BLESSED ARE THE SHAMELESS

Blessed Are the Shameless

A 21 year old American streamer enters Lagos surrounded by bodyguards and cameras, and very quickly the outstretched hands begin to appear. Not hands waving hello. Hands asking. Hands reaching. Hands, demanding. The crowd is loud. Some of them were laughing, some of them jeering, many asking for cash, for streaming.

It is easy, from a distance, to call this embarrassing. To say Nigerians beg too much. To say the country has forgotten pride.

Lagos, up close, teaches you the rules with your body. Heat on the back of your neck. Generator coughs behind walls. A road that is five roads at once. A queue is a suggestion. A policeman’s stare is a question you are expected to answer with money. The public square is not neutral. It is an instructor, and its syllabus is survival.

In a place where institutions do not protect you, where procedure does not rescue you, where waiting your turn is a reliable method of being ignored, shame becomes a rule you keep for yourself while other people eat. Dignity becomes a private aesthetic. You can afford it when your life is already buffered.

In Nigeria the public square trains you differently. You learn quickly that public shame is expensive. You learn that the person who insists on the queue is the person who watches others get served first. You learn that following traffic rules makes you the last car on the road, so you drive against traffic, you climb the sidewalk, you become inventive with danger. You learn that reporting a crime properly often means nothing happens, so you join the mob that beats the suspect to death, because at least something happens, even if what happens is also a crime.

You learn this same lesson in offices that smells of paper and sweat and ceiling-fan fatigue. You go the proper route for a passport and you are told to come back next week. Next week becomes next month. Next month becomes a kind of quiet punishment. No booklet. No network. No light. Then someone leans toward you, gently, as if offering advice that is also a confession: call this person. He knows someone. You call. Money changes hands. Your file moves from the bottom of the pile to the top. Forty-eight hours later, you are holding the document as if it has just been conjured. And you thank god. You thank the almighty Nigerian god through whom all things are possible. 

This is how the country teaches. It demonstrates.

The same logic is visible in bribery and in official corruption. The National Bureau of Statistics, in its 2019 corruption survey, documents how normal bribery is in everyday transactions, and how often it is tied to speeding up processes and getting services that are supposedly already yours. When the state becomes a machine you must grease to make it move, shamelessness stops looking like a moral failure and begins to look like literacy.

Some like to say this is cultural, as if culture is a scent Nigerians wear. Culture, here, is also feedback. It is what a society becomes when it watches what gets rewarded.

Blessed are the shameless, for their reward shall come in buckets. 

Blessed are the shameless for their reward will come now-now. 

In Nigeria, “now-now” is a real economic principle. The future is unreliable. The present is hungry.

This is why the begging around celebrity is not simply poverty, even when poverty is present. It is an evolved tactic in an attention economy fused to a broken state. A boy walks in from America with cameras and security and an escape hatch. He is proof of exits. He is proof that money can be pulled from the air by being watched. He is a moving hole in the wall of everyone else’s reality. So hands reach, because hands have learned that their world responds to pressure more reliably than it responds to politeness.

Sociologists have names for what happens when the normal link between effort and reward snaps. Émile Durkheim describes anomie as a condition where the rules that guide desire and expectation break down, and people lose the sense of a stable moral order. He develops this idea most famously in Le Suicide (Étude de sociologie) (1897), where anomie is tied to social dislocation and deregulated aspiration. Robert K. Merton takes a related path in “Social Structure and Anomie” (American Sociological Review, 1938), arguing that when a society prizes certain goals but blocks legitimate routes to them, people adapt through different strategies, including “innovation,” which is a polite academic word for finding other ways.

Nigeria is a place where “other ways” become the curriculum.

You see it in politics, where shame is almost designed to fail. If you run for the office believing your clean hands will be persuasive, the country laughs softly and continues. You learn the unofficial list: bribe the officials, pay the polling agents, fund the thugs, buy the tools of coercion and the tools of patronage, because purity does not protect votes, and votes do not always protect mandates. And when your mandate is stolen they shamelessly say: go to court. Because they know another lesson is there waiting for you: even the strength of a case can be made weightless when the incentives around judgment are rotten. That is why I think when we list sources of Nigerian law, "corrupt judges" should be top of the list. 

