This is an umbrella from the 19th century in my hometown, Badagry. Like many just like it, it started its journey in Liverpool, UK, where it was loaded on a ship and dispatched to West Africa.
On getting here, this umbrella exchanged for twenty (20) able-bodied human beings.
It is important to note that it was not a forced exchange. It was how things were then. Some people wanted umbrellas and plates and guns and corrugated roofing sheets for their houses, and selling people for these things was their idea of a fair exchange. End justified the means.
Pointing this out to remind all of us that our cultural obsession with getting something for nothing, or conspicuous consumption without creating value did not begin with the internet.
The internet is just the latest tool we use to act out our 400+ year-old behaviours.
Fraud is not a recent phenomenon. Arguably it is CENTRAL to our culture, which is why I keep on yelling my head off about our cultural deformity and why we need to fundamentally rip up everything we think we know about ourselves. Our great grandparents were yahoo boys too.
Fixing the problem goes beyond merely "curbing unemployment" and "managing the narrative better" (though those will definitely help).
We have to start from examining why we have such a strong desire to get something for nothing in our culture. That's where it stems from.
Why do we pray for "miracle money" and "special favour?" What do these things mean if not getting something we have no right to? That's where our Yahoo conditioning began. Once a week our parents took us to a building where we were taught to expect something for nothing (prayer)!
"I didn't read for the exam but the Holy Spirit put the answers in my head and I got 100%." That is Yahoo philosophy - "I did not do the honest work required to get the desired outcome but I got it anyway by using another route."
From there to "Maga don pay" is a hop and a skip.
All our lives we are taught that instead of putting in the equivalent value to get something out, what we should primarily do is PRAY.
We were raised to believe in a Yahoo God. Benin Rep had light but my folks told me electricity will only be constant in "God's Kingdom."
Where other people put in work to get something, the Nigerian God will instead listen to us pray and sing, and grant us that thing because we are special.
Do you see how warped and narcissistic we are raised to be? Then we wonder why some people see fraud as a career choice?
Our culture has raised us to see it as our right to get something for nothing. Our ancestors wanted umbrellas but didn't want the work and social change involved in becoming industrial.
So they consumed imported umbrellas and paid using the only available currency - humans.
Young men today want that "Benz* but don't want to work for 10 years first before getting it. So they use the alternative route like their great grandfathers.
We are a culture of habitual Yahooists and it goes back centuries.
We can keep treating symptoms or look in the mirror.
I'll keep saying it - we have a cultural deformity. It is that deformity that made us become the only group of humans inhabiting an entire continent whose history is now primarily defined by slavery. We have a self -destructing mindset and it is going to keep on destroying us.
Yahoo is just a manifestation of the darkness at the heart of our culture.
You might hate me for opening these dark doors into the most wretched parts of our psyche, but I'm not trying to win a popularity contest anyway.🤷🏽✌🏾
Case in point:
TLDR: Some people felt entitled to consume umbrellas and gin even though they did not have the required asset of exchange to buy these things (gold, pounds sterling etc). They could either have forgone the items or found a way to make them if they wanted them that badly.
They did not want to do the hard work of producing these things for themselves and they could not forgo their greed for unmerited consumption, so they chose to use human beings as a unit of financial exchange and thus changed the course of history negatively with that action.
Yahooism is merely an offshoot of this unproductive, consumption-obsessed mentality that still exists in our culture.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
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