Problem of inferiority complex among Africans
By Njoku SaintJerry A.

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery; for none but ourselves
can free our minds." -- (Bob Marley).

In this poetry-like essay I will be sharing with you certain attributes of a man of low self esteem and reasons behind certain actions we exhibit that are inhibitors to human progress and overall development in Africa.
The major problem in Africa and among Africans is a feeling of inferiority…what I will address as a slave or colonial mentality. From a closer observation this feeling of low self-esteem has abysmally destroyed the thought-processes of so many African leaders and elites and is being transferred.

If you write, preach and talk much about anything without effecting any action or taking at least a single lead to change the vices…You are inferior. Very soon your words will be of no use to the people. If you preach don’t cheat and you cheat another business partner justifying your actions as being smart, you sing don’t dupe people and you dupe another man, you shout love, love, love but you practice hatred…Your Inferiority is driving you blind. The reason you preach all these virtues without keeping not even one is because you’ll love to be heard all the time, you fancy ‘relevance’ like the Chameleon, you want to blend to every colour… you wriggle into every public forum shouting against all the negative vices we Africans do to each other that are inhibitory to individual and national progress of we black people only to get noticed as one important lot but the fact is as long as you don’t take the lead or join in any meaningful group to bring about a concrete positive change among your people, your inferiority complex is driving you around, you want to feel what you are not. The emancipation of the African people from the clutches of poverty and misery can only be achieved by constructive planning and work and not by mere abstract argument and denunciation of all the wrong we do to each other.

If your father or uncle is a member of the Nigerian ruling council and he flies abroad for medical check up at every slightest opportunity, he automatically considers even his own country an inferior region, which means he is inferior and a nobody…There is no difference between overseas doctor and African doctor, they studied the same MBBS or whatever, most Nigerian nurses even fare better than their oversea colleagues but because your father, Chief, Alhaji, Professor etc is an inferior person, he thinks flying overseas for medical check up is an achievement so he make sure that one local newspapers carries it that Chief, Dr. so, so, and so traveled abroad for medical check up. My brother your inferiority is alarming!

Do you know that those doctors overseas even charge your uncle and father higher rates for a mere medical check up? Even if they know you’re going to die because of your carelessness, they’ll make sure they collect an upfront of a huge sum.
Find out how many Nigerians leaders have died in a London hospital and pitch your tent with the Londoners for a second and see if such people like ours that buzz around oversea hospitals for every slightest malaise has any regard for themselves and their people...the London hospitals charge them very high fees because they consider you a fool flying all the way from Africa to their tiny hospital for a mere check up or medical attention after they have given you the freedom you agitated for to rule yourself and build your own society, build your own hospitals and develop yourself...and you’re still jetting around to and fro among Mr. White and Co. for even the smallest problem that one blind man can solve anywhere.

My brother, this is colonial mentality in practice. Those days we use to drool in the mouth when we see a Whiteman, but exposure and some personal education of the mind has taught us that he is just an individual like myself and nothing more. In all the places I have worked in as a Blackman, I have been privileged to be preferred over my white colleagues and paid even higher... If you think his environment is more conducive and beautiful than yours, he made it so. But your fathers refused to change and neither wants a change in any form even among their own people so you see them still lapping around Whites and anything Whiteman even after the so called craving for independence yet you bring nothing home from all your oversea trips to share because you want some unwarranted honour accorded you…”Our son traveled to ofasee, let us go and welkom him”...your inferiority complex makes you think you are any bit important!

If you always give the impression that you are rich and so should be respected because you have some cash to burn, people should carry your bags while you flaunt your riches, people should stand up and give you recognition even when you’re late to functions…my brother, you are inferior and blindingly stupid, the worth of a man is what is in his brain and the issues of his mind and not the stolen cash in his pocket, anyway, it’s not always some stolen cash. Some men do have a nice job that fetch them spare cash and I bet you don’t think having a nice job and good income makes you any bit more important than others so that you treat subordinates or colleagues with contempt else your inferiority is blindfolding…What we do in life, what we are and what we will be is simply complimentary! Whether you’re poor or you’re rich. There is no black without white; I hope you get that into your head.

