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Professor Jega on a daily basis is asking for several billions of Naira; Prophetess Ayoka’s presence is precipitating pandemonium in Ondo state; the electoral timetable is tearing politicians apart; and the northern elites are torn between zoning and Goodluck. Politicians across the nation are planning, political underdogs are panting, and law abiding citizens of Nigeria are panicking as we drive towards 2011.
On paper, Professor Jega is qualified to lead Nigeria’s electoral body. His spell at ASUU is enough exposure for someone on that hot seat considering the perennial agitations of Nigeria’s ivory tower elites. As a learned individual, he has the intellectual capacity to run the central agency and possess the diligent audacity to address political parties’ excesses. Though it looks like Jega’s INEC is getting its house in order and on the right path to organizing befitting elections, not everything is within the tight reins of Jega and his commissioners. These defiant areas are where dangers lie ahead of our electoral reforms.
Last weekend, the terror-characterized bye election that was held in Ondo state under the religious eyes of Mrs. Ayoka was a tip of the iceberg of what we should expect in the forthcoming 2011 general elections. While transporting electoral materials and personnel to some areas, the INEC crew and security officials were waylaid by political touts who shot sporadically and went away with the ballot boxes. As usual, the policemen at the scene outran Usain Bolt for their dire lives.
While this is new to the Jega-led INEC, incidences like this are frequent in our political history. In fact, currently, Nigerian elections are considered to be null and void without incidences of ballot box snatching and stuffing, cutlasses and clashes, and widespread bloodshed. The south west region of Nigeria, as an extension of the entire country, has several flashpoints where there is strong panoply of political hooliganism.
Before the political days of Obafemi Awolowo, the imminent propensity to violence of political hooligans had been a central political schism. In what seems like a sustained ancestral ritual, the success or failure of a south western politician remains a factor of the number, strength, dexterity, and sophistication of his Calvary of touts; thus making elections in the area similar to the much-awaited Armageddon. The situation becomes quite embarrassing considering what seems like relics of law enforcement.
The Nigerian Police is notorious for its rare blend of haplessness and helplessness when it comes to handling political uproars and preventing break down of laws and orders at the polls, and beyond. In several cases where evidences are substantive, the force is often reluctant at effecting meaningful arrests. Moreover, the operations of the force had been extensively reduced, by only-God-knows-what, to investigations-in-process that often yield no meaningful concrete results. It is regrettable that in the real sense, The Nigerian Police Force is ill equipped, unprepared and woefully failing in its role of ensuring security of lives and properties.
It’s widely acclaimed that Nigerians, despite the deplorable state of the state, value individual life greatly and would dissociate from anything that brings them within arms reach of danger. Hence if the next elections are intended to validate the voice of the real Nigerian people, and not that of the blood shot red eyed societal miscreants, then Jega and his crew should worry more on how to provide and ensure adequate reliable security during and after electoral outings. Apart from this, the proposed new electoral register would be additional archival materials for the post-2011 INEC chairman. For start, Professor Jega needs to tame the growing wild wings of members of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) in the south west region.
Ogun and Oyo states are state studies of the effects that the union has on state peace and stability. Troubles are fomented at the slightest provocation and when the dust settles, several lives and properties are usually lost. In times past, the mayhems used to be restricted to disagreements over the ownership and control of motor parks until recently when politicians had saddled the various chapters of the union with the duty of recruiting, managing and deploring touts at will.
When hell was let loose at the Oyo state House of Assembly, observers and several media publications claimed that the leadership of the state chapter of the NURTW played central role in the success of the fracas under the supervision of some highly placed members of the state executive. The state’s local government elections also witnessed a mammoth turnout of NURTW members that were armed with reflecting sharp cutlasses. In all instances mentioned, the respective security operatives are still carrying out their ‘investigations’ while the beneficiaries of the terrors are smiling to the bank.
It is expedient for the Jega-led INEC to critically understudy this union, and similar ones, that politicians are using as unregistered electoral armies. The electoral body should look for a constitutional means of ‘substituting’ the present Nigerian Police with something that can truly police the poling booths.
The major setback in Nigeria’s quest for free and fare elections is not Iwu’s voters’ register, poor training of electoral staffs,-but the land-mine status of the polling booths. While Jega is talking big grammar and electoral economics, the local offices of the various political parties are fast becoming homes for societal misfits who smoke hemps and sharpen their cutlasses in preparation for the battle of 2011. Who will stop them?
How much will Professor Jega need to equip Nigerian policemen that are poorly equipped and well outnumbered? How many billions of Naira is needed to fix the cantankerous twenty-Naira addiction of our official men-in-black-uniforms which could make them complacent or accomplices in electoral manipulations? Does the agency have enough money to grant amnesty to political thugs? And do we have sufficient time to reform them?
President Goodluck Jonathan should make good his promise to organize a free-and-fair election by tightening the loose nuts and replacing worn out tires in the system. The voters’ register is not the major issue; we need adequate security. Of what use is an accurate voters’ register and well trained electoral officers when touts and hooligans with dangerous weapons are disrupting electoral process and disenfranchising law abiding citizens of their constitutional rights? None I guess.
Presently, the only evident difference in the services rendered by these two tiers are the medical trainings—undergraduate and postgraduate—offered by the tertiary health institutions, and what remains of our extensively eroded health referral system. In Ibadan for instance, both UCH (a tertiary health institution) and Adeoyo General Hospital (a secondary health facility) treat secondary wounds, deliver babies, give immunizations and vaccinations (duties of primary health centers), operate HIV clinics, carry out minor and major surgeries, and train medical and paramedical staffs. Nigeria’s emergency medical practices and wards also point to the fact that our health system is in disarray.
The entropy (degree of disturbance and disorderliness) is highest in our tertiary health facilities where patients with minor cases that are treatable with a salt-sugar solution mixture compete for medical attention with those presenting with medical conditions that could only be treated at the prestigious King Fasai Medical Center in Saudi Arabia.
It’s only in Nigeria that a 911 dial gives a number-not-in-use response. Our various governments claim to have procured ambulances, yet no citizen knows how to contact them when in dire need. It’s therefore an expected aftermath that Nigeria, despite its enormous oil wealth, has one of the highest emergency mortality rates in world history. Even Mozambique and Tanzania fair better than the self acclaimed giant of Africa!
No thanks to the lackadaisical attitudes of those at the top, these shortcomings, as bad as they are, are nothing when compared with associated dangers of the numerous accesses that are now available to terrorists, and anyone with harmful intentions.
According to the Atlanta based US’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a bioterrorism attack is the deliberate release of viruses, bacteria, or other germs (agents) used to cause illness or death in people, animals, or plants. The agents used are ubiquitous and are widely found in nature, but could be transformed to increase their viability and ability to cause disease (e.g. botulinum toxin), drug resistant (e.g. XDR-TB), or to increase their ability to be spread into the environment (e.g. anthrax). Air, water and food are common routes of spread.
Any terrorist with scores to settle with the Nigerian government or a desperate politician who can pay a medical scientist may produce biological agents that are extremely difficult to detect.
Globally, bioterrorism is fast becoming an attractive weapon because biological agents are relatively easy and inexpensive to obtain or produce. They can be easily disseminated, and can cause widespread fear and panic beyond the actual physical damage they can cause. Politicians too are gradually seeing bioterrorism as a potential tool in ensuring victory at the polls. This has been used in God’s own country—the USA.
According to a Wikipedia article, in 1984, followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh attempted to control a local election by incapacitating the local population. This was done by infecting salad bars in eleven restaurants, produce in grocery stores, doorknobs, and other public domains with Salmonella typhimurium bacteria in the city of The Dalles, Oregon. The attack infected 751 people with severe food poisoning.
In Nigeria where dangerous arms proliferation goes unabated, weaponization and dissemination of agents like small pox, anthrax, botulinum toxin, bubonic plague, and several others are but a piece of cake. The fatality of such would be as a result of our popular synonyms- executive nonchalance, cantankerous corruption, poor planning and very late response.
Biosurveillance, early detection and rapid response are the keys to combating bioterrorism. These involve a close cooperation among doctors, medical laboratory scientists, epidemiologists, security agencies, and a working healthcare system. With political agitations and confrontations coming from all fronts, it is not a white elephant project for Nigerian government to start putting its health house in order to prevent sacrificing the lives of innocent Nigerians on the altar of peculiar ignorance, professional inertia and political insanity.
