When subjects that directly impact negatively on the lives of others are discussed in the public sphere, it is a rational mind’s belief that they are brought to a stop.
How exactly that happens has always been a debate left to the intellectuals. On the recent debate about Yahoo boys, a perfect picture of an answer can be found in Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s exploration of the metamorphosis of a Yahoo boy in ‘I do not come to you by chance’.
The Descent into Darkness
Many will be forgiven for looking down at Kingsley Ibe with disgust; a young man whose wealth was built on the tears of the trusting and greedy. Many, from the zenith of their moral horse, would pronounce a man of his standing a disgrace and a participant in the Nigerian decay; few would look at him and see the inevitable result of decades of bad choices.
The first born, in a family of four, to a retired civil servant whose pension gradually lost value with each terrible government policy and a tailor who no longer worked full time to take care of her diabetic husband, the story of Kingsley Ibe as told by Adaobi reveals how much the war against Yahoo boys is a game of Whac-a-mole.
Education as a path to success is an ideal that drives millions of parents and their respective wards in Nigeria. Parents back their belief by sending their kids to school up to university level regardless of the economic cost, expecting their ward to live a reality whose chances of materialization diminishes with each passing year.
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Kingsley and his parents subscribed to this belief, a conviction so strong they sold the family’s Peugeot 504 for it. After completing a series of tests for a position of a chemical engineer in an oil company, he got a letter that said, ‘We are sorry to inform you that you did not meet the requirements for…’ It was his third year of unemployment.
Kings believed his success resided in the power of his certificate. For the average Nigerian graduate, his tale as told by Ms Tricia is all too relatable, like watching your life story on the silver screen, except your parents are played by Olu Jacobs and Joke Silva and you’re played by a man too old to play someone in his 20s.
Each negative result after every round of spreading your CV like common cold is matched with the warmth and love of your mother, as did Kings’ when he returned home from picking up his latest letter of rejection. She dons her cape of motherhood and goes to work consoling her dejected son.
‘Everybody has their own dry season but the rain will always come. You’ll see, and you will remember I said so’ – an all too familiar dialogue from characters in Adaobi’s universe; except this is not a movie, this is your life. You got this speech or a version of it every time the answer was no and at some point, it starts to lose its motivational potency.
There is a part where Kings sought to go after his girlfriend, whose words still gave him peace. His gracious mother came to give him money for transport. A twenty-five-year-old whose family is depending on to lighten the increasingly heavy burden of raising his siblings, still dependent on his mother’s handouts.
It was a shame his ego could not bear and his initial reaction to the offer was rejection. ‘Mummy, don’t worry. I can manage till Daddy gives me my next pocket money’, he says. His mother understood his reluctance and reassured him – ‘Kings, look. I know it’s just for a brief period and that things will work out for you soon. Take the money’. He took it because even the biggest of egos crash under the weight of poverty.
It’s not an unfamiliar scenario to your average unemployed graduate who can’t subscribe to the cheapest of internet data plans without their parents’ financial input.
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We don’t pay enough attention to psychological blows unemployed graduate deal with every day. The emotional pile of shit they are forced to take on due to their inability to pull their own financial weight. For many, it is a depressive phase that is compounded with each new failed attempt at securing a job.
Each day becomes an emotional battle. There is something in physics called ‘elastic limit’ – it is the maximum extent to which an object can be stretched without being permanently deformed. When hope tarries too long, one tends to break under the weight. When it all becomes too much to bear and they choose the dark path, we fail to acknowledge the years of frustration that preceded their decision in our judgement.
The final burden that breaks each person's moral resolve differs from person to person. For one of my friends, it was the return of his childhood friend from the UK. His friend returned with a car of his own and a flat, my friend was now the only one among his childhood friends who still lived with his parents, unable to buy a shirt for himself without their say so.
For Adaobi’s protagonist, it came in the form of his father’s death. A man who was already stretched thin emotionally with unemployment and the break up with his long-term girlfriend who left him for a rich man, the weight of his new reality as the breadwinner of his family gave way to a grave moral compromise.
An internal bargaining that started with accepting his uncle’s 419 way of life because ‘at least he’s using the money for a good cause’ – the good cause here being paying his father’s hospital bills – cracked his wall of morality and led to a total acceptance of life as an internet fraudster.
The Fall of the House of Cards
Adaobi aptly divided her book into two parts. The first part dealt with the emotional and circumstantial history that led to part two, Kings’ life as a Yahoo boy. When it comes to internet fraudsters, the focus is primarily on part two of their lives. What we fail to consider while we perch at the apex of our moral horse is the frustration and loss of hope that propels them to the point where they have to choose between survival and morality.
Perhaps we ignore them to avoid the introspection that would come when we realize we built the house that birthed internet fraudsters. With the foundation built on docility and roofed with negligence, we stood idly by as the system that was supposed to encourage civil obedience disintegrated and paved the way for the weak-willed to crumble under the burden of survival.
Yahoo boys, like corrupt politicians, civil servants, police officers, kidnappers, your average social media entrepreneur whose products fail to live up to its online image and every other group whose actions destroy our national reputation are branches of the tree that is the broken Nigerian system and the tree continues to grow every day we abdicate our responsibilities as citizens.
Someone once said ‘we can all be good if we are allowed to be’. Before the death of hope crystallized among the new generation and they embraced the ‘by hook or crook' mantra, no one wanted to grow up and become a fraudster. Everyone wished for a dignified career but we failed at creating an environment that allowed people to become the best version of themselves.
In Kingsley's story, a system that allowed one to be good would have jobs waiting for the graduates it produced and a decent pay to go with it neither would its universal health care have given Kings’ the opportunity at rationalizing crime to save his dad. One only need look at developed countries to see how a working society allows its inhabitants to live a morally upstanding life.
Had we managed to create a society that worked for everyone, we would be rid of the most glaring of our dirty linens in one fell swoop. Even those whose driving force for fraud is greed might find, in a functioning system, a legal path to own objects of their greed.
Of course, crime is bad and those who are found guilty of it should be fairly prosecuted, but until we direct the bulk of our energy towards creating an enabling environment for positive morality, the outrage against Yahoo boys in uplifting our national image is nothing but a game of Whac-a-mole.
Written by Adeola Seun
Adeola Seun is a humanist. Big believer in common sense. Arsenal lover.