$500 million, that is what Nigeria lost in 2022 alone to cybercrime according to the EFCC. Nigeria may have all sorts of challenges with sourcing, sorting and saving data, but the fact is that any figure close to the calculation of the country’s losses as a result of cybercrime should send alarm bells whirring.
Nigeria’s drastic descent down the moral and economic ladder has thrown its teeming young people into an impossible spin, forcing them to take a draining decision between hunger and holiness, vice and virtue.
Amidst the unprecedented opportunities offered by technology, especially information and communication technology and the tremendous challenge posed by biting hunger and bristling unemployment, many young Nigerians have taken to cybercrime. The road they take is as rusty as it is riveting.
Over the internet, while using as many aliases as they can invent, they hunt foreigners, especially Europeans and South Americans, who are on a quest to love and be loved and have a few quid to give. Using all manner of subterfuge, these Nigerians succeed in getting their foreign ‘lovers’ to part with considerable sums of money.
Given how catastrophic the exchange rate has become for Nigeria, these monies, meagre in the hands of their original owners, become a little fortune once they cross international finance lines. For many of the boys involved, it is like winning a jackpot; a considerable cashout; a veritable payday.
The sudden realization that only mastering the art of deception and subterfuge, boys, many of whom have dropped out of schools, can’t speak good English, and have known poverty and lack all their lives, can suddenly become millionaires is dizzying. Like ants summoned to the sticky sweetness of sugar, the frenzy has been a forceful one.
These days, it is not uncommon to see primary school pupils declare that they want to be ‘Yahoo boys’ in the nearest future, or secondary school students who are unapologetic about what they do. As for many students of tertiary institutions, pride is all they take in their lifestyle.
The society has been caught in this tailspin of quick money with very little pain. In the face of these ‘emergency millionaires’, the moral structure of the society is running the risk of collapsing. Many parents basking in the new-found wealth of their children consider it an abberation to question what they do for a living. Some of them even flaunt their children’s wealth while mocking parents whose children are yet to ‘make it.’ Not made it.
In the face of this surge of cybercrime and its ill-gotten proceeds, what are the relevant
Nigerian authorities doing? There is always the usual pontification about the need to be good citizens of the country and shun crime by those who are hardly model citizens themselves. There is also the
Occasional prosecution and incarceration of suspects, including raids on so-called ‘yahoo academies.’ But a country haunted by its inability to provide for its young people is one likely to hamstrung in questioning their crimes of survival.
But beyond what the relevant authorities are doing to curb cybercrime is what they are not doing to check the rampaging menace that is corroding the moral fibre of young children even before they are strong enough to know their right from their left.
It is common knowledge that some men of Nigeria’s security agencies have turned some of these yahoo boys into cash cows thereby aiding and abetting their crimes. These unscrupulous personnel who have become suspiciously wealthy themselves feign raiding these boys occasionally, extort considerable sums from them and let them go to continue their illicit enterprise of deceiving unsuspecting foreigners.
With the impossible expansion of the cyberspace, crime has become as numerous as opportunities. Both are growing rapidly. What is Nigeria’s choice in it all?
Nigeria must choose combat rather than collusion in cybercrime. It must confront the menace headlong. A key part of its fight must be giving Nigeria’s youth options that can at least match the fleeting comforts of cybercrime.
However, in a country strangled by the cost of living crisis and soaring unemployment, the fear is real that Nigeria lacks the weapons to contend with what the EFCC chairman himself has described as the third-largest GDP in the world.
Unless Nigeria takes drastic measures, the pull of cybercrime will not only push Nigeria’s young over the precipice but would pulverize the entire country.
Ike Willie-Nwobu,