As a matter of urgency, governments at all levels should remove the health sector from their political reach and allow the health system to be run by the experts. The experts should also collaborate with the brilliant minds at the ivory tower to fortify our health boundaries against adverse medical invasions and importation of foreign diseases as experienced with the report, few years ago, of Asian avian influenza in Lagos and other states of the federation.
A complete overhaul of the Nigerian healthcare workforce is long overdue as the system is presently footing the bills of numerous ghost workers and wrong workers. The government needs to sort this out to ensure that our medical facilities are manned by qualified and experienced professionals that would ensure the good health of the sick patients and patient healthy citizens.
Since our traditional health practitioners are quite numerous and currently enjoy the patronage and trust of a large proportion of the sick population, the Nigerian Ministry of Health needs to incorporate the alternative health practitioners as primary healthcare providers, and closely monitor their activities and not act, like NAFDAC numbers, as an official rubber stamp for all shady activities and esoteric procedures.
There is also the need for the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency (NPHCDA) to go back to its situation rooms and drawing boards after awakening from its perpetual slumber. The nation is in dire need of a rejuvenating and reinvigorating programme that would revitalize our sick primary healthcare and equip our local clinics with required facilities and resources (human and otherwise) to regain the long lost confidence of grassroots’ healthcare seekers.
The age long professional bias in the Nigerian health system is another clog in the wheel of the progress of the sector. The administration at all levels should be unfaltering, just and fair in ensuring that this is permanently removed, and compel health professionals to see contemporaries as colleagues, and not competitors or enemies.
The NHIS’ current shape is shameful hence an understudy of the UK’s NHS and US’ Medicaid is suggested as this would enable Nigerian health insurance policy formulators to have an idea of how national health insurance should be operated with the interest of care seekers, and not care providers, at heart. If Guilder and other beer brands could get to every corner of the nation, health insurance policies should.
There is an urgent need for meaningful health campaigns aimed at informing and attracting citizens to government health facilities. At government hospitals, healthcare seekers should be treated with courtesy, confidentiality and mutual respect that are accorded law abiding citizens of the nation by the Nigerian Constitution.
The frequent sojourns of Nigerian leaders abroad in search of quality treatment for minor ailments connote more doom for our already disarrayed health sector than a bioterrorist’s anthrax threat hence such travels should be stopped. If government officials are satisfied with, and could boast of the quality of healthcare they’ve put in place at our various health institutions, they should be confident enough to fell asleep under the influence of anesthesia in our hospitals without any doubt on their minds.
Whichever way we choose to progress, let’s have it on the back of our minds that time is fast running out. Sooner or later, the only thing that would be safe is our last breath because the next, might actually be the last.
Apart from the WHO whose major role as an offshoot of the United Nations is to ensure that member countries have closely monitored health sectors, and that health episodes of intra and international epidemiologic interests are well documented, individual countries also have central roles to play in ensuring that their citizens are healthy. According to protagonists of medical history, the most viable and far-reaching effective National Health Programme is the one that encompasses the primary, secondary and tertiary tiers of government, and health infrastructures. This is the type we have in Nigeria.
Rais Akhtar in one of his numerous publications reiterated the fact that the Nigerian federal government’s role in health in recent years has been limited (restricted) to coordinating the affairs of the federal university teaching hospitals and medical centers, NAFDAC and other health- related agencies, while individual state government, through respective hospital management boards, manages the various general hospitals. The local governments in Nigeria on the other hand regulate the activities of dispensaries, pharmacies, community health centers, local maternity clinics and more recently, traditional healing homes.
In Ronald J. Vogel’s book—Financing Healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa—Nigeria’s total expenditure on healthcare as a percentage of GDP was put at 4.6, while the percentage of federal government’s total expenditure on healthcare was (and still) a miserly paltry 1.5% when juxtaposed with the nation’s official (and muted) population size, enormous health challenges like the incessant ethnic uproars and disease-predisposing religious crisis up north. The nation is also groping with illiteracy, endemic malaria, ravaging HIV, astronomic population upsurge indicating the imminent need for improved birth control, poliomyelitis, drug adulterations (fake drugs) and several other Proudly Nigeria health-related debacles which point to the fact that very soon, if something urgent is not swiftly done, danger looms at all levels.
At the state level, the dividend of democracy—politicization of the administration and running of state-owned health institutions—spells great doom. Unlike past years when duly and ably qualified health professionals were at the helm of affairs at the General Hospitals, it is gradually becoming a familiar scenario, especially in South Western Nigeria, for opulent potbellied politicians to parade themselves as heads of the Hospital Management Board (HMB). Apart from the possibility of funds meant for the development of the state’s health sector growing wings or being used for a wrong cause, the yardstick with which the success or otherwise of the health sector is measured is gradually transmogrifying from the reputed overall assessment of the health of the citizens and residents, to the number of contracts awarded by the government. Oyo state is a good case study.
On its official website (www.oyostate.gov.ng), the state government’s webmaster highlighted the following state government pioneered projects as a sign that its health sector is vibrant.
- Hospital Equipment worth 70million naira was procured by the Ministry of Health to Government hospitals in the year 2007.
- Essential drugs and consumables worth N52million were procured during the period. Contracts for the supply of Essential Drugs and consumables worth 298 million naira were also awarded to contractors in December, 2008.
- Commissioning of Health facilities, namely Cold Chain Laboratory, Eleyele, Primary Health Center, Odo-Oba, Ogo Oluwa Local Government, Butubutu, Ona-Ara Local Government and Primary Health Center, Ogbooro, Saki East Local Government.
- Construction of General Hospital, Iwere-Ile, Iwajowa Local Government is almost completed and will be ready for commissioning soon.
- Three buses were procured by Health System Development Project II [HSDP-II] for Health Institutions, namely schools of Midwifery, Nursing and Hygiene.
- Two other vehicles were procured by HSDP-II for Projects Monitoring.
- Several others
According to a recent edition of WHO Bulletin, the state still has a high incidence of poliomyelitis (a viral disease that has been declared extinct in most countries of the world). Furthermore, mental illness in Oyo state has escalated to the level that if INEC does a thorough job and fairness is ensured, mad men and women can now contest and win elections in the state. And socially, the health status of Oyo state indigenes and residents couldn’t be worse.
Social welfare services provided by the state are literally non existent, yet the state, like most Nigerian state governments, spends hundreds of millions of Naira absurdly publicizing procured equipment, renovated hospital infrastructures, free condoms, and prompt payment of health workers’ salaries as indications that the state’s Ministry of Health is healthy. The ravaging misplaced priority has also been extended to the grassroots—the primary healthcare—where the local governments had lost the confidence of the local communities.
Sometimes ago, I was at Alade Orthopeadic Hospital in Oke Adu Area of Agodi Gate, Ibadan where the owner—Dr. Moruf Alade—was happily having a busy day seeing to the health needs of his patients who religiously and astutely followed the expensive esoteric treatment regimens. While at the clinic, I coincidentally saw Egbeda Local Government’s Mobile Clinic drove bye. Unlike what is expected of an ambulance, the automobile was packed full with bananas, plantains and other perishable edibles.
Nowadays, sick citizens that can afford private services are gradually not seeing government-owned primary health centers as reliable clinics to get treatment when sick. In the same vein, privately owned motherless babies homes like the one in Total Garden, Ibadan, and Red Cross Home for the Motherless situated at Warehouse, Hospital Road Owerri, now enjoy more patronage than respective State Child Welfare Units which are fast becoming CICS offices where social workers lend and borrow money at will.
Local government chairmen nowadays are enthralled by the pictures of established health centers which would be used for canvassing for votes at the polls, and not actually meeting the health needs of the host communities. Little wonder that few months after the glamorous opening ceremony, thorns and bushes encroach on the new clinic while rats and termites become the attending patients of the drug-deprived, poorly lit and deserted Local Government Health Center. Good examples are some health centers found in Ibadan North East, Ogun Waterside and Isiala Mbano Local Government Areas of Oyo, Ogun and Imo states respectively. The National Primary Healthcare Development Agency (NPHCDA)—the agency responsible for the regulation and establishment of primary healthcare centers—is also haplessly helpless in the discharge of its saddled responsibilities of ensuring that our primary healthcare centers cater for our primary health needs.
