by Wole Olabanji

I have always found it puzzling when I talk with Nigerians and they insist that the average Nigerian is an honest person. My personal experience seems to suggest that we have grossly misunderstood both words: average and honest.

No, I don’t consider Mr Jaja who recently received a national award for returning a whopping $120,000 to a passenger who had forgotten it in his cab to be an average Nigerian. Maybe average in his means, but certainly not in his Nigerian-ness. I’d describe him as exceptional, and I imagine if he were not so, his national award would be pointless.

My experience of the average Nigerian is that he is someone who will try to game any system within which he is required to function. Oh, I expect lots of folks to remonstrate with me at this point and point out that the few thieving politicians and 419ners who give ‘us’ a bad name cannot represent a whole nation of 160 million. I agree with their impeccable logic, but not with the shaky assumptions upon which it is built.

My experience is wide and varied. From the pepper seller to the dapper banker; across every demographic and social stratum, I have found the rot of corruption in its most putrid state.

In 2008 for instance, not too long before Intercontinental Bank ran into troubled waters (let’s not even talk about the corruption that brought that on), my firm had won a contract to do some construction work for the bank. So at about December, someone from the projects department contacted us to ask about when we would be delivering their bags of rice. It sounded strange to me so we made some further enquiries, and found that it was a ‘tradition’ for contractors who wanted to remain in the good books, and keep prospects of future jobs alive to ensure that they didn’t default in this ‘key performance indicator’.

I imagine these suited bankers are part of the millions of so- called honest, average Nigerians who loathe the bad name that we get from the few ‘dishonest’ Nigerians like sweaty, hard-nosed policemen who extort money from hapless Okada riders. I guess we have succeeded so well in recalibrating the truth that we don’t see that the banker who extorts rice from a contractor is no different from the Mopol who takes his ‘roger’ from the Okada rider.

It is the same recalibration of the truth that makes the tomato seller think of herself as being hardworking and honest while the road contractor is a common thief. She would lament the dishonesty of the contractor who puts a paper thin layer of asphalt on the road but completely miss out the fact of her own deviousness when she deftly turns the tomato into the bag to keep the customer from seeing the layers of rotten tomato beneath the layer of fresh yummy looking tomatoes she has craftily placed on top.

It is the same inhibited view of reality that helps the Nigerian journalist write powerful editorials against ‘bail for sale’ or ‘money for fuel’ at our police stations, while hindering cognition as he collects the brown envelope ‘for transport’ at the news conference.

The average Nigerian does not understand that it is merely degree that separates the man who uses the office copier to photocopy a text book for personal use from the one who converts an official car to personal use. This famous, honest, average Nigerian does not think that when you scale up a bag of rice that is given to a clerk by a small vendor, it can become a 50-room mansion on a hill built for Oga by a major contractor.

The specie of average Nigerian that amazes me the most however is the one that I find in church. I teach adult Sunday school, and in my church we have a national directorate responsible for monitoring the Sunday school department in local branches. Trust the average Nigerians in the system, when the monitoring officers come from headquarters to audit our adherence to process; ‘we’ make sure that they get a ‘brown envelope’ to conveniently carry their reports in when they go back.

Given my experience therefore, I was not surprised in the least bit when the poster boy for average Nigerians said on national TV that people have been erroneously misrepresenting common stealing as corruption.  “Sometimes people take common stealing as corruption” he said. Guess what, you can also replace common stealing with things like: common PR; common thank you; common kola. In fact, I imagine that if you asked the president whether Nigerians are corrupt people, he might sagely say; “sometimes people take us for corrupt people but we are just a nation of common thieves”.

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