INTERNET FRAUD AND BUHARI’S CABINET

The new ministers should work hard to stem the deepening poverty in the country, writes

At the close of last week, Nigeria had thrown on her face the list of 80 of her citizens who had been arrested (some still at large) by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States of America in connection with internet fraud. The list came after the appetizer - one of those doing the country proud as a young achiever below 30 already listed by Forbes as a young achiever was actually an alleged fraudster. He was merely a forerunner of the things to come as the country was afterwards slammed with a list reported as the largest bust of internet fraud so far.

Amidst the media attention it generated, glaring was the fact that Nigerians were concerned about the ethnicity of those whose names were on the list ahead of the disgrace that they were all representative of national identity. The fixation on the ethnicity of a criminal in Nigeria reeled itself out earlier in relation to the herdsmen-farmer clashes with the herdsmen being dubbed Fulani and the connotation “Fulani herdsmen” has stamped itself in Nigerian media.

In the United States of America and other nations (even nations in Africa), the tribal distinctions which are so locally apparent are obscured whenever the individual is outside his country. An individual in a foreign country becomes representative of his nation and race ahead of his ethnicity.

The fact that there were any number of Igbo or Hausa or Yoruba on the list would not serve as an obstruction limiting other ethnic groups in Nigeria from being viewed and treated similarly in international circles. A Nigerian should not really think that the

difference between the Saudi list meant to be executed for drug peddling comprising mostly Yoruba and the list of 80 fraudsters comprising mostly Igbo with the FBI has any difference to the eye of the foreigner who sees it all as a mash of African names. Chukwueze is as good as Adewale or Ciroma.

In reality, what exists in some parts of the world still is a single perception of Africa and Africans; till today, there is an ongoing attempt to rewrite the mistaken perception that Africans are one single lump of people. At a time when even national identities are not really obvious outside Africa, the hammer we are slinging locally on the ethnic identities would do us no good as we are all really in the same mess of being viewed internationally as a nation of fraudsters.

Though, it is a factual and obvious one that the list contains people from a particular tribe or ethnic grouping, but this becomes irrelevant in the face of the facts that are available to us from the daily experience of being Nigerians that crime has no ethnicity. Everyone in this country would be a witness of the “80 Nigerians” species that have now crowded national life. They reek of a wealth you cannot explain. They live lavish without owning companies or having any publicly identified source of income. We see them everywhere even in the religious centers.

Nigerians have adapted to the presence of the lavish-species that begun appearing on our landscape in the early 2000’s. They have become so prominent that they are being sung for by our artistes. Have some of our artistes not already been arraigned for being involved too? Eighty Nigerians were