Few years ago, going to bed on an empty tummy and waking up to an malnourishing meal seemed to be a familiar tale in Nigeria. However, since last week, President Jonathan or his Honorable Minister for Facebook Affairs has added another feather to our national cap— Aso Rock e-comedy. The question now is- are you filled?
In all ramifications, Nigeria remains an interesting country. Although other countries of the world, especially the so called G8 countries, can boast of economic vibrancy, personnel resourcefulness, security intelligence and political might, our political geniuses are also not lagging behind. For more than 5 years since Nigerians caught the internet fever and Facebook addiction, the online community used to be the arbiter and home zone of the so called internet militants. With several websites that are spearheaded by nigeriavillagesquare.com and saharareporters.com. Nigerian writers home and abroad, young and old; ensure that though the Freedom of Information Bill is dust-laden in the chambers of The National Assembly, our voices are heard online. Current scenarios however indicate otherwise. We’ve been compromised.
Almost every political execu-thief is on Facebook. The list also includes several lawmakers and senators, governors who now have special advisers on Facebook Matters, ministers, commissioners and several heads of government establishments. There are also budding political office seekers who disguise under the pretense of youth advocacy to gain undue popularity. However, none of these individuals could be said to brandish a potent online talisman like that of Mr. President who now seems to be hosting the online version of NTA’s AM Express live from Aso Rock studios.
Like Angel Gabriel blaring his vuvuzella on the second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, Dr. Pat Utomi and other popular e-warriors sounded the trumpet announcing Goodluck Jonathan’s debut on Facebook. And before you can say Jo, President Jonathan had taken over the internet. When he sneezes, expect about 13,000 comments and 25,000 likes. And when he delivers his long speeches in form of status updates, Facebook servers bear the brunt as Nigerians in thousands compete for Mr. President’s attention. This shows that as far as 2011 is concerned, Jo holds the ace with his online craftiness which is epitomized in his ‘brilliant’ promises for the Nigerian youths. Even the self- proclaimed genius does not come that close.
Last Friday, President Jonathan pledged his administration’s unalloyed ommitment to ensuring that our ivory towers are functioning perfectly. This he said would be achieved by prompt payment of lecturers’ salaries, personnel training and infrastructural development among other interventions. Without an extensive juxtaposition of those words with his recent incidences, Mr. President’s page was over painted with goodwill messages from those who are either star struck, or seeking the good face of Goodluck.
Unlike what Reuben Abati, Okey Ndibe, Pius Adesanmi and other literary warriors propagate online, especially the popular notion of Save Nigeria Group that Nigerians are angry with the status quo and crave for change; it’s becoming evident, on a daily basis, that Nigerians are actually enjoying the show!
If not, we would have set aside a day that every comment would be absolutely against every wrong actions of Jo’s administration and recommend our marshal plans. He said he reads them, why shouldn’t we draw his attention by uniting in our clamors instead of seeking PHCN contracts, Aso rock visits and Presidential handshakes?
The geniuses at Facebook are ensuring access, what we do with it is left to us. Goodluck wants to spend billions yet a large percentage of his friends pat him on the back. Is it that we can’t come up with a strong argument against such, cannot recommend better things to do with the sum, and cannot prove through uploaded videos that the average Nigerian is embittered? As far as present responses are concerned, Jonathan could as well go ahead with the spending since the money would grow wings sooner or later!
It’s evident that Goodluck is having a good time reading all those wonderful comments from the so called oppressed youths and sidelining fellow contestants like Utomi et al at the same time.
I can’t believe that in the twinkle of an eye, President Jonathan could attract such a huge attention in the blogosphere that Dr Utomi, Ribadu, Momodu and the rest once dominated. The stage, though fair enough for all to thrive, seems to be dominated by Mr. President, yet the Nigerian opposition parties are resting on their oars and giving everything away sheepishly (and stupidly) to Jonathan. It’s surprising that the Action Congress (AC), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), APGA. Labour Party and the legion of mushroom parties are nowhere to be found with the elections not far away. The internet ought to have become the theater of minds where accusing fingers are pointed, issues are raised and fears are allayed. Presently, this is not the case.
What if other candidates host their own Facebook shows like Jonathan is currently doing? What if they point out his shortcomings and sell themselves to Nigerians at no extra cost? It is a gospel truth in Nigeria that popularity, good or bad, plays a vital role in ensuring victory at the polls; but if current results are anything to go by, Jonathan is taking the lead.
Nuhu Ribadu, Pat utomi, Nasir El Rufai, IBB, Goje, Ahmed Yerima, Bukola Saraki, Pastor Chris Okotie, Dele Momodu, Donald Duke, Atiku Abubakar, other acclaimed candidates and intending presidential aspirants should take on Jonathan on a daily basis. Let there be clashes of ideas, conquests of intellects, contests of opinions, and evidence of intelligence. This is what e-democracy is all about. If they can’t challenge Jonathan on Facebook, how feasible will it be to contend with someone with the power of incumbency tightly secured in his hat?
The President should also sit up to the issues being raised by some Nigerians who are not hypnotized and are making good use of the medium to have their opinions passed across. There have been several reports of people being blocked and prevented from posting comments on our President’s wall. Jonathan should realize that this is a rare blend of democracy and internet liberty. Hence he should either delete his account, or step up and allow freedom of speech- our amended constitutional right.
Come what may, unlike in times past, the internet would be a good place to judge our political aspirants. Nigerians need to open their eyes well enough to fairly judge how these crop of politicians handle issues, issue statements, and state their views on various issues ranging from global security to common pornography. I can’t wait for the next episode of A.M. Express with Lucky Jo while hoping that other aspirants would grow some balls.
Nigerian Witches: Where Are You?
Adepoju Paul Olusegun
"You witches too, bring your science into the light to be written down so that ... the benefits in it ... endow our race."
- Janzen & MacGaffey
- Janzen & MacGaffey
As of 2006, between 25,000 and 50,000 children in
It was reported on May 21, 2008 that in
Christian pastors in
Elsewhere, in
In
Some of the healers and diviners historically accused of witchcraft made themselves mediators between the physical and metaphysical realms. They described their contacts with fairies, spirits or the dead, often involving out-of-body experiences and traveling through the realms of what Ginzburg called an 'other-world'.
Beliefs of this nature are implied in the folklore of much of Europe, and were explicitly described by accused witches in central and southern
According to Rose Ariadne, African witchcraft is a nature based religion, where one or more deities, nature spirits and ancestral spirits are worshipped. The witchdoctor, with his or her ability to commune with deity, nature spirits and ancestral spirits, is traditionally held in awe - an awe which is an odd mixture of respect and fear.
The witchdoctor can be either male or female. Although there is no gender equality in African culture, no distinction is generally made where spiritual practices are concerned. The witchdoctor is responsible for divination, healing, presiding over rituals, conducting rites of passage, performing sacrifices, finding lost cattle, protecting warriors, casting and removing spells, and narrating the history and myths of old.
For harmony between the living and the dead, which is an essential component of leading a trouble-free life, ancestors are shown respect by means of daily offerings, prayers and songs, elaborate rituals and animal sacrifice.
Witchcraft in the African sense may be used for both positive and negative purposes. It can be used to bless and to curse, to cure and cause disease, to bring peace and to initiate battle, to protect and to harm, to create and to destroy. These are specialties that Nigerians can utilize to find a lasting solution to our peculiar national challenges.
In the popular Harry Porter series, the young wizard singlehandedly saved the universe from the hands of those seeking to destroy it, led by the-one-whose-name-must-not-be-mentioned. The same scenario is playing itself in
The recent visits of selected Christian leaders and Islamic clerics have shown that prayers alone cannot solve
Our witches had been reputed as capable of dragging someone in New York City to Erunmun village in the split of a second; let them use the same magic to call forth Yar’adua from his sparingly accessible Aso Rock’s solitary confinement.
