti -social behaviors and does not feel bad from doing so, has no social conscience, no sense of right or wrong.  Criminals steal, hurt and kill people and do not feel bad from their criminal behaviors.

       For over a thousand years Africans were habituated to criminal behaviors (selling their people to whoever wanted to buy them…if the rest of the world were today to remove laws banning slavery Africans would restart selling their people for they are quick to criminal behaviors).

        Instead of dealing with this anomaly in their character structures they point blaming fingers at white men and the white men fell for their scam and felt guilty and gave them money that they promptly misspent. 

       Until Africans feel guilty for selling their people and make amends for that crime against God and man they are going nowhere; they cannot govern themselves correctly (criminals can only take but not organize society). Nothing they do will work out well for them.

       We live in a moral universe and whoever steals and engages in other criminal behaviors must pay a price for his action.  The law of cause and effect, behavior and consequences is the most fundamental law in the universe.

        Africans are currently paying a severe price for their past and present criminal behaviors. Those born today in Africa reincarnated from the past to pay for their past misdeeds. In the past they were slave sellers; they were evil and had to be punished by the law of karma. Thus, they are reborn to suffer for their past evils.  They have bad karma; they are paying off their accumulated negative samsara (past evils from past life times to be paid off before one moves on to good fortune).

        (How about white men and Arabs, those who enslaved Africans, are they free from negative karma? Africans would love to point out that it takes two to tango and from there on focus on the evils done by whites. I will not allow myself to be sidetracked by these clever rogues. Yes, white men did evil and are paying their own prices; see, their societies are falling apart and in only a matter of decades they would be overtaken by Asians. As for Arabs, are they not a basket case? I want to focus on Africans not on non- Africans.)

                  When Nigerian criminals touch religion they transform it to money making rackets.  Instead of teaching love your neighbor, as Jesus Christ taught his followers to do, they now teach rob your neighbor as the African version of Christianity.  You go to their churches and they collect tithes two or three times during the church service. The tithe is not used to serve the people but is stolen by the pastor.

       (Like Pharisees they want to be seen dropping large sums of money into the tithing basket so that men may see them as rich and important; they forgot that Jesus told them about the widow’s mite, the poor who gave a few pennies and said that such persons give more than the showy criminals who prowl Nigerian churches to exhibit their ill-gotten wealth. The parable of the rich man who suddenly died despite his wealth is meant for the Nigerian big men. In another parable Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter heaven; Nigerian lunatic rich do not learn from the same Christianity they profess to belong to!)

      The Nigerian pastor is like other Africans; he is smitten with the African disease of pride and vanity, his love for titles. The pastor now calls himself all kinds of names meant to promote his ego, such as bishop, arch-bishop, cardinal, pope etc.

       (Never mind that the Catholic Church devised those titles for its worldwide church and they are mere job specifications in a large organization. In Nigeria a church of a handful of people has a pastor who calls himself bishop or whatever titles he feels makes him important, important crook, that is. By the way, the term pope means father, papa, the pope of Rome is the reverend father of Rome or bishop of Rome. But Nigerians have made that title to seem one of dignity just as they transformed the word Professor which is French for teacher to mean a very important person; they transformed doctor, a person who loves knowledge, to a title of prestige; whatever these people touch they bastardize to serve their narcissistic goals.)

        The criminals are title crazy. The criminal does not do anything to serve his neighbor but wants his neighbor to see him in prestigious light!

         (Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan. The good Christian is a Good Samaritan, a man who serves his neighbor in need, not the Pharisee, Sadducee, and Levite who tells us how important he is but does nothing to help the needy! You are a Christian if you serve the poor.)

        These people are criminals through and through and the sooner we all recognize their spiritual malady and start talking and doing something about it the better it is for all of us. Denying it and blaming the white man for the sins of Africans will not do. Pretending that Africans are good people is self-deception; it is actual part of Africans delusional disorder.

