Nigerians And Their Misplaced Sense Of Entitlement

NGOZI EMEDOLIBE

I got a call from a stranger a few days ago. And the moment I answered, he started blabbing about a WhatsApp Prayer Group I belonged to, which was a fat lie; and how he was compiling a list of participants for ‘an important’ online prayer session slated for that evening. I did not need anybody to tell me what he was up to. He is a hacker, meaning to deceitfully take possession of my number on WhatsApp to solicit for investments from people, gullible people. I played along, with the sole aim of helping him ‘waste’ his call credit after which I would let him know how foolish he had been. This approach became expedient after I noticed the urgency in his scheme, apparently in the hope to use his little call credit to execute a substantial number of ‘jobs’.

I engaged him and each time he was meaning to end the call, I would re-tool him with another issue, so we could talk some more, but at a point, he opened up that his call credit was running out, that all he wanted was for me to share with him the code WhatsApp sent to my phone, so he could add me for the prayer session.  At this point, I burst into a prolonged laughter after which I asked him, why he did not buy enough call credit to execute his 419 schemes. He sighed frustratingly and started insulting me for allowing him to ‘waste’ his call credit on me. He felt, I should not have let him ‘waste his call credit’ if I was not going to ‘fall’ for his scheme. What struck me about this was his sense of entitlement as regards scamming me.

I tend to believe that Nigerians are somewhat imprisoned by this typical emotion, this sense of entitlement, because it keeps reflecting in our daily encounters. I have heard stories of armed robbers storming people’s homes to steal, only to get irascible that the person could not bring adequately for them to steal. Sometimes, they would ask their victims what they were doing in the city, if they could not afford enough to be stolen from them. I once watched a bank manager on TV, narrating how some armed robbers who raided her bank kept yelling at them to open their vaults, because the money would be replaced by the NDIC-Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation.Anyone conversant with the roads of Lagos, Onitsha and Ogun should be familiar with the activities of ‘touts’ who demand to be paid by commercial bus drivers with menacing effrontery, despite that only a tiny fraction of such levies get to the Government. This is also reflected when foundations for housing projects, especially in less secured areas of Lagos and Ogun States, are being constructed; various groups would emerge to be ‘settled’, or the project would terminate. On less formal fronts in our homes, we also see this playing out when relatives place a premium on relatives living abroad. It took so much for me to convince a friend of mine who took ill at a time, to drop the grudges he had for another mutual friend of ours in the US, whom he had asked for $1500 for treatment; I know quite well that $1500 in US does not come with as much ease as N1500 in Nigeria.

On the social media space, one sees this tendency playing out as well. The moment ‘social media friendship’ is established the next is to see someone invading your inbox with soothing titles like dear, honey, sweetie. Love at first chat?If not for this awkward sense of entitlement, would a group, not empowered by law or mandated by the Government at any level,  get up to ask fellow citizens to leave their part of the country? It happened sometime in 2017 and because that was treated with levity by the Government, it is repeating itself, this time, directed at Bishop Mathew Kukah, for having an opinion contrary to the group’s.

The amusing thing about this development is the converse priority as regards our sense of entitlement in this part of the world. Nigerians’ sense of entitlement will never prompt them to demand good governance, constant electricity and good roads. It does not even let them have the belief that power belongs to them and not the few rogue politicians who have appropriated the country’s resources to themselves.