In The Legend of The Seeker, we saw how a map was made to specifically locate an individual using something that belonged to the person being looked for. We all have access to Yar’adua’s pictures hence Nigerians will be eternally grateful if our witches can teleport (metaphysical form of transportation) journalists, photographers, reliable medical experts, cameramen and others to the President’s current location without being seen by Turai and her cabal.
In Yoruba culture, ancient warriors used egbé and àféèrí for swift transport and gathering intel information about their opponents. If any witch can help us out, since Bishop Oyedepo et al won’t talk, the entire nation won’t be kept in the dark. Also, the acting President and the National Assembly would be armed with enough evidence to implement Section 144 of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution, or commence impeachment proceedings as the case might be.
Globally, our witches are known for their unimaginable powers. However, we are all affected by the epileptic and erratic power supply. If they are indeed powerful, they should help us reach out to the electrical forces and resolve the mystery that has gulped billions of Naira in several failed attempts to fathom. If the problems are man made, let the witchdoctors cast spells on those behind it, and if metaphysical, let the witches fight for us. Every Nigerian home - bewitched or with witch - is in darkness, and the government has failed in solving this mystery. Hence if there is anything anyone can do, don’t mind religion, Nigerians are open to suggestions!
Handling corrupt leaders is another area where Nigerian witches could help out. I’m of the opinion that western problems warrant western solutions, and indigenous challenges need indigenous resolutions. In
How lovely will it be if our politicians swear by Ogun, Nworie river goddess, Amadohia, and other local and regional gods and goddesses? Be that as it may, Nigerian witches can help us speed up the snail speed judgment process, avenge us, and administer justice on corrupt officials. It would be awesome if all corrupt leaders are daily afflicted with untreatable boils, sores, chickenpox, and midnight nightmares! They will not steal without daring the consequences. And the once bitten ones won’t have the nerves, as shown by IBB, to return to such hot seat. The works of EFCC, Amnesty International, Transparency International, and social crusaders would be made easy if witches and wizards can take our predicament personal.
Another area of interest is that of conflict resolution.
Recently, the mad clans in Jos went on rampage for the umpteenth time. Nigerian witches can help solve this national embarrassment once-and-for-all if they can send delegates to the state to carry out massive flogging of perpetrators- Moslems and Christians- such that next time religious crisis is ideated in any of the camps, the fear of unseen rod would prevent such. Moreover, the Bible says “do not spare the rod!”
Many are of the opinion that the inability of Nigerian witches to act is as a result of the widespread act of witch hunting by the likes of Helen Ukpabio. It is however worthy to note that if the witches want to be spared, they should demonstrate their relevance. Helen Ukpabio and other witch hunters should also pick their Bibles and get a better understanding of God’s position on witch hunting.
In the Holy Scripture, references to sorcery are frequent, and the strong condemnations of such practices found there do not seem to be based so much upon the supposition of fraud as upon the abomination of the magic in itself.
The King James Bible uses the words "witch", "witchcraft", and "witchcrafts", wherever the Masoretic text, from which it is translated, has כשף (kashaph or kesheph) and קסם (qesem), and the Septuagint has φαρμακεια (pharmakeia); similarly in the New Testament it uses 'witch', 'witchcraft', and 'witchcrafts' to translate the φαρμακεια (pharmakeia) of the underlying Greek text.
Traditional translations of verses such as Deuteronomy 18:11–12 and Exodus 22:18 therefore produce "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" which was seen as providing scriptural justification for Christian witch hunters in the early Modern Age.
However, Kashaph more literally means either mutterer (from a single root) or herb user (as a compound word formed from the roots kash, meaning herb, and hapaleh, meaning using); the equivalent pharmakeia of the Septuagint means poison. As such, a closer translation would be potion user (additionally, pharmakeia implies further malevolent intent), or more generally one who uses magic to harm others, rather than a very general term like witch.
The Bible provides some evidence that these commandments were enforced under the Hebrew kings:
And Saul disguised himself, and put on other raiment, and he went, and two men with him, and they came to the woman by night: and he said, I pray thee, divine unto me by the familiar spirit, and bring me him up, whom I shall name unto thee. And the woman said unto him, Behold, thou knowest what Saul hath done, how he hath cut off those that have familiar spirits, and the wizards, out of the land: wherefore then layest thou a snare for my life, to cause me to die?
The Hebrew verb ‘Hichrit’ (הכרית) translated in the King James as ‘cut off’ can also be translated as excommunicate, or as kill wholesale or exterminate. It should be noted that the Hebrew word ob, translated as familiar spirit in the above quotation, has a different meaning than the usual English sense of the phrase; namely, it refers to a spirit that the woman is familiar with, rather than to a spirit which physically manifests itself in the shape of an animal. If this is true, then witch hunters should go after the spirits, and not the old women and children who are said to have contacted them. This is done during sensibly serious and Biblical deliverance sessions.
As it now seems, pastors had failed us as a nation, Islamic clerics are also short of ideas; the nation is at a standstill, and in dire need of help. It is evident that
"The availability of e-mail has helped to transform a local form of fraud into one of Nigeria's most important export industries."
Insa Nolte, University of Birmingham's African Studies Department.
Greek George Makronalli was 29 years old when he was invited to South Africa in 2006 to complete a lucrative deal with his new business allies. On arrival, his host supposedly took him round on a familiarization tour of infrastructures on ground for the smooth take off of their enterprising deal. At a particular point however, he suspected foul play when he noticed that many things were amiss in the deal. He tried to back out but his host won’t succumb, a situation which culminated in several bitter outbursts. George was overpowered, kidnapped, and murdered in cold blood, when his family failed to pay a stipulated ransom. This incidence sparked off INTERPOL investigations into the matter. George, however, is not the only one who had died after falling mugu (victim) of internet scams.
In November 2003, Leslie Fountain, a senior technician at Anglia Polytechnic University in England, set himself on fire after falling victim to a scam; Mr. Fountain died of his injuries. In 2006, an American living in South Africa hanged himself in Togo after being defrauded by a Ghanaian 419 con man. In 2007, a Chinese student at the University of Nottingham killed herself after falling for a lottery scam. That’s not all.
In February 2003, Jiří Pasovský, a 72 year-old scam victim from the Czech Republic, shot and killed 50-year old Michael Lekara Wayid, an official at the Nigerian embassy in Prague, and injured another person, after the Nigerian Consul General explained he could not return $600,000 that Pasovský had lost to a Nigerian scammer. While death is usually at the extreme, the usual aftermaths of successful scams are monetary losses.
In a 2006 report produced by a research group and reported by BBC News, it was estimated that internet scams cost the United Kingdom economy £150 million per year, with the average victim losing £31,000. Individuals are often the worst hit.
Nelson Sakaguchi, a director at the Brazilian bank Banco Noroeste, transferred hundreds of millions of US Dollars to Chief Emmanuel Nwude, Nigeria's most accomplished scammer. The scam led to at least two murders, including that of one of the scammers, Mr. Blessing Okereke. The scam was the third biggest in banking history, after Nick Leeson's activities at Barings Bank, and the looting of the Iraqi Central Bank following the March 2003 US invasion.
In 2008, Janella Spears, an Oregon woman, lost $400,000 to a scam, after an e-mail message told her she had inherited money from her long lost grandfather. Her curiosity was piqued based on the fact that she actually had a grandfather whose initials matched those given in the email. She sent several hundreds of thousands of US Dollars over a period of more than two years, despite numerous opposing views from her family, bank staff and law enforcement officials. It is therefore evident that internet scams are devastating and spell great doom for national economy and global security, but this wasn’t the intention of the founding fathers (and mothers) of scamming.
In the late 1800s, Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. The first recorded instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram started from May, 1864. Until the Great Depression of the 1930s, wealthy North American residents were deluged with nebulous investment offers. This problem never fully emerged in Europe to the degree that it did in the Americas, because telegraphy was regulated by national post offices in the European region.
Arguably, the aggressive email spamming by a number of high-profile spammers such as Sanford Wallace of Cyber Promotions in the mid-to-late 1990s contributed to making spam predominantly an email phenomenon in the public mind. Prior to 2009, most spam mails sent around the world were in the English language; since last years however, spammers had began to use automatic translation services like Google Translate to send spam mails in other languages.
