The Curious Obsession Of Nigerians With Sob Stories And Blameshifting

The thing about Nigerians, and as I suspect, a major factor responsible for our failures on a personal level and as a country is our habit of blaming others for our misfortune. It's as though we try so hard to gain sympathy from listeners that we are unable to tell a simple story without having a villain in it. 

You know the popular villains now, the doctors who gave us death reports but God pass them, it doesn't matter that we fail to go for medical check-ups until symptoms become life-threatening, but then God simply has mercy on our souls and keeps us alive. Yet, instead of ascribing the glory to God jejely and going back to our seats during testimony time, we shame the doctors doing their jobs. 

What of lecturers? They're always out to fail us. The part where we miss a couple of tests and our names hardly make the class attendance list stays hidden in the closet of our hearts. 

Then, the female domestic helps, female secretaries and office subordinates that snatch our husbands, we blame our crumbling marriages on them, refusing to come to terms with the fact that men are not babies without a will of their own, and that we ignored the warning signs that we were about to get entangled (not engaged) with a casanova for a fiancé.

Oh, and did you really think I'd forget the chairman of them all? The step parents and/or step-siblings in collaboration with the village witches who work actively to see us fail, it doesn't matter that the average Nigerian operates with a mediocre mindset, focusing on what to get, rather, than on what to give, a sure foundation for irrelevance. 

It would be quite unreasonable of me to dismiss all stories of spiritual  wickedness and physical manifestations of human envy as false, but this I know for sure: There aren't as many enemies as we rave so much about. 

People seriously need to get over themselves and work on their own lapses rather than peg unfavourable events on the enemies they make up by themselves. 

Truth is, hearing such fantastic stories makes me almost lose whatever empathy has been building up in me, and I just roll my eyes instead, like, "hmph! Won tun ti de o".

We like to take the praise for our successes, but a greater virtue we need to learn is how to take the fall for our failures and accept that more than half the time, we are the villains responsible for those failures.

20.06.18