Richard Joseph, in Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic (1987), names a Nigerian political logic where public office becomes a resource to be distributed to clients, kin, allies; politics becomes access to “prebends,” benefits you share and trade to keep power and loyalty. In that world, “begging” is not only what the poor do at the roadside. It is what everyone is trained to do in different registers: petitioning power, leaning on relationships, converting proximity into benefit. The etiquette changes. The logic stays. 

Poor Nigerians beg. Middle class Nigerians beg (We can have a whole conversation about whether there is anything like a middle class in Nigeria). Rich Nigerians beg. 

It is easy to look at the fuel attendant begging at the petrol station and get irritated while you are on your way to beg someone to help you fast track your passport that has been stuck at the immigration office for weeks or months. It is easy to complain about all the people who beg in public events while you are waiting for the event to end so you can beg someone who will help your child gain admission to a university. It is easy to get irritated about Lagos agberos begging for money in the streets while you are on your way to beg for something bigger: a contract, an appointment with someone who will open doors, a political godfather who will put your name on the ballot. 

Jean-François Bayart’s The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (English edition 1993) describes something similarly physical: politics as eating, the state as a meal, accumulation as ingestion, power as a stomach. When the most reliable path to comfort is closeness to the plate, people stop pretending the plate is not the centre of the room.

Now add the diaspora to this picture, because the diaspora sits inside Nigerian moral imagination like a second government.

You japa. And instantly the tally of what you owe people begins to rise. From the outside, diaspora giving can be misread as generosity. From inside, it is also a social contract. Remittances become welfare. Phone calls become budget meetings. Love becomes invoices. The person abroad becomes an institution, one of the few institutions that pays out. So the asking intensifies, because in a country where formal systems fail, relationships become infrastructure.

Even romance is not spared from this training. A man buys a woman an iPhone or a bone straight wig and the story is told as moral decay, as if it proves women are evil and men are victims. The story is also about incentives. An iPhone is not only a phone. It is a signal. It is mobility. It is proof that someone can move resources toward you. That in a society where anyone without resources is stripped of all human dignity, you in fact, do have dignity. 

In a society where security is shaky and tomorrow is a gamble, gifts stop being romantic flourishes and become evidence of capacity. People choose what looks like protection. They choose what looks like an exit. They choose what looks like less suffering. The person who insists on pride can end up hungry, mocked, alone in their principles.

Shame and dignity thin out in the public square, not because Nigerians are born without them, not because the culture is naturally shameless, but because the country repeatedly teaches that shame is a luxury no one can afford. Shame opens no doors. It gives no rewards. It moves nothing forward. 

Erving Goffman writes about “face” as the social value a person claims in interaction, and about “face-work” as the practices we use to maintain that value. In Nigeria, the value of “face” gets recalculated by the environment. In a well-functioning system, dignity can be protective. In a deeply dysfunctional one like Nigeria, dignity becomes exposed skin. You keep it, and Nigeria slaps it. Not even a normal slap. What Nigerians will call a dirty slap. Eventually you learn to grow armour. Shamelessness becomes armour.

So yes, the hands in Lagos are asking for money. They are also asking for proof that the world can still yield. They are asking because asking has worked. They are shameless because shamelessness is what has put food on their tables. They are asking because silence has not. They are asking because they have watched people with shame suffer.

This is why calling it embarrassing feels shallow. It is true at the level of aesthetics. It is not true at the level of causes.

A society that consistently rewards the person who shunts the queue will eventually produce excellent shunters. A society that moves your file only when you pay will eventually produce citizens who treat bribery as a sport. And boy, do Nigerians excel at this sport! A society that makes justice feel unreachable will eventually produce people who reach for justice with their hands. Justice becomes recognisable only through broken bones, bloodied lips, and a tire around the neck. A society that humiliates honest labour will eventually produce liars with clean shoes and thieves with confidence. A society that tells you, again and again, that procedure is theatre will eventually produce a people who stop performing it.

Then a boy from America arrives with cameras and an escape hatch, and the crowd does what it has been trained to do.

Hands ask. Hands reach. Hands demand.

They are not only begging for cash. They are begging for relief from a society that punishes dignity. They are begging in the language Nigeria taught them.

Blessed are the shameless, for their reward shall come in buckets, now-now. 

Cursed are the people who still believe shame will save them.

And in all things, give thanks to the Nigerian god.