Silhouette of a criminal in the net
Operatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States went to town recently with the names of some 77 Nigerians they nabbed over financial crimes in that country. While many compatriots agonise that these criminals are hideous ambassadors of their nation, not a few have argued that scams of this nature have their ancestry in the colonoial days and, in many cases, have tentacles in mysticism. Over time, scams in Nigeria began as small time trickeries and pilferings; they graduated to crass stealing of the people’s commonwealth and now they have grown up to become cross-continental grand larceny.
One of those with this submission was Stephen Ellis (13 June 1953 – 29 July 2015), a British historian, Africanist, human rights activist and Desmond Tutu Professor of Youth, Sport and Reconciliation at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the VU University, Amsterdam. He was, according to his biographers, “a member of various editorial boards, including that of the Journal African Affairs, of which he was a former editor. His research was mainly concerned with contemporary Africa, such as developments in Liberia, Nigeria, Madagascar, South Africa, Sierra Leone and the global impact of Africa.”
In his most recent book, This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organised Crime (posthumously published in April 2016), Ellis, as written by many reviewers, investigates how Nigeria became a breeding ground for illicit trade, large-scale corruption and organised crime. He shows the stages as colonial (when an educated elite in the civil service and nationalism started emerging), the independence periods when a new political elite came up and high level corruption ravaged the land and the age of globalisation, aided by the information super highway. In the book, Ellis demonstrates that the means of communication to make the fraud possible changed from street trick, African mesmerism, activities of fraudulent pastors , letter writing through Post and Telegraphs and scam emails, (now graduating to cyber/fraudulent bank tranfers).
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