Philip Ochieng'
4 July 2009
opinion
Nairobi — Many of my e-mail correspondents have received an SoS message pleading with them to send "me" some money because "I am" stranded penniless somewhere in Lagos. "I" was attending an international conference in the old Nigerian capital city and, somehow, ran out of cash.
I write this to inform my correspondents - including Sally Jacobs of the Boston Globe, Barack Muluka of the Standard and Joe Mbuthia of the Nation - that I am right here in Nairobi, that I have never been to Nigeria in my life and that I have not sent out such an appeal.
But such things happen. Almost daily, people get stranded, impecunious, in foreign lands. So it is quite natural for them to send urgent messages to a relevant individual (like a relative) or institution (like the employer or the banker) to bail them out. But I insist on the word "relevant".
Nigerians simply have no idea what damage they do their country's image -- and to that of the black world, in general -- by the cynical -- and amazingly unintelligent -- enthusiasm with which they have plunged into Internet crime ever since this technology was invented.
Every day that passes, I am bombarded with e-mail messages informing me that I am the "lucky winner" of anything up to a billion dollars in a "lottery" in which I never participated. No, my postal address - so that they can send me the cheque there - just will not do.
As though they collude with one another, their wording is almost identical in all cases. "The rules do not allow us to do that. We must send the money directly to your bank account.
Time is running out. So hurry up and send us the details of that account so that we can rush the money into it. Congratulations and enjoy your money."
I am often tempted to write back to ask them to try the American marines. But the thought appals me that people actually fall for this one-armed banditry and that the authors actually enrich themselves by invading and emptying the bank accounts of hundreds of respondents.
Practically all this cynicism comes from Nigeria - a country already notorious the world over for such other international crimes as traffic in addictive drugs and other contraband. But you also get the message from Benin, Togo, Niger, Ghana, Burkina Faso and other countries in the great West African Bend.
What happened to these societies? Nothing. Nothing, that is, except that the speed with which our own crime rate is spiralling, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and other East and Central African societies will soon catch up with and even bypass our siblings on the other side of the continent.
A society sinks into such putrescence at the same rate as its institutions of upbringing -- the cradle, the classroom, the church, the mosque, the synagogue, the pagoda, the workplace, the newsroom, the government -- all cease to be exemplars in conduct and become the "leader[s] unto darkness and death".
When he was the British Governor of Kenya, Sir Patrick Renison used those very words to warn against Jomo Kenyatta as our future ruler.
In retrospect, you cannot say that Sir Patrick was wide off the mark. Darkness and death have progressively descended upon our country ever since day one of independence.
The fact that colonialism -- the system over which Sir Patrick himself presided -- thrived on darkness and death does not make any difference.
It is a good thing the present high-tech revolution has occurred in post-colonial times. The Renisons would never have had any qualm about applying the technology upon Mau Mau and other nationalists.
Nevertheless, the fact is that we are in free fall into the abyss of depravity. By we, I mean we. I mean all of us. It is criminal nonsense to blame the police or the government alone when all individuals and the leaders of all our institutions, including the Church, have become citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Even if we can regale the Lord God with nyama choma in the Oaks of Mamre, whence will our Abraham come? Who will be intrepid enough to remonstrate with the deity to spare at least the one or two or 10 vestal virgins who remain among us when the Charybdis of high-tech crime begins to suck us in?
Which reminds me. High-tech crime has been with us ever since day one of its invention. Many improvements have been added to the magic. So the question is: Why is it taking so long for the whiz kids to come up with a foolproof anti-crime contraption?
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