                Saying that those Africans who point out Africans sins hate Africans is nothing but another African scam meant to make such persons to back off so as to leave Africans to keep being thieves.

        If white men point out Africans criminal behavior the scam artists call them racists and to avoid being seen as racist they back off and leave African con artists to continue stealing from the world. 

       Africans are con men; we must recognize this fact and work to correct it rather than see Africans as innocent persons to be pitied.

        I do not pity Africans. I want to punish them. If I had the opportunity I would flog each of them 1000 lashes on their bare bodies and then sentence them to a life time of prison; I would use them to work to develop Africa and not pay them a dime. I would do so for criminals need to be punished rather than remunerated.

             Observing real Nigerians behave, not what they say about themselves, it gradually dawned on me that Nigerians are mostly anti-social personalities and or narcissistic personalities. They want to be admired and seen as the center of social attention; they latch unto empty titles to make them seem prestigious but do nothing to earn real social worth, such as working for social good. They steal to get the means to make them seem very important persons but seldom do an honest day’s work to acquire the paraphernalia with which they adorn their useless bodies so as to be the peacocks they want to be.

        I came to the realization that these people are criminals and that there is nothing I or anyone can do about it. It is a waste of time trying to change them; stealing and criminality appear to be in their genes. It would take several hundred years to get rid of those criminal genes out of their bodies.  All that one can do is treat them as who they are: criminals.  To expect good to come out of them is to allow one’s self to be browbeat by criminals, scam artists who know only how to make other people feel guilty but do not feel guilty.

               If you point out their penchant for criminality they accuse you of hating them or hating yourself or having inferiority complex and with that cavalier view they continue in doing what their forefathers did, steal and sell their people.  They will use psychology to manipulate you into backing off so as to allow them to continue their scamming behaviors. (One should never allow these seasoned criminals to make one stop pointing out their criminal behaviors; let them call one whatever name they want; one should ignore their name calling and state the truth as one sees it.)

              These people are the dregs of humanity; they are contemptible and despicable. Along with conservative white Americans, who are also criminals, they need to be sent to prisons and eventually to hellfire and allowed to burn for however long their bodies would burn before they turn to cinders.  They are a disgrace to the term humanity.

             One should never pay attention to their so-called social scientists and scholars in general; those would use the social science paradigm that society socialized us into its parameters and made us who we are to try persuading one that it is other folks fault that they are who they are. They will try their damn best to persuade you that white men made them who they are and that their criminal behavior is a function of the one life time (1900-1960…many folks in my kindred were there when white men came to their world and were there when they exited Nigeria, so the white man had no real effect on their characters) that the white man ruled them. They see slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism as the cause of their poverty and backwardness.

       No, they are poor and backward because of their crummy characters, their moral depravity, and their tendency to criminal tendencies. Until they become pro-social in behavior they are condemned to poverty and one should never permit the scam artists to hoodwink and bamboozle one into seeing them as innocent victims of other peoples bad behavior; they have run that scam on the white man for too long and it is now time to call their bluff and tell them that they are criminals and ought to stop stealing too much.

       Whatever you do, please do not permit these con artists to make you feel bad for saying and or doing the right thing.  Their forte is to make you feel bad for doing the right thing so as to leave them to continue in their eternal infamy. Keep saying and doing the right thing regardless of what these scammers say about you. Their 419 and other scams must be continually exposed for it is in our mutual interest to expunge criminality from them.

         They mismanage their continent and come to the West and while in the West instead of showing gratitude to those who offered them economic refugee status they proceed to scam Westerners, trying to rob them down and transform Western society to a chaotic society, as they have done to their continent. We must now start being tough with these criminals and stop allowing our emotions to dictate our relations with them. Do not pity them; treat them roughly and if they step out of line clamp them into jail.

           In my observation most Nigerians are extremely self-centered; they work for the benefit of their pockets and, perhaps, their immediate family members; they seldom concern themselves with the welfare of other people. They can actually see you hurt in an accident and not stop to intervene and help you. On the streets of Lagos dead beggars would lie there and folks would step over them and do nothing to take them to the morgue.

