Lessons From UK Riots – The Difference Between British Students And Their Nigerian Counterparts Is The Similarity

People, we are not crazy with that title. It is already hot in Lagos and we have to send this message after reading one piece in Guardian. That reminded us those days of the tutelage of Sani Abacha where it was common for schools to close just because one man was about to fly through the air.

But this post is not about Abacha. It is about BBC. Those days during riots BBC will barrage Nigerian students. They used to say in the BBC Africa Service or whatever that Nigerian students needed civility. They were right as burning cars, labs, libraries, hostels  and other facilities just to explain you do not have enough of them will not make you have them. It is sheer stupidity to stop free men and women on the road who might not have entered a university one day in their lives and you ask them to come out their cars.

You then pour fuel on their cars and there the cars are gone. Why? You want to explain that government is not funding education. But the man you burnt his car cares not. He is not government and he might not have finished secondary school. Perhaps, because he was driving one rickety car, he was confused by the poor students as belonging!

So, once BBC gets that. They will feast on it. And Nigerian students were not advanced – they lacked civility!

Uhuuuu Britain, your students under the stress most of those Nigerians encountered daily, those days,  did exactly the same. In short if not for the prayers of Nigerians they would have killed Prince Charles and the second wife. Yes, Charles got a lot of good friends in Nigeria and they liked him. The first riot would have messed him up. We than God nothing bad happened to him. The Lord will protect him from the hands of angry British who suddenly woke up to the reality of electing an extremist as a Prime Minister.

But this last riot showed one thing: under similar circumstances, most humans are the same. When you take a British child to Lagos and he stays there for years with no hope, he could be acculturated. In the 3rd world, yet glorified 1st world Britain because they have roads, light and water, British students have shown they can act terribly bad when put in the same conditions as their Nigerian counterparts.

So the difference between Nigerian students and the British ones is the similarity between them. It is all talk when you are not experiencing it. It is like New Orleans where Americans turned to ghettos dwellers and started acting like Sudanese beggars. Those civilities, under stress, vanished. Imagine if the Hurricane Katrina condition is daily, those attitude would become  a normal norm. That is life – man is just the same, only environments make us look different in how the society acts. If not ask David Cameron why he wants to monitor British Internet traffic, because he wants to prevent riots, which the Chinese also want to do!