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Our Oga Problem

December 4, 2009

Image removed.Most Nigerians love to be called Oga. Not only because it projects relevance but also because it entitles the bearer to a natural or forced subservience. To be called Oga is a reassurance that one has subordinates and social inferiors that are willing to confer on or concede to one the trappings of socio-economic distinction. But the Oga phenomenon is also an allegory for our many afflictions as a nation. At the heart of the Nigerian crisis of values, bad leadership, and social decay is an obsession with a distorted, vulgar notion of what it means to be important, to be an Oga.



Right off the bat, let me state that there is nothing inherently wrong with coveting Ogahood. The quest for Ogahood is at some level the expression of a can-do, ambitious spirit that ought to have been harnessed to positive ends decades ago. That, however, is the subject for another essay.

Everyone desires recognition. A sociologist once described the object of most social movements and struggles as the quest for recognition and redistribution. We all desire to have our humanity, identity, and rights respected but we also want to obtain tangible material benefits that we feel entitled to. This proposition assumes that society produces and distributes benefits and that members sometimes seek these benefits through the leverage of status and identity recognitions.

The problem in Nigeria is that we desire status and want to be able to deploy that status for personal pecuniary gains, but we shirk the responsibility of contributing to the production of the material benefits we covet—the benefits that come with Ogahood. Ours is an insatiable desire for the benefits of Ogahood and a corresponding disdain for its responsibilities.

In its fullest realization, Oga is the Nigerian rendition of the popular figure of the African big man. The original African big man is a father and a patriarch, a servant, a caregiver. He is a compassionate do-gooder who may occasionally consume conspicuously and partake in bizarre and vulgar rituals of power but who nonetheless denies himself for the community’s sake.

In Nigeria we have divested the big man concept of its connotations of servitude and selflessness. In its banal expression through the Oga phenomenon, it signifies a desire to be served and attended to but not to serve or sacrifice for country or community.

This is why some Nigerians would give and do anything to be reckoned with as Ogas. They would kill, defraud, steal, rig elections, lie, and deceive. In this twisted moral universe, the attainment of Ogahood trumps the observance of mores and values that have root in our African upbringing.

Our politicians have no moral limits or restraint; armed robbers observe no sympathetic endpoint in the infliction of harm; security forces heed no procedural limits on brutality; and citizens swoon adoringly over the amoral—and immoral—Ogas in their midst. It is one vast network of mutually reinforcing idioms of vanity and moral compromise. The worst Oga, the most depraved big man, is the best role model.

The Oga wants to be a bigger Oga and would do anything at the expense of society and other citizens to ascend to that status. Keenly observing the moral recklessness of the Oga are his studious underlings. They have watched as their Oga has successfully navigated his way to the top, breaking laws, greasing palms, swindling, wheeling, and dealing along the way. Without the punitive deterrence of enforced law, the Oga’s immoral ways become a blueprint instead of a cautionary tale.

Everyone wants to be an Oga; no one wants to serve, to be an ethical, hard working citizen. Everyone wants to consume, conspicuously of course, but no one wants to bear the burden of producing. It would be interesting to see the day when we all become Ogas and there is no one to call us Oga because Ogas don’t call each other Oga—the day when the Oga title loses its valence and becomes an empty, banal pronouncement. Except that that day will never come in a society of limited resources and zero sum realities.

The Oga’s possessions and social status are their own justifications. This is a fundamental problem that transcends the cliché of the end justifying the means. In the peculiar world of Ogahood, the end is both the end and the means. Even pedestrian routines in the life of an Oga are a part of his public persona—a carefully cultivated motif of oppressive self-portrayal.

Even those of us in the diaspora have the Oga problem. In the narratives we construct for the consumption of our Euro-American friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, we are princes and princesses. I have yet to meet a Nigerian resident in Europe or North America who is not a prince or princess in their public script of self-packaging—a descendant of common African folk like me. Most of us see no virtue in noble statuses like peasant, laborer, craftsman, civil servant, and other pedestrian, if dignified, vocational titles. So we tell our Euro-American interlocutors that we are princes and princesses. We are willing to lie to get Oga-like recognition in foreign lands.

We never stop to think about the implausibility of an exodus of Nigerian princes and princesses who would curiously prefer various forms of laborious servitudes in Euro-America to the princely pleasures of their realms in Nigeria. Or that our Euro-American friends may call this narrative to question as stories of royal descent proliferate among us, wondering if Nigerian kingdoms had only kings and princes and not subjects.

Some of this is, of course, a product of the immigrant’s anxiety; no immigrant, especially a stereotyped African one, wants to be branded a refugee, an economic migrant. So we invent fables of prior princely lives to both impress our Euro-American friends and distinguish ourselves from black Euro-Americans of the slave trade diaspora.

But much of it is inspired by our love of highfalutin status and our aversion to non-Oga statuses and the virtues associated with them: hard work, labor, just reward, and moral innocence. We prefer an Ogahood that entails no honest, virtuous work. And our country is today paying dearly for this national attitudinal distortion.

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