Throughout the history of spamming, one fact was clear-spam was meant to facilitate access without which marketers wouldn’t have been able to contact their prospective customers. However, as deeply rooted in the human mind, abuse of anything is inevitable. Scamming gives access, what the user now does with the access is left to individual choice. Spamming was majorly used for advertisement, product promotion and awareness in the past; starting from late 20th century however, spamming has found its synonym in crime and criminality.
Spam can be used to spread computer viruses, trojan horses or other malicious software. The objective may be identity theft, or worse (e.g., advance fee fraud). Some spam attempts to capitalize on human greed whilst other attempts to use the victims' inexperience with computer technology to trick them (e.g., phishing). The question that now rises is how could spamming be successfully carried out in a country like Nigeria that is on every published publication on internet scam? The answer, according to the active yahoo boys consulted, is simple, use the tools!
A serious scammer starts with the purchase of a secure IP address from any of the online proxy address retailers for a token. To know how it works, I got one from proxy.com with the aid of a credit card (I will come to that later on). Instantly, my IP address was changed to that of Cyprus. With this, a scammer is able to hide his identity. The next stage is getting the email addresses of prospective mugus. While some internet scammers have and share a mailing list, advancement in technology now makes email list creation relatively easier with the use of email extractors. I was introduced to emailextractorpro.com.
According to its manufacturer, Email Extractor is the software that allows email marketers conduct their email marketing campaigns without any efforts. “Our intention was to create affordable, flexible and efficient email marketing software.” The software allows users to access several large diverse databases like America Online (AOL), Google, Yahoo!, etc, as well as create some addresses via encoded algorithms.
When email addresses are collated, the scammer then begins to send emails based on the specialty of the spammer. Wikipedia has a good feature on the different sectors under internet scam, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_fraud. It is however worthy to note that the commonly encountered ones are the next-of-kin, wire transfer, goods purchase, check cashing, lottery scams, and internet romance. Others include those related to charity, fraud recovery, eBay, Craiglist, Bona vacantia (properties without owners) and several others.
Communication with potential victims is another challenge in spamming considering the fact that callers originating from Nigeria are handled with greater caution. When I was told the way out, fear gripped my heart.
My ‘lecturer’ typed UKNumbers.com into the address and I was guided through a short step which resulted in a free UK cell number (7023037975) that automatically diverts calls to my cell number in Nigeria.
As shown in my experience, the booming nature of internet fraud in Nigeria is as a result of a 3-faceted strong collaboration and complementation that entail foreign empowerment, Nigerian factor, and evil ingenuity.
I’ve come to realize that everything being used to perpetrate internet frauds and scams-tools, websites and services- are not created in Nigeria or by Nigerians, but abroad. For those involved in credit card detail theft for example, Graham King is a name that readily comes to mind; he is the genius at darkcoding.com, a place where credit card numbers could be gotten free of charge. The testimonies of the site’s visitors are also appalling, although Graham claims the card are fake.
Users like Dineshkumar Ponnusamy used one of the cards to buy something worth 3500 Euros, another reader claimed to have purchased a Sony laptop with one of the credit cards. This shows that all the ideas behind scam did not originate from Nigeria; the computer application packages that are utilized are not created in Nigeria, but downloaded from numerous foreign sites with scammers whose reputations are legendary in the business of scamming.
According to a 2009 Cisco Systems report which listed the origin of spam by country, Brazil, USA and India are the origin of about 17.9 trillion spam messages per year with Brazil blazing the trail. Nigeria, as notorious and synonymous as the country’s name is with scam, is not even on the top ten list which makes one wonder what is peculiar about Nigerian scams?
My interactions with young boys who daily throng cybercafés revealed that unlike their foreign contemporaries, Nigerian scammers are more desperate, a situation that makes their impacts harder felt than other scammers in other parts of the world.
In America for instance, citizens are not at a greater risk of being swindled, it’s the stores, shops and other establishments like banks. In India, telecoms companies like Mobitel are the major focus of internet scams. On peperonity.com and other social network platforms, Indian IT gurus share free call cheats with contemporaries while software design and advanced hacking are the major sources of revenue generation. To the Nigerian scammer however, everyone is a potential mugu-the poor single black mother of four in the ghettos of New York, terminally ill patients and fellow Nigerians could be swindled. Many things are responsible for the peculiarity of Nigeria’s case.
One of such is the large number of scammers around. Nightly across the nation, especially in the South, several hundreds of thousands of Nigerians of all ages type away on keyboards. With each one of them knowing that thousands like him or her are sending the same message probably to the same set of recipients, victim selection is left out. This makes one inquire why there are so many people-young and old-that are interested in internet scams.
Based on my observations, I won’t blame unemployment and poverty; this is due to the kind of cars some of these scammers ride, and the evening shift scammers who are employed married old men who also try their luck. The most tenable reason would be the relative ease with which internet scam is carried out here, the complacency of Nigerian government and its agencies, and the gradual acceptance of internet scam as an acceptable vocation in some Nigerian cultures.
The roles of the Nigerian government in promoting internet scam are of high magnitude, and seem to be responsible for Nigerians’ online fraudsters’ status.
In 1997 for instance, an American was swindled by a Nigerian scammer who claimed to be an official of the CBN (most scams are woven around the CBN). During the course of investigation, she produced valid CBN phone numbers. Furthermore, when told to identify some staff, she was able to convincingly identify three top CBN staffs that were lined up. This shows that the CBN’s house, like most arms of the Nigerian government, is leaking. ATM fraud is another point of reference to the corruption in the Nigerian government.
In the course of my research, I learnt that when victims sheepishly give their bank account details, scammers send such details to someone with an ATM card printing machine that produces an ATM card for the account details provided, and such cards could be used at any ATM machine or POS terminal. One begins to wonder and ask how the machine got into the wrong hands. However, one stops wondering after realizing the fact that this is a country where submarine ammunition, rocket launchers and war guns are in the creeks without an explanation on how they got there in the first instance, how much more a small concealable ATM printing machine?
In another similar scam in 2004 involving a number of Nigerian fraudsters, investigators asked Nigerian government to apprehend the beneficiaries of the largess since the wire transfers were traced to them. They got the shock of their lives when the Nigerian government said it wasn’t possible to arrest identified perpetrators.
Our banks are also playing the role of devil’s advocate and facilitator for internet fraudsters.
For a non fraudulent international wire transfer, it takes a minimum of 10 days for a transaction to be completed in UBA and Zenith Bank while it could take several weeks or months in banks like First Bank. But for a well connected internet fraudster, bank transfers could be completed within few hours to two days into untraceable bank accounts in any part of the world. How are they able to achieve this feat against the purported background of unemployed fresh graduates, and annual JAMB UME candidates? One of my respondents informed me that they have insiders in some banks that help them with wire transfers. Another infiltration is that of the law enforcement agencies.
While the notoriety of the Nigerian Police Force is legendarily monumental, Nigerian internet fraudsters, in addition to infiltrating the NPF, are organized into what they call hoods with godfathers that bail them out of any trouble encountered. Such troubles include EFCC arrests, Police incarceration and border complications. It is only those who are not well connected that are arrested in the Nigerian scam sphere.
NCC is another government agency whose helpless haplessness leaves much to thought, and I inquired about the possibility of blocking the websites that provide internet scammers with their tools. I was made to understand that it is as simple as ABC. Some events in the media confirmed this.
Few months ago, I tried to download a BBC Sports podcast but was told that access from my region is restricted. I tried using the hide-my-proxy IP that I procured online all to no avail. This shows that it is very possible to ban some websites from being visited in Nigeria, or restrict access. Iranian government successfully clamped down on social network websites during the last general elections when the opposition was utilizing the medium to instigate rebellion in citizens. Hence it's either NCC officials don’t know what they are doing, or are benefiting immensely from the status quo.
The last reason for the thriving nature of the Nigerian scamming industry could be traced to the colonial era when whites-Americans and Europeans, were seen as superior to the citizens of the colonized nations. According to a good source, yahoo boys are showing the world that Nigerian youths are smarter than the smartest whites. This is compounded by the inability of most of those duped to report such incidence to relevant authorities to guard against any negative implication or retribution.
