I had an Afro-American colleague back in the day when I lived in the US.
One day at work he was asking me about Nigeria, and somehow the discussion got to the political system we practise.
I told him we practise the US Presidential System of government.
He looked at me in shock and said:-
”You do what….?”
The guy was utterly disgusted.
”What the hell is wrong with you Africans? When will you grow some dignity and balls and stand on your own damn feet?
You had working empires and kingdoms before the white man. Why the hell do you need to copy their system of government?
Why can’t you devise yours? And you wonder why there’s corruption and nothing works there? Get the fck outta here, you dumbass motherfckers!!!”
That was when it occurred to me that we had come to see our foreign dependency syndrome as ‘normal’.
But the outside world sees it as very strange and abnormal.
They see it as a sign of weakness, and a declaration of intellectual deficiency and surrender.
The British colonialists did a real job on us. They seriously messed up our way of thinking.
How can it be that a nation of 200 million Africans cannot (or rather refuses to) sit down and devise a workable, homegrown political system?
Why the hell does it feel the need to travel thousands of miles across the ocean to see how white foreigners govern themselves a totally different culture and then copy it wholesale to implement in Nigeria, a totally different culture?
And then when, naturally, the system fails to work in your country the way it works in the country you copied it from, you start to attack your ‘leaders’, attack yourselves, hate other ethnic groups, and even attack your race, for being ‘useless’.
