Nigeria, our dear sovereign country, where nobody is oppressed, has one peculiar problem. Our people say that “ihe onye balu nkita ya ka o na-aza.” This simply means that whatever a man calls his dog is the name the dog bears. In the late ‘80s, I named my dog ‘SAP’. Then I was living at Abakpa GRA, Kaduna. It always reminded me and my visitors of my abhorrence for SAP and its evident evils. Later, when a group of brigands decided to ruin Anambra state, with the obvious support of OBJ, I named another of my dogs ‘Eselu’. At that time, I was living in Okota, Lagos. If you don’t know who ‘Eselu’ is or what he stands for, just read the recent political history of Anambra State. Maybe because SAP was not a human being, or because Eselu did not know that I named my dog after him, or just because of the mercy of God, I got away with that ‘treasonable’ audacity. However, one brother, Joe, named his dog ‘Buhari’, and his right to name his dog was removed from him, even though he named his daughter Aisha! (Ik Muo, 10/9/16; The man, the dog and the need for a National Dog Naming Agency (NaDNA) http://www.cityvoiceng.com/the-man-the-dog-and-need-for-national-dog-naming-agency-nadna/)
However, while dogs bear the names they were given by their masters, some people have the temerity to rebrand us as they wish. And they do so without any cultural naming ceremonies. I have seriously deliberated on this weird practice that impugned our sovereignty, violated a core diplomatic protocol and ‘mal-presented’ us before the right-thinking members of the diplomatic community. The only reason I found is the fact that even the original name, Nigeria, was given to us by others. If others gave us our registered name, others can also change that name without recourse to us!
On May 11, 2016, the British PM renamed Nigeria as a ‘fantastically corrupt country’. This was as PMB was in the UK to attend an anti-corruption summit. However, Trump, the most prosecuted, most convicted and most impeached president of America, just described by Senator Kelly as ‘ignorant of the constitution and without regard for the rule of law’, holds a gold medal in baptising and rebaptising Nigeria. In 2018, he called us a ‘shithole’, and now, he has branded us a ‘disgraced country’, in addition to being a CPC.
As a patriot, I ought to boldly protest this unauthorised rebranding, but it appears that those who are empowered to represent our collective interest are comfortable with those appellations or that those names were and are so correct that there was nothing to defend. Unfortunately, the fantastic corruption is one of the factors that made Nigeria a disgraced country! And we are so disgraced that those fantastically corrupt elements amongst us deposit their mindless loot with those who describe them as fantastically corrupt. We dance naked in the market square.
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I believe that the Whiteman is corrupt, and that is why corruption is proudly seated in their dictionary. But they do it with tact, with dignity and with the knowledge that it is abnormal. Here, we do it with impunity. We steal with impunity and flaunt the proceeds with impunity. The impunity quotient of our corruption becomes awesome when we deepen and broaden the concept of corruption to include political, judicial and administrative corruption. A look at the front-page news items in the past few weeks is enough to affirm the fantastically corrupt branding. NNPC has been struggling to explain what happened to N210trn, while NASS is probing $200bn & $300bn worth of crude oil leakages. We have just been informed that N17.5trn was spent on pipeline surveillance in a year, while the trial of Agunloye over $6bn (dollars!!!) fraud in the Mambila business continues, more than 20 years later. The leadership of NASS was just sued over the N18.6 bn NASS complex fund, while Malami is in the dock over the $490 Abacha loot, just as Sylva will soon be docked over $14.8m. N7.1trn was spent on ‘energy security’ in 2024, and the Federal Government has been ordered to release the names of those involved in the NNDC multi-billion-naira heist. That is for the first name.
On the second name, the greatest evidence that we are disgraced are the two disgraceful lists recently released by the FGN: beneficiaries of presidential pardon and non-career ambassadors. If you look at these two lists and feel that nothing is wrong with Nigeria, you are right because we perceive things differently. In any case, these two lists also evidence other forms of corruption! When people who have already disgraced themselves as ranking EFCC customers are the best we can send to the world, it sure shows that we are disgraced. That is why my friend said that they are ‘harmbassadors’.
I abhor these names being given to us, but there is not much I can do because those who represent us in the world appear comfortable with those names. The day they reject those names in words and action and the day we Nigerians insist that they must reject those names, then we can take it from there.
Ik Muo, PhD, Department of Business Admin, OOU, Ago-Iwoye, 08033026625