Judging by the global trend in internet fraud, Nigeria's dark days are yet to come, hence there is still time to restore order. However, if the current trend goes unabated, the phase when banks and major companies would be victims is not far away.
Recently, there was a technical breach at MTN Nigeria, an incidence which gave hackers access to MTN database. Unlike before when message from 0803 were certified as directly from MTN, these hackers now send messages to subscribers with different claims. An uncle once fell victim as he was told to pay ten thousand Naira for the transportation of a giant screen TV he won in an MTN contest he never entered.
Effectively checkmating internet frauds and scams are a simple individual responsibility; we should stop being greedy and opportunistic.
On a daily basis, Prayer Mountains across the nation are filled with miracle seekers who pray for God’s hands to miraculously bless them. When such individuals receive such emails or SMS, they think it’s God that has answered their prayers. Their knowledge of the scriptures that all has roles to play in miracle perfection makes them go along with the mind game being played by the fraudsters and before they realize God’s innocence in the whole deal, scammers had eloped with their hard earned resources, starting another bout of frustration, rejection and poverty. Also, the emotional impact of being duped was recently placed on the same scale with rape by a recent New York Times publication.
To combat scammers therefore entails individuals not being greedy, selfish and unreasonably optimistic. Satisfaction, contentment and hope are the bedrock and themes of a life that cannot be defrauded. No matter how good an internet scammer is, there is no means of forcefully taking money out of the pockets of an individual that is not greedy.
NCC also needs to update its knowledge on internet safety. There are numerous recent means of combating online crimes, frauds and scams that the Ernest Ndukwe-led agency is evidently not aware of. All actions would be taken serious when there is an enacted legislation that criminalizes internet frauds.
Law promulgation and enactment evidently are duties of the legislature which in Nigeria is regrettably full of people who can’t even speak good English language, talk less of passing bills that could effectively curb internet misconducts. Moreover, how many of them know how to operate an ordinary Facebook account when all they could ask a prospective minister was her culinary skills?
Nigeria’s dreaded status in internet scam is in no way as a result of the skills of the scammers, but the inability of the Nigerian government to checkmate it, even when strong evidences could steer toward easy resolution. Our government is not serious; the regulating agencies are short of ideas, the law enforcement agencies are compromised and the yahoo boys are having a field day. This will continue until when someone who knows what to do comes on board. Till then, the message is simple; you’re on your own!
In November 2003, Leslie Fountain, a senior technician at Anglia Polytechnic University in England, set himself on fire after falling victim to a scam; Mr. Fountain died of his injuries. In 2006, an American living in South Africa hanged himself in Togo after being defrauded by a Ghanaian 419 con man. In 2007, a Chinese student at the University of Nottingham killed herself after falling for a lottery scam. That’s not all.
In February 2003, Jiří Pasovský, a 72 year-old scam victim from the Czech Republic, shot and killed 50-year old Michael Lekara Wayid, an official at the Nigerian embassy in Prague, and injured another person, after the Nigerian Consul General explained he could not return $600,000 that Pasovský had lost to a Nigerian scammer. While death is usually at the extreme, the usual aftermaths of successful scams are monetary losses.
In a 2006 report produced by a research group and reported by BBC News, it was estimated that internet scams cost the United Kingdom economy £150 million per year, with the average victim losing £31,000. Individuals are often the worst hit.
Nelson Sakaguchi, a director at the Brazilian bank Banco Noroeste, transferred hundreds of millions of US Dollars to Chief Emmanuel Nwude, Nigeria's most accomplished scammer. The scam led to at least two murders, including that of one of the scammers, Mr. Blessing Okereke. The scam was the third biggest in banking history, after Nick Leeson's activities at Barings Bank, and the looting of the Iraqi Central Bank following the March 2003 US invasion.
In 2008, Janella Spears, an Oregon woman, lost $400,000 to a scam, after an e-mail message told her she had inherited money from her long lost grandfather. Her curiosity was piqued based on the fact that she actually had a grandfather whose initials matched those given in the email. She sent several hundreds of thousands of US Dollars over a period of more than two years, despite numerous opposing views from her family, bank staff and law enforcement officials. It is therefore evident that internet scams are devastating and spell great doom for national economy and global security, but this wasn’t the intention of the founding fathers (and mothers) of scamming.
In the late 1800s, Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. The first recorded instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram started from May, 1864. Until the Great Depression of the 1930s, wealthy North American residents were deluged with nebulous investment offers. This problem never fully emerged in Europe to the degree that it did in the Americas, because telegraphy was regulated by national post offices in the European region.
Arguably, the aggressive email spamming by a number of high-profile spammers such as Sanford Wallace of Cyber Promotions in the mid-to-late 1990s contributed to making spam predominantly an email phenomenon in the public mind. Prior to 2009, most spam mails sent around the world were in the English language; since last years however, spammers had began to use automatic translation services like Google Translate to send spam mails in other languages.
Throughout the history of spamming, one fact was clear-spam was meant to facilitate access without which marketers wouldn’t have been able to contact their prospective customers. However, as deeply rooted in the human mind, abuse of anything is inevitable. Scamming gives access, what the user now does with the access is left to individual choice. Spamming was majorly used for advertisement, product promotion and awareness in the past; starting from late 20th century however, spamming has found its synonym in crime and criminality.
Spam can be used to spread computer viruses, trojan horses or other malicious software. The objective may be identity theft, or worse (e.g., advance fee fraud). Some spam attempts to capitalize on human greed whilst other attempts to use the victims' inexperience with computer technology to trick them (e.g., phishing). The question that now rises is how could spamming be successfully carried out in a country like Nigeria that is on every published publication on internet scam? The answer, according to the active yahoo boys consulted, is simple, use the tools!
A serious scammer starts with the purchase of a secure IP address from any of the online proxy address retailers for a token. To know how it works, I got one from proxy.com with the aid of a credit card (I will come to that later on). Instantly, my IP address was changed to that of Cyprus. With this, a scammer is able to hide his identity. The next stage is getting the email addresses of prospective mugus. While some internet scammers have and share a mailing list, advancement in technology now makes email list creation relatively easier with the use of email extractors. I was introduced to emailextractorpro.com.
According to its manufacturer, Email Extractor is the software that allows email marketers conduct their email marketing campaigns without any efforts. “Our intention was to create affordable, flexible and efficient email marketing software.” The software allows users to access several large diverse databases like America Online (AOL), Google, Yahoo!, etc, as well as create some addresses via encoded algorithms.
When email addresses are collated, the scammer then begins to send emails based on the specialty of the spammer. Wikipedia has a good feature on the different sectors under internet scam, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_fraud. It is however worthy to note that the commonly encountered ones are the next-of-kin, wire transfer, goods purchase, check cashing, lottery scams, and internet romance. Others include those related to charity, fraud recovery, eBay, Craiglist, Bona vacantia (properties without owners) and several others.
Communication with potential victims is another challenge in spamming considering the fact that callers originating from Nigeria are handled with greater caution. When I was told the way out, fear gripped my heart.
My ‘lecturer’ typed UKNumbers.com into the address and I was guided through a short step which resulted in a free UK cell number (7023037975) that automatically diverts calls to my cell number in Nigeria.
As shown in my experience, the booming nature of internet fraud in Nigeria is as a result of a 3-faceted strong collaboration and complementation that entail foreign empowerment, Nigerian factor, and evil ingenuity.
I’ve come to realize that everything being used to perpetrate internet frauds and scams-tools, websites and services- are not created in Nigeria or by Nigerians, but abroad. For those involved in credit card detail theft for example, Graham King is a name that readily comes to mind; he is the genius at darkcoding.com, a place where credit card numbers could be gotten free of charge. The testimonies of the site’s visitors are also appalling, although Graham claims the card are fake.
Users like Dineshkumar Ponnusamy used one of the cards to buy something worth 3500 Euros, another reader claimed to have purchased a Sony laptop with one of the credit cards. This shows that all the ideas behind scam did not originate from Nigeria; the computer application packages that are utilized are not created in Nigeria, but downloaded from numerous foreign sites with scammers whose reputations are legendary in the business of scamming.
