"THIS IS HOW NIGERIA WORKS" - GIMBA KAKANDA

You get a call from a Big Man who has a soft heart, or has been told remarkable things about you. You honour the invitation and there is a job offer. For you. No competition. No stated qualification. No test. "I just like you," You hear. Just that! 

In the past few month, three of such privileges came my way. And because I have a pending contract, I recommended 'deserving' friends - my own contribution to the corruption. God forgive me. None was considered. One response was classic: "Gimba, if I need just anybody I would've advertised this vacancy in a national daily!"

And this is the reason I get hurt anytime I read Nigerian public servants boasting about their exceptionalities, and what made them the best of a pack, in their memoirs and authorised biographies. Nigeria is a base of incredibly educated and talented people, and whoever makes it to the top should, at least for sanity's sake, not romanticise such privilege or consider it as a proof that s/he's the best. We have all benefited from the corruption of this dysfunctional country in ways we may never wish to admit in public.

Any attempt by a citizen to portray his/her rise as an act of incomparable genius makes me sick. This is the reason I'm yet to forgive Mallam Nasir El-Rufai's embarrassing masturbations in his terribly written memoirs. For a man who, before opportunism favoured and attracted him to public service, had never worked in an organisation where promotions are competitive - a man who, in a critical sense, may never pass for a technocrat - to have such audacity to boast is disquieting. We are all El-Rufais, local champions whose membership of, or fraternity with, a clique, ethnicity, religion and region, brings many good things. Well, I have forgiven Mallam, especially now that we're on the same political lane. I know he'll invite me for a lunch chat someday. He's good like that. God will punish the Witches that asked Mallam to unfollow me on Twitter, just for a review of his masturbations I wrote under a certain spell.

As expressed in a column last month, Nigeria creates a mess in which obedience is not always possible. And many of us, as my big brother once highlighted, may suffer the day Nigeria starts functioning. Like a decent nation of "upright men!"