If your father, uncle, sister or country men still run to overseas to deposit money he ripped off his own people, he is an inferior individual and he is so confident about his inferiority, so he thinks in his mind that once ‘Mr. Oyinbo’ see my stack of cash, he will know that I am an important person from Africa and he will give me some recognition and a quick pass into his country…Jesus Christ! This is a man of low-self esteem! so in other to be accepted by members of the international community that has never wanted you in the first place, he defraud his own people, steal their moneys, money meant for road projects, schools and hospitals to overseas and indulge in a buying spree…in the name of ‘shopping abroad’ with monies he rarely worked for, to give ‘Mr. White’ the impression that he is rich…then some, he keeps in oversea banks and the banks will invest his monies into their own beautiful country, and he runs back to his impoverished country to steal some more like rats do…this one is the most stupid kind of all inferiority!.

An example of such inferior people is one DSP Alamieseigha, former governor of Bayelsa State, Nigeria and his fellow rats. The entire state in which he once governs as the Chief executive has only one multi-lane, paved road, which leads only to the capital…I doubt if they have a working electricity in that oil producing region yet it was discovered that this man used public funds to acquire several multimillion dollar properties in the United Kingdom, set-up seven British bank accounts, and bought a yacht!

Anyway, common sense has taught us that there is a difference between being rich and being wealthy, what else, like a certain ‘blogger’ quoted on his website…A wealthy man create riches or income for others and his systems keeps supplying that wealth, while a rich man makes himself rich and could be making others poor. He almost creates nothing; he has no intention or lacks the ability to help others. His main interest is possession of money by defrauding others especially members of his own community and taking advantage of common helpless people.

My brother, tell your godfather or godmother and friends that corruption undermines economic growth, it jeopardizes financial stability of any institution or organization and undermines confidence in government institutions. It also leads to criminality that has negative effects on governance and the rule of law.

If you tell lies, so that lying becomes a habit and you do it as an order of business…you are very inferior, infact you are a coward because you only tell lies to the one you are afraid of…If I tell you a lie or the truth, it won’t add even 1cm to my height neither will it make my life better…so why should I lie to you….who are you anyway?
The book of wisdom teaches us that a dishonest mind is rooted in false pride as a reason of mis-education.

If you give gifts and monies to induce people to vote for you during elections, you are the grand father of all inferior people and if you will vote anyone into place of leadership because he gave you some gifts either in cash or in kind, you inferiority has no bound, this is the house Negro kind of mental slavery according to Malcolm X! You don’t want your people to make any meaningful progress and as long as you eat fine and live in comfort, the slave master should drive on.

Somebody steals so much public funds to use it for his own selfish purpose, monies meant to develop schools, hospitals and roads in Africa, he kept them all to himself and during election, he brings some out to give to you as gifts so that you could vote him again and you collected the money in all enthusiasm and joins his praise fellowship.
My brother, I know it’s really tough on you, collect his money, but don’t vote for him! There will be no meaningful progress with the likes of people who embezzles public funds trusted into their care no matter how he tries to justify himself…these are the crop of inferior people from Africa…some of them claim to have a degree in education because I can see a ‘Dr. and ‘Prof.’ titles before their names but my brother, what they have is academic training, education is meant to refine an individual from mental inferiority to a positive thinking individual.

One of the reasons why most African leaders, Nigeria for example don’t care about developing their regions is this; they assume that by subjecting their own people to emotional torture, poverty and misery, it will be much easier to re-use them whenever the need for them arises especially for a negative selfish purpose because a cringing poor man is a perpetual slave.

My brother, this is colonial mentality, worse still, this is a mixture of slavery and colonial mentality because even the colonial masters didn’t subject the people to so much pain and misery like my brothers are subjecting each other today…they paved the road so that they could see where to drive on, they built cities and decorated them so that their living environment would be conducive, even while stealing from the locals they built railways that connects towns and regions of their itineraries and employed the locals to assist them in everyway, where the locals were unable they trained them…My grandfather was a missionary translator to the Whiteman and later graduated to speak the languages himself and he became a missionary too before his death…he was trained!

Now at the end of colonialism, my people took over and decided to imitate the Whiteman, they not only assume the position of the colonial master but became the modern slave masters enslaving their own people in poverty, unemployment, housing and Medicare, this is the weapon they used to hold their own people in bondage to forcefully command respect and awe of their own people,…Why do we appreciate negative virtues this much my dear friend?...Only an inferior person will force others to obey and respect him by reason of material acquisitions.