According to a 2009 Cisco Systems report which listed the origin of spam by country, Brazil, USA and India are the origin of about 17.9 trillion spam messages per year with Brazil blazing the trail. Nigeria, as notorious and synonymous as the country’s name is with scam, is not even on the top ten list which makes one wonder what is peculiar about Nigerian scams?
My interactions with young boys who daily throng cybercafés revealed that unlike their foreign contemporaries, Nigerian scammers are more desperate, a situation that makes their impacts harder felt than other scammers in other parts of the world.
In America for instance, citizens are not at a greater risk of being swindled, it’s the stores, shops and other establishments like banks. In India, telecoms companies like Mobitel are the major focus of internet scams. On peperonity.com and other social network platforms, Indian IT gurus share free call cheats with contemporaries while software design and advanced hacking are the major sources of revenue generation. To the Nigerian scammer however, everyone is a potential mugu-the poor single black mother of four in the ghettos of New York, terminally ill patients and fellow Nigerians could be swindled. Many things are responsible for the peculiarity of Nigeria’s case.
One of such is the large number of scammers around. Nightly across the nation, especially in the South, several hundreds of thousands of Nigerians of all ages type away on keyboards. With each one of them knowing that thousands like him or her are sending the same message probably to the same set of recipients, victim selection is left out. This makes one inquire why there are so many people-young and old-that are interested in internet scams.
Based on my observations, I won’t blame unemployment and poverty; this is due to the kind of cars some of these scammers ride, and the evening shift scammers who are employed married old men who also try their luck. The most tenable reason would be the relative ease with which internet scam is carried out here, the complacency of Nigerian government and its agencies, and the gradual acceptance of internet scam as an acceptable vocation in some Nigerian cultures.
The roles of the Nigerian government in promoting internet scam are of high magnitude, and seem to be responsible for Nigerians’ online fraudsters’ status.
In 1997 for instance, an American was swindled by a Nigerian scammer who claimed to be an official of the CBN (most scams are woven around the CBN). During the course of investigation, she produced valid CBN phone numbers. Furthermore, when told to identify some staff, she was able to convincingly identify three top CBN staffs that were lined up. This shows that the CBN’s house, like most arms of the Nigerian government, is leaking. ATM fraud is another point of reference to the corruption in the Nigerian government.
In the course of my research, I learnt that when victims sheepishly give their bank account details, scammers send such details to someone with an ATM card printing machine that produces an ATM card for the account details provided, and such cards could be used at any ATM machine or POS terminal. One begins to wonder and ask how the machine got into the wrong hands. However, one stops wondering after realizing the fact that this is a country where submarine ammunition, rocket launchers and war guns are in the creeks without an explanation on how they got there in the first instance, how much more a small concealable ATM printing machine?
In another similar scam in 2004 involving a number of Nigerian fraudsters, investigators asked Nigerian government to apprehend the beneficiaries of the largess since the wire transfers were traced to them. They got the shock of their lives when the Nigerian government said it wasn’t possible to arrest identified perpetrators.
Our banks are also playing the role of devil’s advocate and facilitator for internet fraudsters.
For a non fraudulent international wire transfer, it takes a minimum of 10 days for a transaction to be completed in UBA and Zenith Bank while it could take several weeks or months in banks like First Bank. But for a well connected internet fraudster, bank transfers could be completed within few hours to two days into untraceable bank accounts in any part of the world. How are they able to achieve this feat against the purported background of unemployed fresh graduates, and annual JAMB UME candidates? One of my respondents informed me that they have insiders in some banks that help them with wire transfers. Another infiltration is that of the law enforcement agencies.
While the notoriety of the Nigerian Police Force is legendarily monumental, Nigerian internet fraudsters, in addition to infiltrating the NPF, are organized into what they call hoods with godfathers that bail them out of any trouble encountered. Such troubles include EFCC arrests, Police incarceration and border complications. It is only those who are not well connected that are arrested in the Nigerian scam sphere.
NCC is another government agency whose helpless haplessness leaves much to thought, and I inquired about the possibility of blocking the websites that provide internet scammers with their tools. I was made to understand that it is as simple as ABC. Some events in the media confirmed this.
Few months ago, I tried to download a BBC Sports podcast but was told that access from my region is restricted. I tried using the hide-my-proxy IP that I procured online all to no avail. This shows that it is very possible to ban some websites from being visited in Nigeria, or restrict access. Iranian government successfully clamped down on social network websites during the last general elections when the opposition was utilizing the medium to instigate rebellion in citizens. Hence it's either NCC officials don’t know what they are doing, or are benefiting immensely from the status quo.
The last reason for the thriving nature of the Nigerian scamming industry could be traced to the colonial era when whites-Americans and Europeans, were seen as superior to the citizens of the colonized nations. According to a good source, yahoo boys are showing the world that Nigerian youths are smarter than the smartest whites. This is compounded by the inability of most of those duped to report such incidence to relevant authorities to guard against any negative implication or retribution.
Judging by the global trend in internet fraud, Nigeria's dark days are yet to come, hence there is still time to restore order. However, if the current trend goes unabated, the phase when banks and major companies would be victims is not far away.
Recently, there was a technical breach at MTN Nigeria, an incidence which gave hackers access to MTN database. Unlike before when message from 0803 were certified as directly from MTN, these hackers now send messages to subscribers with different claims. An uncle once fell victim as he was told to pay ten thousand Naira for the transportation of a giant screen TV he won in an MTN contest he never entered.
Effectively checkmating internet frauds and scams are a simple individual responsibility; we should stop being greedy and opportunistic.
On a daily basis, Prayer Mountains across the nation are filled with miracle seekers who pray for God’s hands to miraculously bless them. When such individuals receive such emails or SMS, they think it’s God that has answered their prayers. Their knowledge of the scriptures that all has roles to play in miracle perfection makes them go along with the mind game being played by the fraudsters and before they realize God’s innocence in the whole deal, scammers had eloped with their hard earned resources, starting another bout of frustration, rejection and poverty. Also, the emotional impact of being duped was recently placed on the same scale with rape by a recent New York Times publication.
To combat scammers therefore entails individuals not being greedy, selfish and unreasonably optimistic. Satisfaction, contentment and hope are the bedrock and themes of a life that cannot be defrauded. No matter how good an internet scammer is, there is no means of forcefully taking money out of the pockets of an individual that is not greedy.
NCC also needs to update its knowledge on internet safety. There are numerous recent means of combating online crimes, frauds and scams that the Ernest Ndukwe-led agency is evidently not aware of. All actions would be taken serious when there is an enacted legislation that criminalizes internet frauds.
Law promulgation and enactment evidently are duties of the legislature which in Nigeria is regrettably full of people who can’t even speak good English language, talk less of passing bills that could effectively curb internet misconducts. Moreover, how many of them know how to operate an ordinary Facebook account when all they could ask a prospective minister was her culinary skills?
Nigeria’s dreaded status in internet scam is in no way as a result of the skills of the scammers, but the inability of the Nigerian government to checkmate it, even when strong evidences could steer toward easy resolution. Our government is not serious; the regulating agencies are short of ideas, the law enforcement agencies are compromised and the yahoo boys are having a field day. This will continue until when someone who knows what to do comes on board. Till then, the message is simple; you’re on your own!
"The availability of e-mail has helped to transform a local form of fraud into one of Nigeria
Insa Nolte, a lecturer of University of Birmingham
Greek George Makronalli was 29 years old when he was invited to South Africa
In November 2003, Leslie Fountain, a senior technician at Anglia Polytechnic University in England South Africa hanged himself in Togo University of Nottingham
In February 2003, Jiří Pasovský, a 72 year-old scam victim from the Czech Republic, shot and killed 50-year old Michael Lekara Wayid, an official at the Nigerian embassy in Prague, and injured another person, after the Nigerian Consul General explained he could not return $600,000 that Pasovský had lost to a Nigerian scammer. While death is usually at the extreme, the usual aftermaths of successful scams are monetary losses.
In a 2006 report produced by a research group and reported by BBC News, it was estimated that internet scams cost the United Kingdom economy £150 million per year, with the average victim losing £31,000. Individuals are often the worst hit.
