A country that allows mediocrity to flourish will always be rewarded with mediocrity and embarrassment.
Has it occurred to anyone that the United States is currently sending a strong message to Nigeria. Now let’s look at the recent past by the United States. The American government is clearly sending a message to Nigeria that they will no longer tolerate or allow our criminals to do well in the United States. The embarrassment that we’re getting right now is well deserved. We should not be surprised if we see a lot more coming up soon.
Can we be objective enough to admit that we as a society have been raising a lot of criminals into power and now have many of them in control of our Society? What we are reading about recently is typical of what has been happening in Nigeria. Nigerian criminals forge documents and use relationships with other fraudsters in positions of power either at the banks or in government to get unfair advantages. They steal from the intellects and present ideas that belong to other people as theirs. Then they collaborate with people in power to get the funds or forge documents to present to enable them together funds
I stopped arguing with Nigerians that have not traveled outside of the country. When I say outside of the country, I’m not just talking about taking a flight between Nigeria and another country. What I am talking about is actually being within a civilized country and then traveling within that country. There is a large noticeable difference in the service that they see at foreign airports, especially in the developed world. People are not shabbily treated. Neither are they insulted openly with lies and deceived.
Taking a flight from Lagos to Abuja will expose you to a lot of deceit, lies, incompetence, and inadequacies by the people serving us in the Airlines. They schedule flights that will never take off and people who wake up early to catch an early flight will end up waiting until another flight is ready to take off just to accumulate people in one big plane and have it filled up. This you will not see in developed Nations. As a matter of fact Air Traffic Control will frown highly at such activities, and probably report it to Governing agencies. Planes are scheduled to leave at certain times and air traffic control expects them to leave at such times.
When I look at the movement of Flights based on my experience in Nigeria I wonder if there’s anything logged about the Air traffic movement in Nigeria. Airlines in Nigeria basically operate like bus terminals. And in some cases certain bus terminals in Nigeria actually run better.
One would imagine why government would allow certain norms that are very controversial and not face up and deal with those issues. Business people are in fact the ones that mostly use the airlines, and I sometimes wonder if the Government realizes that wasting such people’s time, will impact our economy.
What do we have in Nigeria when you schedule a meeting in Abuja for example for 11:00am and your flight is still on the ground in Lagos at 11:00am. Meanwhile you’re being lied to and deceived and you’re being told the plane is undergoing maintenance or in some cases a plane has not arrived yet for your flight. Should this be normal in any society? Should we be allowing such a business practices to continue unchallenged?
In some historical books that I have read about Nigeria, the Colonials that wrote those books clearly stated how they perceive the black man, who only cares about the looks and perception rather than the substance behind things. Many of these books were written over 100 years ago. But if we critically analyse what is happening today there is no difference from what the white man saw back then. In Nigeria we are more about the superficial rather than the substance. And until we change this approach how do we expect to make any progress?
In my personal experience of seeing how Airpeace was being run, I knew there had to be a problem somewhere. The problem here is glaring but it’s not limited only to Airpeace. The problem can be seen across the other Airlines including Arik Air and other Airlines.
I can pretty much conclude that the employees of these airlines are actually trained to lie to the passengers. What a paradigm? They delay, make fake promises and never come through. But as soon as there are enough passengers to fill up a plane, suddenly an Aircraft will be available. Yet our government has never found it proper to investigate these activities. Of course the practice will continue unabated, and the same fraud will be continue being perpetrated on all Nigerians.
Why then will we be surprised when the FBI puts out a warrant for the arrest of the principal of such an Airline. It is only natural that from the way the airlines are run, there’s enough probably cause to reason that such owners may be less than honorable. From the clear paradigm of the Airlines one can pretty much say they are fraudulent and of course their Beginnings must have been fraudulent as well, so why are we surprised? Of course nothing good can come out of a bad beginning. And until we clean out our systems of fraudsters they will continue perpetrating their frauds.
But let me go back to the message America is trying to send to Nigeria. America is saying to Nigeria but we have seen that the worst of your people, are the ones with money and we’re going to bring you all down. We will no longer tolerate the frauds that you bring into our country and the influences that we do not need in our countries.
My only question to America is what took you So Long? Why did you wait until the whole power structure of Nigeria got infiltrated with mostly criminal minded people? Do you know how long it will now take to correct having all these people in power? Do you know how long it would take to start trying to reset the minds of the people that have been influenced by these people? Yes we know your standards are higher than ours, and we know that you are now intimidated by the influx of very bad characters in your system with large amounts of money that can be used to influence your society. But then we can never say it’s too late. There’s always a time to reset and rebuild. Yes indeed Nigeria system needs to be crashed, and reset with good people at the helm.
My only prayer right now is it countries of the West will follow suit with America and bring down all this international criminals, who come back to Nigeria with illicit funds to become Politicians. Because the only way that we can change the paradigm in Nigeria is by showing that crime does not pay. Nigeria is now at a point where our young believe that to make it ahead you must always be a criminal first. How unfortunate?
The average Nigerian youth today believes that there are only two or three narrow ways of getting ahead in life. It is either to use or be used. Our politicians are experts at motivating our youth to continue singing their praises despite not deserving such. Once in a while, you see them lift up a praise singer, which now serves as an example to others to emulate. An elevated Praise Singer seen with prominent Politicians becomes a reward that many of our Youth seek. But this deception could lead a million youth to singing praises while probably two or three finally get rewarded. A lot of their time gets spent wasted for nothing, absolutely nothing. But do they ever stop? No they don’t. They continue living out of the only hope that they have which is to have ties to a Politician, and access to unscrupulous advantages. The other way they know is to defraud. Fraud now seems so common and normal to the average Nigerian youth. It is not uncommon to hear the Nigerian youth ask the question: if honesty can feed them? They become overly slick and unscrupulous. The only other outlet that they believe they can make it in life is in the entertainment industry. Such is the life of the Nigerian youth.
Well done America!! We need more!!!
