Do the Work: Nigeria’s Dangerous Obsession with Buck-passing
By: Golden Worlu
Tags: Nigeria, Leadership Development, Social Change

Photo by Romina BM on Unsplash

The Nigerian pledge ends with the following statement: “So help me God.” On paper, this statement acknowledges the enormous power in the human mind and hand. It also recognizes the fact that there are things beyond our control and encourages us to ask for some help when appropriate.

In practice, this statement has translated to a strong belief that our specific circumstance as Nigerians has nothing to do with us and as such, can only be fixed by an external body, God, in this instance. This translates the powerful, potent “So help me God” to the weak, flaccid “Only God fit help us”.

Many terms come to mind when I think of the average Nigerian, few of them positive ones. Of the many non-positive ones, the following spring to mind easily: grumblers, comedians, buck-passers.

Buck-passing specifically is highly encouraged, on a cultural and institutional level. It’s why leaders hardly take the blame for underperforming agencies and ministries, and why things hardly get fixed; its never our fault anyway, let the next man fix it.

But how did we get here? Part of the reason we exist in this brutal, repressive, dysfunctional society isn’t our fault, I agree. Blame colonialism and imperialism. But part of it IS our fault: see irresponsibility, bad leadership, and followership.

And since some of it is our fault, we owe it to ourselves to fix the parts we’ve broken and even go over and beyond to battle the demons we didn’t create. But instead of fixing this mess, what have we done? We’ve delegated the hard work of solving our problems to some hypothetical entity. We’re not even sure who, but anyone — God, the UN, the US — anyone that’s not us, works just fine.

We’ve come to say “maybe someone else will protest, maybe someone else will speak out, maybe someone else will walk the talk.” We’ve come to expect other people to solve our problems. Maybe some messiah will come, maybe Obama will listen to Rema and… what exactly?

The biggest person we expect to come running is God. But from the looks of things, this isn’t something that can happen. He probably could but he more likely won’t fix this, not with a magic wand, at least. Fixing Nigeria is not a project God can commit to, pardon my presumptuousness. In many ways, it would be a task so arduous and so unnecessary, he would probably consider it unworthy of his time.

Substituting Work for Grace

There’s a running gag in The CW’s hit TV Show “Everybody Hates Chris”. It’s essentially Chris’s mother running into some inconvenient situation and then flaring up and responding with, “I don’t need this, my man’s got 2 jobs!”

A similar mindset seems to run through many Nigerians. They might not say it out loud but their actions consistently say “I don’t need to work, I’ve got God!” Never mind that the Christian scripture admonishes that “faith without works is dead”, apparently, that’s a very easy verse to ignore.

What’s not ignored is the concept of grace; one so mouth-watering, it’s been preached to redundancy. As the sermons usually go, if you have grace, you will be besieged by goodness on all sides while you sit perfectly still. You will find opportunities, get money, avoid accidents and survive COVID-19. You will be so highly favoured, you won’t need to work.

Grace covers you to the point that when you uncover yourself, it takes it upon itself to cover you again. How convenient this all sounds, but if you read the scriptures even lightly, you’d be skeptical of such sermons.

Why is believing in God an access pass to not working? How have we come to believe that if there’s a God, then we shouldn’t work? The gospel of Christianity encourages adherents to maintain a personal relationship with God. People have taken this to mean talking to him about everything but actually doing nothing. You can ask for strength and favour and ask if your next move aligns with his will but by all means, do the work! Stop taking “Jesus take the wheel out of context”.

If believing in God is your way of passing the buck and absolving yourself of responsibility, you’re doing it wrong.

How could God look at Nigeria, with the millions of us in it, perfectly capable of changing our collective fate and just step in? How would he do it, really? Would he magically make our leaders not want to embezzle? “Magically” make us not throw waste in the drains? Make us not beat red lights? Make us pay taxes?

No matter how caring you understand God to be, he’s not a babysitter and you’re not a helpless infant. Think about the relationship parents have with their kids. Or the one older people have with their younger ones. You do for them what they can’t, that’s understandable. Even when they ask that you do things they’re quite capable of doing, you indulge them sometimes but you wouldn’t keep doing it forever, would you? At some point, you’d decline their requests just so they can act, no? Why should God be different?

I’m sure God takes all our prayers in good faith but if you did less chattering and more listening, you’d probably hear him speaking back, saying, “Do the work.”