Nelson Sakaguchi, a director at the Brazilian bank Banco Noroeste, transferred hundreds of millions of US Dollars to Chief Emmanuel Nwude, Nigeria
In 2008, Janella Spears, an Oregon
In the late 1800s, Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. The first recorded instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram started from May, 1864. Until the Great Depression of the 1930s, wealthy North American residents were deluged with nebulous investment offers. This problem never fully emerged in Europe to the degree that it did in the Americas
Arguably, the aggressive email spamming by a number of high-profile spammers such as Sanford Wallace of Cyber Promotions in the mid-to-late 1990s contributed to making spam predominantly an email phenomenon in the public mind. Prior to 2009, most spam mails sent around the world were in the English language; since last years however, spammers had began to use automatic translation services like Google Translate to send spam mails in other languages.
Throughout the history of spamming, one fact remains clear- spam was meant to facilitate access without which marketers wouldn’t have been able to contact their prospective customers. However, as deeply rooted in the human mind, abuse of anything is inevitable. Scamming gives access, what the user now does with the access is left to individual choice. Spams were majorly used for advertisement, product promotion and awareness in the past; starting from late 20th century however, spamming has found its synonym in crime and criminalities.
Spam can be used to spread computer viruses, trojan horses or other malicious software. The objective may be identity theft, or worse (e.g., advance fee fraud). Some spam attempts to capitalize on human greed whilst other attempts to use the victims' inexperience with computer technology to trick them (e.g., phishing). The question that now rises is how could spamming be successfully carried out in a country like Nigeria
A serious scammer starts with the purchase of a secure IP address from any of the online proxy address retailers for a token. To know how it works, I got one from proxy.com with the aid of a credit card (I will come to that later on). Instantly, my IP address was changed to that of Cyprus
According to its manufacturer, Email Extractor is the software that allows email marketers conduct their email marketing campaigns without any efforts. “Our intention was to create affordable, flexible and efficient email marketing software.” The software allows users to access several large diverse databases like America Online (AOL), Google, Yahoo etc, as well as create some addresses via encoded algorithms.
When email addresses are collated, the scammer then begins to send emails based on the specialty of the fake sender. Wikipedia has a good feature on the different sectors under internet scam, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_fraud. It is however worthy to note that the common ones are the next-of-kin, wire transfer, goods purchase, check cashing, lottery scams, and internet romance. Others include those related to charity, fraud recovery, Craiglist, Bona vacantia (ownerless property) and several others.
Communication with potential victims is another challenge in spamming considering the fact that callers originating from Nigeria
My ‘lecturer’ typed UKNumbers.com into the address and I was guided through a short step which resulted in a free UK cell number (+17023037975) that automatically diverts calls to my cell number in Nigeria
As shown in my experience, the booming nature of internet fraud in Nigeria
I’ve come to realize that all tools, websites and services being used to perpetrate internet frauds and scams are not made in Nigeria
Users like Dineshkumar Ponnusamy used one of the cards to buy something worth 3500 Euros, another reader claimed to have purchased a Sony laptop with one of the credit cards. This shows that all the ideas behind scam did not originate from Nigeria ; the softwares that are utilized are not created in Nigeria
According to a 2009 Cisco Systems report which listed the origin of spam by country, Brazil , USA and India are the origin of about 17.9 trillion spam messages per year with Brazil
My interactions with young boys who daily throng cybercafés revealed that unlike their foreign contemporaries, Nigerian scammers are more desperate, a situation that makes their impacts harder felt than other scammers in other parts of the world.
In America India Nigeria
One of such is the large number of scammers around. Nightly across the nation, especially in the south, several hundreds of thousands of Nigerians of all ages type away on keyboards. With each one of them knowing that thousands like him or her are sending the same message to probably same recipients, victim selection is left out. This makes one inquire why there are so many people interested in internet scams.
Based on my observations, I won’t blame unemployment and poverty; this is due to the kind of cars some of these scammers ride, and the evening shift scammers who are married old men who also try their luck. The most tenable reason would be the relative ease with which internet scam is carried out here, the complacency of Nigerian government and its agencies, and the gradual acceptance of internet scam as an acceptable vocation in some Nigerian cultures.
The roles of the Nigerian government in promoting internet scam are of high magnitude, and seem to be responsible for Nigerians’ online fraudsters’ status.
In 1997 for instance, an American was swindled by a Nigerian scammer who claimed to be an official of the CBN (most scams are woven around the CBN). During the course of investigation, she produced valid CBN phone numbers. Furthermore, when told to identify some staff, she was able to convincingly identify three top CBN staffs that were lined up. This shows that the CBN’s house, like most arms of the Nigerian government, is leaking. ATM fraud is another point of reference to the corruption in the Nigerian government.
In the course of my research, I learnt that when victims sheepishly give their bank account details, scammers send such details to someone with an ATM card printing machine that produces an ATM card for the account details provided, and such cards could be used at any ATM machine or POS terminal. One begins to wonder and ask how the machine got into the wrong hands. However, one stops wondering after realizing the fact that this is a country where submarine ammunitions, rocket launchers and war guns are in the creeks without an explanation on how they got there in the first instance, how much more a small concealable ATM printing machine?
In another similar scam in 2004 involving a number of Nigerian fraudsters, investigators asked Nigerian government to apprehend the beneficiaries of the largess since the wire transfers were traced to them. They got the shock of their lives when the Nigerian government said it wasn’t possible to arrest identified perpetrators. Our banks are also playing the role of devil’s advocates for internet fraudsters.
For a non fraudulent international wire transfer, it takes a minimum of 10 days for a transaction to be completed in UBA and Zenith Bank while it could take several weeks or months in banks like First Bank. But for a well connected internet fraudster, bank transfers could be completed within hours to 2 days into untraceable bank accounts in any part of the world. How are they able to achieve this feat against the purported background of unemployed fresh graduates, and annual JAMB UME candidates? One of my respondents informed me that they have insiders in some banks that help them with wire transfer. Another infiltration is that of the law enforcement agencies.
The notoriety of the Nigerian Police Force is monumental. In addition, Nigerian internet fraudsters are organized into what they call hoods with godfathers that bail them out of any trouble encountered. Such troubles include EFCC arrests, Police incarceration and border complications. It is only those who are not well connected that are arrested in the Nigerian scam sphere.
NCC is another agency whose helpless haplessness leaves much to thought.
I inquired about the possibility of blocking these websites that provide internet scammers with their tools. I was made to understand that it is as simple as ABC to block a website with particular themes. Some incidences in the media confirmed this.
Few months ago, I wanted to download a BBC Sports podcast but was told that access from my region is restricted. I tried using the hide-my-proxy IP that I procured online all to no avail. This shows that it is very possible to ban some websites from being visited in Nigeria
The last reason for the thriving nature of the Nigerian scamming industry could be traced to the pre-colonial era when whites- Americans and Europeans, were seen as superior to the citizens of the colonized nations. According to a good source, yahoo boys are showing the world that Nigerian youths are smarter than the smartest whites. This is compounded by the inability of most of those duped to report such incidence to relevant authorities to guard against any negative implication or retribution. As far as scamming is concerned in Nigeria
Recently, there was technical compromise at MTN Nigeria, an incidence which gave hackers access to MTN database. Unlike before when message from 0803 were certified as directly from MTN, these hackers now send messages to subscribers with different claims. An uncle once fell victim as he was told to pay ten thousand Naira for the transportation of a giant screen TV he won in an MTN contest he never entered. To effectively checkmate internet frauds and scams is a simple individual responsibility; we should stop being greedy and opportunistic.
On a daily basis, Prayer Mountains
To combat scammers therefore entails individuals not being greedy, selfish and unreasonably optimistic. Satisfaction, contentment and hope are the bedrock and themes of a life that cannot be defrauded. No matter how good an internet scammer is, there is no means of forcefully taking money out of the pockets of an individual that is not greedy.
NCC also needs to update its knowledge on internet safety. There are numerous recent means of combating online crimes, frauds and scams that the Ernest Ndukwe- led agency is evidently not aware of. All actions would be taken serious when there is an enacted legislation that criminalizes internet frauds. This evidently goes down to the House of Assembly which is regrettably full of people who can’t even speak good English language, talk less of providing laws that could effectively curb internet misconducts. How many of them know how to operate an ordinary Facebook account when all they could ask a prospective minister was her culinary skills?
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