The chronicles of Nigeria: The prince, the witch and the bad name

First of all excuse the tackiness of my title..i jus couldn't resist..lol

Ok, is it just me that is frustrated with all the bad press Nigeria has been getting this past month?
First of all every Tom, dick and Harry is claiming to be receiving emails form Nigerian Princes and other guises that Nigerian scammers use. Supposedly, they have now even stepped up from emails to facebook. As in what the freak! I read three different articles about this in the past month alone. Those that are not even scammable plus the gullible ones that have actually been victims. Nigerians need to please stop disgracing our country and bringing all these stupid insults on our name. Abeg!

Next, it was the documentary that aired on channel 4 about witch children. Talk about bringing out all the skeletons in our closet! Ok, y’all know this phenomenon of children being branded witches and wizards has been going on in Nigeria 4rm time. But its one of those things you only hear stories about and the stories are always told from the perspective of the victimised family/bosses etc. Also all those dodgy Nollywood movies helped perpetuate the idea of these evil witch children. So, granted, we were ignorantly living with this phenomena without anyone recognising the plight of these stigmatised damned children. I think that’s why its good to get out of Nigeria to escape the suffocating mentality that you don’t actually notice until you’re out of it. You know like when you’re in a smelly room you become so used to the smell that it doesn’t bother you anymore or you don’t notice it until someone from outside comes in and makes you uncomfortably aware that you are sat in a smelly room. That is exactly the case with this documentary. It shamefully opened up our eyes to what we have been allowing in our country. To make it even worse it was now aired on Channel 4! Do you know how many people watch that channel? They were now doing reruns again?! Now almost every person in England will associate Nigeria with Ignorant, religous crazed people. Not minding that this documentary featured just one part of Nigeria but we will not go into that right now. Cuz really and truly the whole of Nigeria is afflicted with Religous crazed ignorant people..be it the extremism of sharia law in the north, the overzealous witch branding people of the south and just the ever readiness to blame any unfortunate incident on supernatural causes.

It did not end there oh! Some journalist went on to write a story about how day old babies were being sold over the counter in Lagos/ Enugu (the writer was confused about the location). That one got on the yahoo news headlines. That one caused another uproar about gross human rights abuse and yadayada. Excuse my language/tone. I’m not in anyway justifying or condoning all the stupid shameful acts that have been carried out by Nigerians but there is only so much damage that the Nigerian label can take! I mean I have to tell people I am from this goddamned country (We’re not goddamned in Jesus name…lol) and then I have to now be associated with all this bullshit.

Please this our generation better be more sensible. I can only hold a little hope that we would try to change our dirtied image in time. People in general just like to dirty our name whatever chance they get and we give them too many opportunities to do this! So people, pls try to be the best Nigerian you can be! American & British People love being branded by their nationality because they are proud of it. Whatever you do you cannot deny your nationality, so make it something you can be proud of.