Nigeria’s “Holier Than Thou” Syndrome -By Kehinde Oluwatosin

Kehinde Oluwatosin

The phrase “holier than thou” has successfully created a niche for itself in Nigeria’s ever competitive lingual exchange market.

A “holier than thou” attitude is a form of self-righteousness that is characterized by moral superiority above others. The phrase is complex in the Nigerian context because of the difficulty to know when the phrase is applied angrily as an attack on non adherents of our premodial and evil ways (e.g when an harem of prostitutes refers to their non prostituting colleagues as forming holier than thou) or when it is used against those who rise up as bastion of morals to intimidate the sensibilities of the rest of us to prove the superiority of their piety . The popularity of this phrase is connected with Nigeria’s Innate ability to create cliches out of words/sentence usage to sometimes sound urbane and posh, and also because of Nigeria’s complex social architecture that is often defined by class superiority . The complex social architecture of the typical Nigerian will form the praxis of this article. However, despite its popularity in Nigeria’s context, it is often discussed in social strata and rarely in official settings because of the supposed sanity that is expected to be the forte in official systems, however following my several interview experiences over the years ,I have been brought face to face on numerous occasions with Nigeria’s “holier than thou” attitudes in officialdom. An instance is when an employer insist that the interview time is 8am, and you could barely sleep in the night as you rushed your rumpled (rumpled because of years of inactivity) credentials into your bags and rush down to arrive at the interview venue before eight, you will get to the interview venue only to find the doors and gates of your prospective employer locked.

You will have to wait for another one hour before the gatekeeper (who is an ‘oga’ in his own right) leisurely stroll in to open the gate and engages you in a detailed commentary of why he had to come late- citing the traffic,the government, his pregnant wife ,his children etc as his reasons. He opens the reception and you will wait for another one hour for the interviewers who often seem to have forgotten the interview date and time going by their almost deliberate lateness to the interview venue.Meanwhile in your waiting time you have to adjust your legs and sitting position for the cleaner who also came late but needed to mop the dirty floor before the arrival of the ‘oga’. They are now settled,they call you in and demand for copies of your curriculum vitae,that you have sent it to them earlier does not matter,and at that point they bamboozle you with a plethora of questions ranging from the impossible to the implausible. In one of my encounters with the CFO of a leading bluechip oil and gas companies in Nigeria, I also encountered the “holier than thou” syndrome.He started “what is internal control?” I answered “it is a risk assessment measure put in place to ensure risks are identified, prioritized, measured and mitigated against” He vehemently said no! and insisted on the textbook definition of the term which states that “Internal control are all forms of controls financial or otherwise, that ensures operations are carried out according to extant rules, assets are Sefeguarded and also seek to ensure the validation, accuracy and completeness of transactions”.

I could not hide my anger that a man of that position could not differentiate his finance role from that of the Human resource role mind you,the Human resource had initially recommended me for the job given my exceptional delivery at the initial stages of the interview .It was unthinkable for me that a man of that stature will measure the competence of an applicant on a job by an elementary part of the job description. However I came to myself that this is Nigeria where impossibility is nothing. It is with this kind of fake intellectual superiority that employers blast and vilify young graduates and insist they know nothing, most of the interviewers/job owners often had forgotten that they also knew nothing before getting the job only for them to get ‘on the job trainings’ and insist that fresh graduate should show on the spot the same competence that took them years to acquire.

Finally, in my several encounters with the “holier than thou” attitudes of Nigeria’s officialdom was in another leading telecommunication company in Nigeria, they required and insisted on the company’s website that applicants should write the full details of their professional associations i.e chartered Institute of personnel management and quizzed that writing CIPM disqualifies the candidate.I was still trying to curtail my anger only for me to see a misspelling of certificate as ‘certificate’ on the same company’s website, I just laughed at the sight of the company’s kettle calling applicants pot black. The Nigerian nation rarely operates on merits, anytime she wants to give that false impression of merits, it’s a meritocracy built on vendetta and inferiority complex by the establishment to disqualify, discredit those who seem like potential threat. It is with this complex social architecture that the country now has more ‘Science students’ as postulated by Olamide than students whose future is established by thoughts.Many became “science students” given the resentments that devolves from having their hopes often shattered by the same system and institutions they once believed in and worked hard to be part of. Nigeria’s officialdom is often complicit in this subtle conspiracy and we all pay heavily directly or indirectly for this wickedness.

Kehinde Oluwatosin B is a prolific writer and public speaker from Abeokuta ,Ogun-State

Email: kehindeobabatunde@gmail.com
Twitter : _@tqatq