Just one +234

It all started with a word. Alaye. The Yoruba word for “information,” and a code word that means “I am an internet scammer and I suspect you may be, too.” When I first noticed that word in many of my DMs, little did I know what a cavernous rabbit hole it would send me down. It seems ironic that Yoruba information is met with Western ignorance, right? Some of the scammers’ most calculated and conniving schemes border on comical. It is easy to joke around, to string them along — but at the end of the day, who is on the other end of that screen?

Nigeria has the largest population in Africa, with over 200-million people. For centuries, the country was parceled into tribal city-states, the most prosperous of which was the Yoruba empire. Their ancient capital of Ilé-Ifẹ̀ shone with its golden affluence and bustling urbanity. They developed some of the first world’s modern metropolitan areas, congregating around the gold deposits that made them so wealthy. During the industrial days, Nigeria became even richer due to its underground cache of crude oil and coal. So… what happened?

Nigeria was founded on principles similar to those of the United States: conservative political ideologies and a pluralist democracy based on checks-and-balances. They even have a bicameral Congress and a Presidential executor of the laws! But under the guise of democracy, since its independence in 1960, Nigeria has experienced a thinly veiled dictatorship, a military coup, civil wars, and an incalculable amount of corruption. Nowadays, political factions and a rigid class distinction divide the country more than ethnic lines ever did. Nigeria has held democratic elections since 1999, but the damage was already done. According to a study by the World Bank, a staggering 75% of the country’s GDP has gone solely into the pockets of politicians. That is $400,000,000,000 in USD that have been stolen or misappropriated in just 61 years! Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, the former Vice-President of the African branch of the World Bank who spearheaded this investigation, says, “Poor governance of public resources and assets in Nigeria… is worsening at every level of government, institutions of state, the private sector, and is engulfing the wider society,” adding that “teacher-less, desk-less schools… only hint at the extent of the problem in Nigeria.” There is an irreparable fissure between the perennially disenfranchised and those who have never been hungry.

It is easy to reconcile abject poverty with an antiquated archetype of paltry huts and water urns on the head. This is promulgated by all the media we consume. They do not have indoor plumbing, right? — let alone modern technological luxuries like cell phones and the internet! But this simply is not an accurate portrayal of 21st-century Africa. For those who are fortunate enough to have a job, their abysmal wages pay for, not only food, water, and shelter, but also phone bills, transportation, and internet connection. It is a globalized world, and those same technological advancements are just as indispensable in Sub-Saharan Africa as they are here.

Nevertheless, any wages, abysmal or not, are nearly impossible to find in Lagos. According to a nonpartisan economic forecaster, the average income in Nigeria is estimated as ₦43,200 per month, which is a little over $100. That sounds ample in a country with a lower cost of living. Until you realize that families are substantially larger… and the cost of living is not even lower. If anything, the lack of infrastructure makes living even more expensive. According to Mickey, an internet acquaintance of mine from Lekki, a highly impoverished borough of Lagos, a month’s supply of rice costs ₦30,000. That is the majority of the typical person’s income. Mickey’s father is a college professor, a respected profession whose salary is higher than average, bringing in about ₦50,000 per month (approximately $131). However, Mickey is the eldest of eleven children. Nigeria is a developing country in one of the earlier stages of demographic transition — meaning that birth rates are high but the infant death rate is dropping precipitously. According to data obtained by the CIA, the average fertility rate is 5.07 births per woman, with nearly half of the population still in childhood. A simple calculation will show that Mickey’s family is living off of $0.33 per person per day. And they are among the lucky with a consistent income.

Mickey is what Nigerians refer to as a “Yahoo boy.” The etymology of this term dates back to the earliest days of the internet, when tech-savvy young Nigerians perpetrated email scams; this is also the origin of the trope of the “Nigerian prince.” According to international internet ethics and crime prevention boards, Yahoo boys are called “419 scammers,” in reference to the law formally criminalizing their work. Yahoo boys basically “catfish” on social media to ask for money, using various templates: an escort who only accepts gift cards for payment, a beautiful woman who needs a gift card to pay for travel to your doorstep, Mark Zuckerberg contacting you about your winnings in the Facebook sweepstakes (when you have to pay shipping and handling for your giant check)… Some of the more humorous ones include a BDSM mistress who needs you to pay a tribute before you can be collared as a sex slave, or an Illuminati recruiter who needs you to pay dues before you can become a member of the global elite (in lieu of human sacrifice, obviously). It is easy to laugh at the ridiculous intricacies of these background stories and some of the broken-English scripts they copy from, but it is difficult to imagine whom you are talking to on the other end. These are people who are sacrificing their last modicum of self-respect, just to be slightly less hungry. They are a testament to something truly darker.

