“They just tend not to be honest. Nigerians as a group, frankly, are marvelous scammers. I mean, it is in their national culture.” That damning comment appeared in the 25 September, 1995, edition of The New Yorker. That scathing assertion stirred a hornet’s nest, and its author — Colin Powell, the urbane American diplomat, Army General, and later the 65th Secretary of State (and the first Black American to serve in that role) — courted unpleasant rebukes for those remarks. Powell was like smelly rot on whom flies perched as he courted outrage with that unflattering categorisation.
A similar whitewash of Nigeria occurred years later. It was in May 2016 during Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th birthday celebration at Buckingham Palace. British Prime Minister David Cameron was overheard describing Nigeria and Afghanistan in derogatory terms while reporting to the Queen on an upcoming anti-corruption summit in London. He was quoted to have said: “We’ve got some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain… Nigeria and Afghanistan, possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world.”
Nigerians were almost unanimous in rebuking these characterisations as unfair. Following Powell’s 1995 remark, human rights activist and legal luminary, Femi Falana, told Powell in The Washington Post that, “You should never make sweeping generalisations like that to describe a people. Those comments are very unbecoming of a man of his stature.”