This is the reason why whenever any election is in the offing, the inferior slave masters will come on board and sing these songs to his slaves, “I will build houses for everyone once voted into power”, “I will give jobs to one million people in one month”, “I will build hospitals and bridges from Lagos to London”, since the slaves are always in captive until the day of revolt, they have no choice than to accept and re-accept this master who they know has held them in captives all their life, with an illusive hope of probability of the master keeping to any of his promises. Like all colonial imperialist, their strongest weapon is the ‘Divide and Rule tactics’…He will toss a piece of apple to one set of the slaves and they’ll go against the other sets of slaves…with this idea, He will keep them busy while he steals from his own people…So why one group is complaining bitterly in the form of opposition and protest groups against the injustice meted out to brother against brothers and their underdeveloped environmental condition another group is singing praises of the slave master, those that received mere apples and crumbs from the master’s left over… how nice and magnanimous he is…while the looting thrives unchecked.

An example of such slaves is one Mr. Chris Uba in Anambra State, Nigeria…Who cared less about how badly underdeveloped his region is but has been bent on an infamous political this and that with his own people, another slave is one Pro-IBB for president campaigner, Obi Mbadiwe, and lots more I need not mention because they love to see their names on papers, this gives them joy…Cheap name dropping without one bit of achievement other than…. ’E don buy 7 Hummer Jeeps, E get money like sand! This man knows that the former slave master has so many apples to share so he decided to lead the “Praise Singing Fellowship”…nothing more other than that!

Without digressing, only an inferior person enjoys a cheap publicity even for an infamous trend, what are you proud of? Causing mayhem in your region, with so much poverty and lack everywhere, you threaten your own people with team of gun wielding security operatives all the time, SUV’s and Hummer Jeeps driven on muddy roads that you have withheld the money meant to pave the roads. You do this because you are a worthless person so the best idea in your head is ‘seeking relevance’ and because you lack any form of creativity to impress the people, you decided to impress them with some stolen money from the grand slave master and something you call ‘political influence’.

What else…If you defraud people, you cheat and dupe to become rich, my dear, you are practicing your inferiority like an art, you have reduced yourself to the place of animals, the reason why you dupe, defraud your people and cheat others in business is because of a warped brain of inferiority that inhibits any creative idea emerging from your head…Jesus Christ!, How can you develop?...How can your region progress with your likes everywhere?... Your fathers, uncles, brothers and sisters are skimming off the entire country and people of every humanity left in them and like rats do, one of the oppressed people managed to wriggle out and engage in some business with another slave and you rip him off, you cheat him and want all the proceeds to yourself alone then you go ahead fabricating lies to checkmate your fellow rat!

My brother, inferiority complex has consumed any humanity left in you, because all right thinking human beings who crave for progress knows of a certain that there will never be any meaningful progress of the people and their society without a cooperate contribution of each member of the people to their own welfare and progress, respect to humanity and a cooperate restoration of human dignity!

Finally, good people, let’s imbibe the right attitude to change, no one else will bring this desired development to our societies other than me and you, if you live overseas and all you do is wriggle into online forums to trade blames here and there while doing nothing meaningful to bring about any positive change to your own societies…You are only helping to trade your inferiority around. I am an artist and working out a project on how I can use my art to influence a change back home so I implore you to do the same in your own field of expertise. Don’t regard any man or woman be him of any position who tell lies to outwit his own people, these are dumb fellows although they be in position of leadership, they cannot achieve that feat if we make them compete for it like in true sportsmanship. This is why all this inferiority and colonial mentality is being traded around…

Teach your younger ones who can’t read to shun inferiority and accept themselves as unique individuals with a God-given personality that cannot be cowed over a bottle of beer or some One thousand Naira from one Politician to go and foment trouble somewhere, hold seminars in churches and schools, teach your wards that the only thing special about our White brothers is ‘a collective mentality’ of their own…They put heads together to build a decent environment for themselves, and they consider it barbaric to embezzle monies meant to develop the society or treat a fellow human being like an animal, in China where I live, if you do that the government will cut you short immediately! One man can’t afford to hold an entire region to ransom because he has the largest purse, worse still, a public purse he has hold claim in all selfishness and greed…No, that can’t happen!

One fact we Africans must get clear is; to live to yourself alone is to live in hell. And if you hold anyone down, neither you nor he who is hold down is free.

Brothers and Sisters heal yourself! Redeem your society’s image. Redeem Africa. You are the best doctor to your own problems!

Njoku SaintJerry A.
PRC
jerrynjoku@artseffx.com
saintjerry75@hotmail.com