Almost any networking website is riddled with Yahoo boys, including dating apps and college emails. In my own community, students at my college have been harassed by “professors” looking for interns or dog sitters. Some of them duplicate the Facebook pages of older people with public information available, haranguing their friends for money. In some of the slums of Lagos, where the Yahoo populations are most sizable and the ravages of poverty are the most extreme, they form a sort of union to pool their earnings and protect each other against law enforcement.

Since 419 scammers affect people all around the world, there are several international laws and organizations designed to crack down on cyber crimes. The most prominent of which is the Economic and Federal Crimes Commission (E.F.C.C.), a branch of the Nigerian police tasked with regulating “advance fee scams,” which is just fancy legislative talk vilifying the poor. But frankly I find it difficult to view these people as opportunistic, hard-hearted outlaws. I befriended a Yahoo boy named Samson, who lived in Ibadan. He was scamming because his mother was gravely ill and could not afford adequate treatment. Then, any money leftover he was allocating toward his college education so he could get a good job and be financially secure. He would send me photos of pretty waterfalls and mountains where he lived, and on a video call he got excited to see a puppy. Legally, he would be regarded as a petty criminal in the lowest moral dredges of society. Dr. James Yékú, a professor of African-American studies at the University of Kansas, writes: “Internet vigilantism that is targeted at online scammers to avert scam produces epistemic violence which [sic] evacuates the Black male body of human dignity.” The complex predicament in which they find themselves forces them to decide between degrading themselves on the internet for bits of change, or potentially starving to death and experiencing homelessness.

Even government employees at the municipal level are corrupt. The EFCC police are notorious for making frivolous arrests just for cash — a bribe instead of prison time. They patrol the streets of the major cities and do a stop-and-search at random. However covert a Yahoo boy may be about his activities, however, the police will always impugn illegal motives. Mickey and Samson were both arrested recently. Mickey said, in a verbatim quote from a WhatsApp message: “I don’t have anything [incriminating] on my phone… I remember I unlock [sic] my phone for this officer and he couldn’t found [sic] anything to implicate me.” He did not have money for a bribe; but since he cooperated fully, he went to jail without being shot to death. Samson was likely murdered by the police during a stop. He was only 19 years-old and was planning on going to medical school.

This is an example of relative morality. Obviously, the societal conscience inculcates the qualms about stealing that exist universally. When asked whether the Yahoo business is moral, almost everybody has answered with a resounding no. But it is considered more ethical to force charity from those who can afford it than it is to be a government employee. Whole lives are destroyed by people who betray their own background. Samson said working for the police over there is viewed the same way being a petty criminal is over here.

Okay but there are literally scores of other countries in the world with squalid living conditions and corrupt and ineffectual governments. Why specifically is it any worse for the Yoruba scammers? The answer lies in geography. Approximately 30% of Nigerians are employed in the agricultural sector. This is subsistence farming, which obviously requires a large parcel of space. The majority of Yoruba people live in large cities, like Lagos and Port Harcourt, which each have over 2-million people. These are crowded places where there is just not space for such a reliable industry to exist. They do not have the same agricultural crutch to supplant empty paychecks. Further, the economies of larger cities are not equipped to offer a proportionate number of jobs. Oyulado Tade, professor of criminology at the University of Ibadan, posits, “The celebration of wealth, particularly among politicians, serves to motivate the involvement of the youths in cyber-crime. Nigerian society celebrates wealth without questioning the source of the money.”

With such a competitive job market, no taxpayer money to go toward welfare programs, and nowhere else to turn, many people decide to finagle money from those who have some to spare. In an environment where learned helplessness is subliminally instilled from an early age, they are channeling all the agency they have left into finding a way to sustain themselves. I believe that the preponderance of internet scammers in Nigeria illustrates the human predisposition to coalesce dignity with suffering, and ultimately to survive.

It is a problem that the developed world does not care. The I was writing this, 300 little girls were abducted from school by radical insurgents in Northern Nigeria. That was not a headline. Instead, I had three different news updates about Tiger Woods’s leg injuries after his car accident. And he is an F-list celebrity who has not been relevant in years. I do not think it is a lack of media exposure that allows people not to care. I think it is a matter of convenience. In an audacious display of performative allyship, folks post black squares on Instagram and preach about racial injustice when police lynch Black people in broad daylight. They are focused on Black death, not Black life — this suffering is real and requires more than social media advocacy and a hashtag.

There were so many more stories, so many more interviews than I could include here. And, frankly, I am not sure if this is even my story to tell. I am an imperialist whose privilege makes it difficult to imagine some of this suffering. But in all, the motif is clear: Nigeria needs help. After immersing myself in the Yahoo subculture and making an effort to understand why they are doing what they are doing, I see who truly is civilized. In my book, in a moral quandary so much deeper than right and wrong, those who fight for what they have in the wake of life’s obstacles are always the good guys. When approaching a complicated situation like this, it is so overwhelming to know where it all ends. But it always begins with just a little information.