A Bag of Rice

Almost every Nigerian founder I respect was educated outside Nigeria.

Not all of them. But enough to raise my brows. Founder after founder, innovator after innovator, same detail buried in the bio. Is it the access? Better resources? Better networks? I believe it was an escape hatch. They got out before the training finished.

Because there is training. And it begins early.

I wrote before on my blog on ‘The Gospel of Lagos Traffic’, how the second you step outside your house you're in a simulation with no rules, fend for yourself, nobody's coming, government doesn't care, police doesn't care until you pay for them to, and that message just plays and plays, every single day, for everyone who lives here.

Now give that same message to a five year old and call it school. A curriculum that was never built to make anyone think differently, only to make them memorize and “survive.” Apparently, asking questions in many schools is forbidden. You do what you’re told and are punished severely if you are “disrespectful”. Then at ~eighteen ~twenty, you hand that person to a system with no good jobs, and no ground under them and say: figure it out. (Then we wonder why corporate prostitution and fraud plagues the youth. LOL)

I don't think this is a system falling apart. I think it's a system doing exactly what it was built it to do.

This is Egypt. And I’m not being poetic or dramatic, I mean this literally.

Refer to Exodus in the good book. The Israelites weren't small in number. There were a lot of them (Fun fact: the United Nations projects that Nigeria's internal population alone will hit 400 to 440 million by 2050. By that time, it will pass the United States to become the third largest country in the world…)

Pharaoh didn't need an army to defeat these populous and very intimidating nation, he needed a strategy. Ration the food, not enough to starve, just enough that nobody has energy left to dream. Strip their identity. Get them suspicious of each other instead of him. Work them to their bones with unpurposeful tasks. Lower the bar a little more with every generation, until by the time freedom shows up, most of them don't even recognize it. Rather, throughout their journey out of bondage, they’re complaining to their savior, and grieving the onions and garlic in the land of bondage. They don’t want to be free, they want to go back to the place that enslaved them because at least they knew the shape of that hunger, and by now, the suffering is one with them :)

That's the whole Nigerian project, if you ask me. Dim the light early. Ration the hope. Make sure nobody expects too much, because a person who expects nothing is very easy to manage.

Peter Obi happened, and then, well. He didn't.

I actually let myself hope. A lot of us did. I remember thinking, finally, someone who might actually move the needle.

But hope doesn't reach a mind that's spent decades thinking about nothing but the next meal. A vote means one thing to someone who knows dinner is handled, and a completely different thing to someone who doesn't. If you genuinely don't know when you’ll eat next, a bag of rice in exchange for your vote isn't corruption, it's salvation because “who vote help?”

And you can spot us from across a room. Every time.

I get to attend a lot of international programs, and I can tell who's Nigerian before they say a word. Elbowing to get on a bus. Squashed bodies at the food areas, screaming for their own.

I've watched the separation happen in real time, Nigerian delegates on one side, other African delegates somewhere else, international delegates much further off. Nigerians aren’t bad people. They are trained. Well trained :)

The first generation out rarely makes it in.

We already have the playbook for what freedom actually costs. The generation that walks out of bondage is almost never the one that reaches the promised land. Their minds are already set, and it doesn't undo itself just because somebody removes the chains.

I believe the work now is identifying our places and stepping into our roles as the Joshuas and the Calebs, the untainted and untrained ones. There is a reason God chose Moses; a man who was not a part of the system to rescue those who were.

Almost every Nigerian founder I respect was educated outside Nigeria.

Coincidence?

:)