“The central theme of ‘White Men Can’t Jump’, according an AI Overview, “is not simply about basketball, but about the challenges and complexities of race relations in America, and the development of trust and friendship between two individuals from different backgrounds.
“The movie explores how racial stereotypes can hinder personal connections, and how overcoming these stereotypes can lead to unexpected camaraderie. (And although) the plot revolves around basketball hustlers and their gambling schemes, the film delves deeper into themes of race, friendship, and the ability to see beyond superficial differences.”
We can extrapolate from this theme to deliver a fitting appraisal of the challenges of inter-tribal (as against inter-racial in America) relationships in Nigeria, of course. But, for the purpose of this write-up and adapting it to our need, the question arises as to what our headline, ‘White Men Can’t Jump’, connotes.
Think White man, think racial superiority! Witness Donald Trump. Here is an American president that would no other group except the White race existed on the planet. The world was awakened to the frightening reality of MAGA (Make America Great Again) when President Trump, its Chief Priest, stated off-the-cuff, without any shred of evidence, that lowered standards of hiring for air traffic controllers (hiring of non-Whites) in the Federal Aviation Administration, during the Joe Biden and Barack Obama presidencies, was responsible for the January 29 DC plane crash, less than 10 days after Trump was sworn-in. Such an appalling statement!
That sense of racial superiority is evident in what Trump does as a person and as president: he misspeaks practically all the time without a care; makes outlandishly false claims, treats people like dirt, delivers a mishmash of policies and actions that are clearly ill-defined and directionless, believes he is the wisest and greatest human being ever created by God. And he doesn’t give a hoot about what others say or think about him. Many around the world actually view Trump as a childish, egotistic, bumbling, fire-stoking bull of a president!
In the same way, think Nigeria, think ‘Born-to-Rule’ and the ‘Most-Politically –Sophisticated!’ Since the end of the Nigerian Civil War in 1970, the country’s leadership has been shared between Northern and Western Nigeria. It used to be said that Nigeria stood on a tripod, creating a healthy balance of power and control among the three big tribes of Hausa/Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba. Not any longer. Today, the North and the West, in what has manifested in so many ways as post-civil war conspiracy, have practically seized the state, sharing the spoils, first of war and later of office, between them and sparing others no thought at all.
Like the Trumps of this world, the North and West believe that the best for Nigeria do, and should always, come from among their kind. So, they arrogate to themselves the monopoly of political wisdom and socioeconomic management skills, using their control of state resources, levers of power and instruments of violence and propaganda to instigate instability in the polity just so they could keep the rest of the country too busy, too antagonistic to, even too angry with, one another to interrogate the quality of governance that they have provided the country with over time. It is no surprise that Nigeria has been in a state of flux for as long as anyone can remember, the result of the incompetent management of the Nigerian state by the North and West.
And yet, the problem isn’t even that they have monoplised leadership of the country in the past 55 years, post-civil war. The problem is that, in all these years, they simply have been unable to provide progressive leadership for Nigeria and have all but run it aground.
Statistics bear us out. And we aren’t even going to go too far back in time. According to a report by the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiatives (NEITI), in the period from 1999 to 2021, Nigeria’s oil and gas sector generated $764.52 billion. Now, where is the money? Today, Nigeria is a net importer of refined petroleum products because, despite the huge oil revenue, the nation’s four refineries are moribund. Even the 650,000bpd Dangote Refinery in Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos, with enough capacity to satisfy the local daily petrol needs, is being steadily sabotaged by oil marketers with the active support of government agencies.
In the areas of security (including food security), education, healthcare, indeed, in every development index, contemporary Nigeria is at the bottom rung of the ladder in the comity of nations, even in the nations of the South, no thanks especially to Muhammadu Buhari and Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Under Buhari and Tinubu in the last 10 years, Nigeria has become the poverty capital of the world and one of its most indebted nations. It is home to 18.3m out-of-school children, the highest number in the world, and boasts an economy delivering neither on jobs for its teeming mass of the unemployed nor on food production. Thus, with a score of 28.8, “Nigeria has a level of hunger that is considered serious”, according to a 2024 Global Hunger Index (GHI) report, which ranked Nigeria 110th out of the 127 countries with sufficient data to calculate 2024 GHI scores.
The only area in which the power monopolists have excelled is in the level of corruption they have inflicted on the country. In fact, the Nigerian ‘Wise Guys’ – ‘the born-to-rule’ and ‘most politically sophisticated’ entities, have built a huge industry out of corruption. According to the 2024 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index report, Nigeria ranks 140 out of 180 countries, scoring a miniscule 26 out of 100. Not surprisingly, it boasts the most corrupt judiciary in Africa, if not in the world; the most corrupt security apparatus and worse still, the most corrupt electoral system. Here is probably the only country in the world that is wont to cancel free, fair and transparent elections, and easily uphold ones sullied by money from questionable sources and crippling violence.
