How To Be Nigerian No. 6

NO. 6- Be Smart, Be Tough

Sorry this is coming 23 hours late, I had serious network issues yesterday. Nothing was working right. Well then, here we go. To be Nigerian, you have to be tough. Very tough. Nigeria has no patience for weakling, mentally and physically. It is just not allowed. An average Nigerian’s mantra is “I be naija pikin o!” that has to be said with an amused/incredulous expression. As a naija pikin, no one can cheat you. Well, except a fellow naija pikin. In Nigeria, you match wits against wits. When arguing for example, you should things like ‘you think say you dey craze? I get craze pass you.” The word craze can be substituted with other adjectives such as mad, stupid and etc. over the world, Nigerians are known as drug peddlers, thieves, scammers, as so on. That’s a lie. The thing is, Nigerian are just tough, tough really is the word. Survival against all odds. We have learnt to do this, trust me NEPA and the government has taught us so much.

We are seated in front our house, trying to enjoy the cool breeze. A guy walks up to us and says he wants to see Chichi. We say there’s no Chichi here, he says really? He has an android phone belonging to her which he fixed and should have returned to her the previous day but he couldn’t, so here he is. We say we don’t know chichi, oh wait? Does he mean Chinaza our neighbor? He smiles and says yes. We say she’s not in but we can hold the phone for her. He says no, he would come back. His office isn’t too far away. We say we have phones to fix too, can he help? He says yes he can, but his tools are at the office, we should give him the phones and he’d return them when finished. He describes his office. We smile and say “You think say you smart? I smart pass you.” We say since the office isn’t far away, let’s go there together. We go, when we start climbing the stairs to the office, he says to us, wait here please, I do not want my boss to know I am taking external jobs. We wait because we know that there is only one exit from the building and he cannot outsmart us. Fifteen minutes later, he emerges from the building and says his boss sent him on an errand, he would be right back. We smile the naija smile again. We tell him to give us the phones, we would hold them till he returns, and he says do we doubt him? The phones are in the office, we say what about his phone? He takes it out of his pocket and gives it to us. It’s an android phone too. We let him go and start to wait. Forty-five minutes later we are still waiting. We decide to go to his office to ask when he would be back, the man in the office says they do not know him, he simply came in to make some inquiries. We have been scammed, naija way. We check the android phone he gave to us, it’s inferior to our phones, it has a broken screen and it is password locked.

In naija, wits are matched against wit. You have to be tough else you would be left behind. This is just a small example of what goes on. Lots of other things you would have to learn on your own. You are almost a typical Nigerian.