Okrika intellectuals, poor big men a.k.a toilet elites

Nigeria has no elites

A random view of the typical okrika market setting.

Three things are certain in life: death, taxes, and the existence of an ‘Okrika’ spot in every Nigerian market you find yourself. Traders in this section have second-hand clothes customarily spread out on sack mats on the floor. The final touch of the customer luring trick is brought to life with the starchily ironed shirts swinging on hangers from side to side – which especially in very local markets, also serve as shade for the trader and his customer reception area. The buyer makes their choice from a hip of clothes on the mat most of the time, branding this cache the popular second name ‘bend-down-select’ thanks to the mode of shopping implored.

Relatively cheap as compared to prices in boutiques and fashion stores, okrika has been a popular source of clothing for much of Nigeria’s middle class. However, an unarguable fact is that one rarely finds quality clothes from these stores. It takes real effort and time to search through a pile full of nearly fitting, too short, poorly designed, awkward styled, and sometimes stained attires before you can find something manageable. Our people say, “Better soup na money kill am” and so bend-down-select is the poor man’s alternative which very well comes with its hassles.

I know a tad too much about okrika thanks to the years of rocking it myself and going on this exhaustive shopping expedition. I recall in my university days I had a mate who had a lot of shirts, one could not help but notice he was always appearing in different tops. One day I asked him how come he had so many shirts and he revealed to me that he had been picking all of his classic-looking shirts at the legendary Wadata market in Makurdi. I had to copy his style, but it was not long before I learned I needed to always starch and iron these shirts before they’d look any good. 

The okrika alias bend-down-select customer is therefore one with limited freedom of choice; he cannot clothe himself better. This makes perfect synergy with the obscure reality of a group of Nigerians I want to refer to as the bend-down-select intellectual. 

Some time ago I read a Business Day column by David Hundeyin; a piece about the disgusting, self-serving, and myopic approach to life by the Nigerian elite – he called them the “okrika elite,” in what I deem a perfect description. In that column, he illustrated how the ruling class had access to GSM phones way before it hit the market for ordinary Nigerians. Lagos State military Governor Brigadier Rasaki as early as 1988 had a satellite phone. On one occasion, Mr Hundeyin (David’s father) who was assistant director in the state civil service would only watch in dismay as the Governor would put a call to his Cross River counterpart Navy Capt Princewell on a 3 AM morning. This was after Mr Hundeyin would complain about his inability to reach the Cross River Governor via the existing NITEL landlines at such odd morning hours

Brigadier Rasaki will chuckle, “You bloody civilian” and pull out his phone and put the call through - the man’s idea was that “these things do not belong to ordinary people” as he said. Look at the hideous contempt to which the Nigerian ruling class hold the rest of its citizenry. It will take 13 years after the date of this highly placed civil servant and Governor encounter before the launch of Econet Wireless – Nigeria’s first GSM telephony era. The okrika elite and the okrika intellectual alike, are our most paramount misfits in the grand scheme as enabling factors for our drench in mediocrity.

The okrika intellectuals in their hubris will defend anything. They claim to be educated, they are SANs, almighty tech brothers, heads of top conglomerates, high-ranking professionals across fields, etc. Yet, no matter where they’ve risen to in life, their basic lack of social intelligence, distortive grasp of reality, and their low life standards continue to ooze like pungent smells from cracked eggs. The worst of the bunch are the undiscerning half-baked literates. These are not even highly placed on the social order, neither are they directly benefiting from the establishment.

I knew a guy who was struggling to pay through his Master’s degree program at Benue State University who could not stop dog-whistling about the ruling party. Another one was a PhD candidate, squatting with his brother, approaching his forties, and still always waxing lyrical about the strides that Buhari was making for Nigeria - you would think he knew better. 

Education has suffered in Nigeria

The standards are gutter-level at the moment because all these years post-independence that different generations of Nigerians have spent learning the Queen’s English and solving simultaneous equations from elementary to tertiary level could sadly not help in their understanding of the entire process. To be educated is to be sophisticated enough to question new ideas, compare your findings and be able to arrive at new conclusions. The educated mind never stops learning - but our relevance-seeking uncles and brothers after the big purses of the poor big men they chase around can never understand this. 

These conversations will never be had enough. I get tired of talking about the insufferable state of affairs in Nigeria, and then before I can take my mind off it, I am reminded by the most simple interactions with family and friends now and then. So, since this cloud is unwilling to move away, we may as well just bask in the shadow that it has cast.

Our poor big men.

The former Governor of Kogi State, Yahaha Bello is a hot topic on Obasanjo’s internet at the moment for the very reasons you already suspect of his calibre: corruption and money laundering. This good-for-nothing excuse of a Governor spent $800000 to pay the advance of his son’s school fees in a school that I did not even care to look at its name. Imagine what goes through the minds of these low-quality human beings. It is a waste of buzzwords to call our politicians corrupt now because they are not, let's address them as the proper low lives that they are. What could push a man into such decision-making? $200000 short of a million dollars in advance just for school fees? That money in the right hands can generate billions in the eight years that this man spent as Governor, get his son educated at 0,05% the cost of tuition he paid, but how do you know when your mind is poverty-stricken and you have no knowledge of how things work?

This reminds me of a certain past Governor in my state who blew alarms about building a cargo airport from the day of his inauguration up until he left office. Cargo airport out of the blue when 60% of roads in the state were unmotorable, and there was no one around him to tell him that the goods cargo planes would need to fly out, or those that would come in would need roads to be transported to their respective consumption points. I would have given him credit today if he had even built a runway on the airport’s site. Just another random example of the okrika elites a.k.a poor-big-men littered in leadership positions in our country. 

The existence of this calibre of men in our society is why people cannot comprehend why a billionaire like Peter Obi is stressing about the width of Nigeria one year after elections were very blatantly and shamelessly stolen from him. Alas, here is a wealth creator who understands that a million cheques in the bank do not spare any man the wrath of abject, widespread poverty around him; that driving SUVs on broken highways, congested traffic with risks of truck containers falling over you; that living in gold plated mansions on streets with clogged gutters and pungent smelling sewers is not elitism. Nigeria is in dire need of elites, because these people who wear agbada to America to discuss insecurity in the North and their band of hallelujah boys are just okrika intellectuals and poor big men with money they have no idea how to make.

Sadly, like the Brigadier Rasakis of yesterday, the Sarakis, Fasholas, Bellos etc. of today, their mindsets have not changed.