        These people have one and only one goal: to survive at the personal level and are not interested in other folk’s survival. Their personal survival needs lead them to steal from governments and take bribes (in hospitals they will not treat the wounded until bribery is paid).

         When I was eight years old my parents sent me to go live with their parents in their village. At our house at Lagos were many folks from mother’s village so I was aware of them and wanted to visit their town. Thus, while in the village I decided to go to mother’s town, may be ten miles away from mine. I would find adults to give me a ride to the town.  I visited the town on a number of occasions. But as I recall no one from mother’s kindred came to visit me in my own town. That is correct; an eight year old boy went to see his mother’s people, people who while at Lagos came to our house to stay and eat, but the adults over there did not reciprocate the gesture and come to see him during the time he stayed in the village. While in secondary boarding school I do not recall any of the fellows from my area in the city I was attending school at come to see me.  These people are thoroughly self-centered.

       These entire folks do is going to their town’s monthly meetings, drink and boast about how important they supposedly are.

       These and similar behaviors I saw exhibited by these people tells me that they have little or no social interest; they have no social caring and are essentially not human beings; they are mere animals. These people are actually closer to animals than to human beings and don’t know it. To call them human beings is to abuse the term human beings.

        I do not know what God created these people (if they can be called people). If their traditional gods could only produce these asocial behaviors in them those religions and their gods are rubbish and no wonder foreign religions so easily replaced them.

        It would help if biologists and other physical scientists could do studies to see whether criminality is in these people’s genes. I certainly do not want to read social science studies on why these people steal too much, for social science is more likely to give us another rationalization why these people steal as they do.  Perhaps, their asocial behavior is due to their lack of parental love; lack of caring society; or the lack of this or that that made them the way they are. I do not want to read another social science excuse for Africans self-centered behavior; I already know that they are self-centered; what I want to know is whether the cause is in their genes and if so can we come up with medications that can generate social caring in these criminals.

         In most human societies we expect no more than five percent of the people to be criminals and ninety five percent to be pro-social persons (that is the case in the USA, anyway) but in Nigeria the order is reversed so that perhaps only five percent of the people are pro-social whereas the other ninety five percent are criminals.  We cannot sustain a human society where most of the people are prone to antisocial behaviors. We cannot sustain a society where nine out of ten of the people are self-centered; these people always put their needs ahead of other people’s needs.  If you are in need they would not bother with you; in fact, they would laugh at you and go to the public square to put you down, to desecrate your name.

        These people seem like mere animals; there is no other way to characterize them. They will rob you down if you are not guarded around them. If you started a business with them they would steal it down.

       Working for the collective good is not in their mental makeup.

       What god created these dreadful people?

        I am yet to see a Nigerian with heroic personality who puts other folk’s interests ahead of his and when push comes to shove places his life on the line for public good. All I see are self-centered, inadequate personalities who want other people to do things for them but do not do things for other persons; I see takers from other people but not givers to other people. 

      There must be a cause for this disturbing degeneration of the human character; I want to know what transformed a whole race into a race of criminals and what we can do to correct the situation.

       What I do not want to hear is someone telling me to blame white folks for these criminals’ behaviors. I blame the thief, not white folks, for his thieving behaviors.  Clearly, something drastic has to be done to increase these people’s level of social centered behavior.

       Alfred Adler (see his seminal work, the Neurotic Character, 1912) would say that they are self-centered neurotics who need to be taught social interest; that they need to be taught living to serve people rather than just their individual selves.

      Human beings find peace and joy from serving all people; they find conflict from living only for their self-interests. The utility of serving social interest is a lesson that Nigerians and Africans are yet to learn; one of my functions is to teach them that lesson. Love for all people is what makes sense in our journey through planet earth; all else is noise.

 Ozodi Thomas Osuji

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

*This piece is from a bunch of essays that I wrote in 2006.