Since the end of the Civil War, Nigeria has remained a nation not built into one. Free with oil money and ever splurging on consumption, the rapacious political and business elite of the North and South West, for whom corruption is all but a sport, may have built their gaudy mansions and high-rises in Lagos and Abuja, largely to massage class ego, but those are merely unproductive, empty shells. To build the country into a functional, progressive and inclusive nation has simply become too tall an order for them. And that is because the North and South West have never demonstrated the talent, passion or the inclination to work for the greater good. The well-advertised we-and-our-people-only cultural mentality of the power grabbers and monopolists in the North and South West just makes it difficult, even practically impossible, for these ever conceited people to build an inclusive Nigeria, a productive country that thrives for all.
That is why, as has been widely observed in political Nigeria, Buhari paid scant attention to the federal character principle in the 1999 Constitution (as amended), while filling every conceivable important public office in Nigeria with his Fulani kith and kin. For the eight years that he ran Nigeria, one of Muhammadu Buhari’s glaring weaknesses was that he seemingly didn’t believe in the ‘Federal’ but in the ‘Fulani’ Republic of Nigeria. And he was unabashedly inconsiderate about it, most of the time acting as if only the Fulani out of the more than 349 other ethnic groups in Nigeria mattered. More than any other president in Nigeria’s tortuous history, Buhari showed how exactly not to run a federal republic, a country as diverse and vast as Nigeria. As president, Buhari was too much of an ethnic bigot to run a diverse Nigeria.
But, that would appear to be Buhari’s biggest selling point for the South West, his ethnic chauvinism that is, a reason they pulled out all the stops to sustain him in power for all of his ruinous eight years as president. Because, as it turned out, not only that South West’s Tinubu didn’t want anything to truncate his “emilokan” agreement with the effete General, he also needed the opportunistic political anchor that Buhari’s chauvinism was to provide for his own overweening nepotistic political exertions that have come to define his presidency.
As a typically opportunistic South Westerner, Tinubu needed an original fall-guy to blame for his own imponderable ethnic bigotry. Buhari was a ready-made. But, while Buhari took all of eight years – and gradually too – to put Fulani at the top of the rung, Tinubu took less than two years to capture the commanding heights, indeed the entire Nigerian state structure, for his Yoruba kith and kith. Today, when they discuss security, trade, maritime, fiscal and monetary policies, transportation, ICT and, among many others, oil & gas in Nigeria, more than 90% of the people at the table would be Yoruba, one nationality out of over 350 ethnic nationalities that make up Nigeria.
What is probably more worrisome, even irksome, however, is not that these people have taken and kept everything to themselves or that Nigeria is simply not working with they in charge all these years. What makes the situation more disturbing, more pitiable, is that, over time, they have used a lot of invidious propaganda to blind the rest of the country, most especially the minorities, to the pernicious effects of their socio-political and economic stranglehold on the country. Today, while Nigeria has all but crumbled under them, the Fulani and Yoruba power grabbers would appear to have eternally convinced the minorities – both northern and southern – that the enemy is elsewhere outside Fulani North and Yorubaland. The minorities, now more like willing slaves to the two biggies in the north and south than anything else, may have suffered irreversible damages to their lives and property. But who can say that the two ruling nationalities have ever been the targets of the minorities’ scurrilous, hateful attacks?
Consider two instances of the minorities’ misplaced aggression. Amid the slaughter of his subjects by Fulani bandits, Hyacinth Alia, a Rev. Fr and Governor of North Central Benue State, wouldn’t even allow Peter Obi, a fellow Catholic and former Governor like Alia, to come into his State to render help to some of his Benue people displaced by the marauding Fulani bandits. This is because while Benue indigenes are killed like chickens across the State by the Fulani and no help is coming from the power monopolists, Alia is more interested in the politics of where a helping hand is coming from.
Down South, South South’s Julius Abure is an enthusiastic battle axe in the hands of those out to destroy the Labour Party, which he chaired to a resounding success in the 2023 presidential election. Why would a man willingly destroy his own splendid national political standing? Only Abure can answer that question. What is clear is that he seems on a mission to ensure that Labour Party is not viable enough for Peter Obi to use as the platform to run for president again in 2027. As if they love to be slaves, the minorities, our southern minorities in this case, just love to hate their friends in order to please their enslavers!
I wager that Nigeria’s liberation isn’t around the corner yet. And the problem has pretty little to do with INEC’s corruption, police/army brutality or Tinubu’s bullion vans. The problem lies squarely in the obstructionist politics of feckless Nigerian minorities, who tend to take delight in acts of self-destruction through constant political alignment with, and loyalty to, the very groups whose undisguised ill-will towards the minorities has led, over the years, to the mindless, not to say remorseless, exploitation of the minorities’ lands, resources and peoples.
The road to 2027 is paved with uncertainties, without doubt. But it can be made more certain should the minorities wise up and do some hard-nosed political realignment. The two power monopolizing nationalities have proved that they are neither good to and for Nigeria, nor are they true friends of the minorities. Only the minorities’ alignment with progressive forces in the rest of Nigeria can guarantee a truly democratic country where no one or two dominant groups can conspire to hold the nation to ransom, as the Yoruba and Fulani have done over the years, especially in the past 10 years.
