Colonial mentality

In practically all their operations Government prefers half-baked foreign “technical experts” to competent Nigerians. Even when compelled to employ Nigerians, their preference is to recruit from diaspora our countrymen who think, talk and act like white men. Their repeated references to “global best practices” confirm an inferiority complex, their belief that the way the western […]

In practically all their operations Government prefers half-baked foreign “technical experts” to competent Nigerians. Even when compelled to employ Nigerians, their preference is to recruit from diaspora our countrymen who think, talk and act like white men. Their repeated references to “global best practices” confirm an inferiority complex, their belief that the way the western nations do their thing must definitely be the best. Nigerian leaders are so in awe of expatriates that even in things as mundane as constructing roads, they take pride in being photographed with some second rate foreign contractor. The paradox is that if Nigerians can’t be trusted to do simple things like building durable roads, how can they be trusted to manage the far more complex issues of good governance? Why don’t we employ expatriate Governors and an expatriate President?
It’s shameful that our leaders have problems accepting Nigerians are more intelligent and competent than the majority of expatriates. The presence of so many foreign “experts” only advertises their lack of faith in locally developed intellect. Our never ending economic, social and political problems are ample evidence that all these foreign interventions have been of little use. Two recent news items are indicative of our current colonial mentality. Firstly, an Australian named Stephen Davis was contracted to negotiate between African brothers. Without substantiating his claims, the man casually and superficially named two prominent citizens as sponsors of the terrorism plaguing the nation. Despite the hollowness of his declaration, top level Nigerians are falling over themselves attempting to make political capital out of it. Since Davis is a white man it doesn’t occur to them that he may not know what he is talking about. Secondly and perhaps more ridiculously we have run to foreign technical experts to produce a simple national ID card. With the MasterCard logo boldly emblazoned on the card, Nigerians are at a loss to understand how their government can surrender a symbol of national pride and sovereignty to a private American firm.
The deal brokered between the Nigerian National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), MasterCard, and Access Bank compulsorily makes every adult Nigerian a customer of MasterCard, via Access Bank. MasterCard provides the pre-paid element which makes the card a payment card. One can only wonder where the monumentally daft idea that our national data should be kept by a credit card company came from. The Central Bank of Nigeria recently stated that using an ATM other than that of your bank, will incur charges. Who will bear the costs of transactions using the national ID/ATM card? Will citizens have to renew their card every three years, as with all other ATM cards? The long and convoluted explanation provided by the Head of the Card Management Services at the NIMC hardly inspires confidence in our abilities to manage our affairs. No one can dispute that worldwide Nigerians are excelling in the field of information technology, so there is no tangible reason why whatever benefits the card possess could not have been realized by Nigerians. It isn’t a question of whether or not the data can be mismanaged by Americans; it’s a question of national pride which seems to be in short supply in government at the highest levels.
The statement that MasterCard’s branding means the card will be subsidized is sheer idiocy. If such branding is a good idea then we should go all the way to reduce the cost of governance. For example the National Assembly Complex could be branded by Berger Paints, the presidential aircraft by Dunlop and Texaco Oil, and the president himself could dress like a premier league footballer with company logos sewn onto his clothes to help cover the cost of his excessive travels! Branding national assets isn’t a well thought out solution; it’s a crass admission of failure that the Nigerian national government with all its resources can’t develop the capabilities of one private American firm. Besides which the plethora of uncoordinated pie-in-the-sky government/foreign-private partnership projects represents wastefulness in the extreme. While the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is busy messing up the distribution of voters cards, our President informs us that their “permanent” card is about to be replaced by his “permanent” card!
As usual with any government program, an utterly unrealizable deadline of December 2014 has been given to register and issue cards to all adult male Nigerians. Despite assurances of success all previous biometric registrations – perhaps with the exception of the passport office – have proved to be time wasting and beneficial only to the concept designers who make billions without positively enhancing operations. IT experts deride the new multi-purpose card scheme on the basis that apart from biometrics, the only information needed on a national ID card is basically the same as would be on a birth certificate. Furthermore fulfilling the many other unnecessary functions requires the integration of numerous databases, none of which presently functions efficiently or can be reasonably expected to in the immediate future. As for irrelevant references to “international” identification, the only Nigerian personal document which concerns foreign governments is our international passport. Confirming suspicions that important details of the arrangement are being hidden, and we are mortgaging our integrity back to neo-colonialists, officials of the NIMC admitted the scheme could run into problems in the “unlikely” event that Nigeria ever has problems with America”!