By Tony Okoroji
Someone, please tell me… how did we become a nation of takers? The way we have treated our country is like it is a conquered land. Let’s face it, we have behaved like an army of occupation, plundering and raping everything in sight on a land which we are supposed to bequeath to our children.
Oh, Nigerians love free food. You may not believe it but there are some of my country men who will deck up in their most expensive regalia and travel many kilometers just to relish some free food and booze at some burial or wedding ceremony where they barely know the bereaved or celebrant.
The funny part is that there are those who will gladly incur five thousand naira in expenses only to eat free food worth less than one thousand naira! They do not believe it when they are told that there is no free lunch in New York, Lagos or Abuja. When you think of it, there is really no free lunch anywhere in the world. When all is said and done, we pay for everything we eat. We might even pay in constipation or diarrhea!
Have you noticed that there is a different atmosphere in the land? Have you checked out the streets? There are no longer any long convoys of state of the art SUVs driving at break neck speed and chasing innocent citizens off the roads. The time may have come for each of us to explain how we came about our many SUVs and many-many mansions at our meager income. EFCC is flaunting its biceps. The banks are doing a roll call of their debtors.
In a certain card game, when you hear ‘check-up’, you know that trouble is looming. This is a check-up moment in the lives of many Nigerians. This is the time to pay for what we thought was free food!
Have you wondered how the lazy guy who went to school with you and was barely managing to get ‘let my people go’, suddenly became the most ‘successful’ guy in your village, terrorizing everyone with his unlimited cash? Godwin? Nope! Since the banks began “Operation Check-Up’, it has been very revealing. We now can see how many have financed and re-financed their stratospheric life styles, borrowing so much money they never intended to pay back, driven by a free food mindset.
For many years, the major debate in Nigeria has been ‘who gets what?’ and not ‘who does what?’ From one constitutional conference to another, the fight has been about how we get the biggest share of the ‘national cake’. There has been very little consideration given to how we bake a real national cake. Free food!
For years and years, the Nigerian elite have been drunk on crude oil. Even when by some of the crazy schemes of our leaders, a Nigerian is bestowed, for whatever reason, with an oil block, it is of course ‘Oyibo’ people that have always prospected for the oil, found it, drilled it, pumped it, sold it and given us some of the change. That is when the real wahala starts. We fight tooth and nail thereafter over how to grab and spend the wealth that did not come from our land and which we did not create. Free food!
The free food mindset has eaten up our public service as many who do no real work expect to become stinking rich. It is the mindset that created the Nigerian 419 generation as many in our land began to ask, ‘why work when you can write a few letters and be amazingly rich?’ It is the mindset that is behind much of our mushrooming NGOs, which if you ask me is another form of 419. The same free food mentality is also behind most of our new wave churches fleecing the poor and innocent of the little they have.
This mindset has permeated through our kids. They want to pass their exams without reading. After that, they want a job but they have very little interest in doing any real work. We have raised them on the free food mentality.
In Nigeria, we are all sitting at the dining table with our forks, knives and spoons waiting to pounce on free food once it comes out of the kitchen. We don’t just want food, we want a lot of red meat, ‘shaki’, ‘pomo’, ‘abode’ and ‘orishirishi’. The problem is that our cash cow is dead. From here on, it will neither produce milk nor meat. The era of the one hundred dollars a barrel of crude oil is gone. Anyone who sees the enormous research on alternative energy and still believes that our cash cow will rise from the dead is a big fool.
I know that there are many out there who demand that President Buhari should produce water out of stone. I have no doubt that Buhari knew that things were bad in Nigeria when he contested the presidency. I will however bet you my last dwindling Naira that the old man did not know how very bad things really are. The man is watching a horror movie. Sorry guys, Nigeria is truly broke.
This horror movie may however be a wake-up call. It may force us to wean ourselves from the erroneous belief that we can build a great nation on a mindset of free food, free electricity, free tax, free music, free everything… We urgently need to reboot our computer. It is hung! Seriously guys, it is time to get to work like the rest of humanity. There is no more free food in Naija!