The question is HOW do we build a society that shifts the middle of the Bell Curve so that fewer moral people fizzle out? To me, the answer is in what we truly reward. We need to move away from a society that rewards bad behaviour, and this starts from the top. Enough of all the “change begins with me” nonsense.That’s what someone recently told David Hundeyin, as recounted in hisThat thing cut my soul because it is true.
Back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and these two stories fall within our basic needs. The majority of the things that fuel corruption in Nigeria fall within those basics. Almost all Nigerians are one major health emergency away from poverty. Just after I had been forced to take a second month’s salary advance, and then a loan from another friend, someone approached me with one unethical deal , so I closed my eyes, facilitated the deal, and got paid. The money that I was so ashamed to take helped pay for my friend’s father’s treatment, and get this: He has not fully recovered till today, five years after.In 2021, a friend was kidnapped. In his house in Abuja.
Now, consider if he was a journalist and the price of his release was to kill a story he was working on. How many people in Buhari’s Nigeria won’t pay such a price willingly?In the Bell Curve of life, the vast majority of people, Nigerians included, are in the middle. We just want to be left alone. So as that intrepid person eloquently told David, “we have seen your type, you will fizzle out.”