For a sermon that urges people to “understand their terrain”, it is ironic how many things Pastor Poju Oyemade got wrong in his message that compares realities between Nigeria and the USA. Most of the blowback to the respected pastor focuses on the controversial claim that Nigerian doctors are trained with a mere N500,000, but his sermon contains the same fallacious claims Nigerian leaders make when they relativise their country with advanced economies. It is one thing for the average talker on social media to construe subsidised medical education as a government charity to doctors, but it is another thing when a cleric repeats it. How come those who mouth these things never stop to ask why the government at the state and federal levels chooses to subsidise rather than demand full monetary value?

Nigerian universities, public or private, cannot come anywhere close to medical training in US schools simply because of affordability. For an under-producing economy, there is a practical limit to what can be charged if you want people to be able to afford medical training. Already, we are a society short of doctors; erecting any more financial barriers in their training system will be hugely detrimental. It is in the interest of the government and society to keep the costs of doctor training low enough. Can the existing arrangement be better structured to enhance value for the parties involved? Absolutely! But we cannot progress by making misleading arguments that fail to weigh the current calibration of interests by the parties involved.

In addition to the affordability, countries where they charge far more for medical training are incomparable to Nigeria in terms of training facilities and amenities. Do we want to compare Johns Hopkins Medical School with even our UCH, where their electricity supply was cut off for 100 days plus? It was just in January that medical students at UCH protested the prolonged power outage. When you listen to the heartbreaking accounts of how they coped during that dark period, you will be amused that someone thought comparing us with a country where no one worries over something as basic as electricity makes for a logical argument. Doctors at Johns Hopkins pay more, but their training also returns value for money. Can the same be said of Nigerian doctors? How many times has Poju heard of doctors in the USA going on strike over salaries, like they frequently do in Nigeria? Even our leaders know the difference, and that is why successive presidents opt for foreign hospitals rather than local ones staffed with N500,000 trained doctors!

Some of the arguments that Poju made in that video reprise what you read on social media by netizens, given to blindly defending Nigeria. One of them is that Nigerians work harder abroad while those at home are shiftless. He specifically said, “If you ask a Nigerian to do two jobs, he will curse your life out.” Really? Does the opportunity to take multiple jobs exist for Nigerians as it does for their counterparts elsewhere? To have a society where people can take multiple jobs, you must also have a productive economy that rewards. When the pastor looks around in his Lagos abode and sees the thousands of people who leave their homes at 4am to return at night, does he think they remain poor because they do not do enough?

Since the pastor’s data on Nigerians’ work culture is anecdotal, let me offer him one too. The other day, a well-meaning activist shared a video of herself scolding a mother who had brought her underage daughter to assist her in her sweeping job at 5am. We later learned from that poor mother that she leaves her home in Oworo by 3am to resume at the job at Ikoyin by 5am, and for a salary of N19,800! Will Poju agree that such a woman’s poverty is a consequence of her not taking a second job or driving for Uber? I can offer him more examples of how Nigeria’s problem of undervaluing labour contributes to the poor work culture. Once, I wrote a column on the poor remuneration of labour in Nigeria and I was shocked when several readers got back to me with figures of what they earn across sectors. The details were so ridiculous; I do not know how possible it is to survive on those salaries. For people to raise families on those amounts, they must already work on multiple fronts.

Before we accuse Nigerians of laziness compared to their immigrant counterparts, let us be sure that we have provided them with similar opportunities, but they failed to take them. Each time I think of the Oworo-to-Ikoyi woman’s 11-year-old daughter who joins her mother to do a menial task for a pittance, I wonder how exhausted she must be by a life that has not even started! If she grows up to despise work, some privileged person who does not know where she has been will compare her to her mate in the USA and conclude she is “lazy”. I am admittedly sensitive to an unnuanced comparison between Nigerians at home and abroad.

Poju made an important point about “employment data”, which he says does not capture the reality of Nigeria’s underground economy. I agree with him on that score. Truly, we can make a legitimate argument that the mathematics of “less than a dollar per day”, which international organisations use to count the number of poor people in the third world, focuses too much on what we lack at the expense of what we have. Those measurement scales are designed to be universal and can therefore elide the complexities of people’s lives in their respective countries. Yet, that should not becloud the reality of the harshness of our economic situation. If we decide to calibrate our own barometer for calculating poverty in the country, it should be to more accurately pinpoint where the problem lies and how it might be addressed, rather than being merely defensive against external agents.

We are a society so invested in faux patriotism that when we challenge poverty figures, we do so simply to contend with the international organisations that calculated them and not necessarily because we have developed a better understanding of the problem. You will hear economic advisors share spurious examples, such as the price of a bottle of Coke in the USA or how much a plate of food in Lekki Phase One costs. Those are unsophisticated understandings of what constitutes poverty in the world and its realistic effects in a modern world. Even Poju had yet another anecdote of a woman who bought wigs to prove that Nigeria might not be as poor. If a person can invest enough capital to sell wigs at N250,000 each, can she really be classified as part of the country’s informal economy system?

The people who feel the effects of these issues keenly and express their angst on social media are not, contrary to Oyemade’s wild assertion, being “programmed to hate their country”. That claim misunderstands the social terrain that precipitates these discussions and the issues that will not disappear simply because people engage in some syrupy positive speak. It is not self-hatred, expressing frustrations with your country. Those who act otherwise are not necessarily patriotic; they are just partisan. Many of them will turn coat the day the government they dislike comes to power.

It is also a part of the expression of our citizenship to stand up to a country that diminishes us. James Baldwin once said, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticise her perpetually.” As a cleric, Oyemade must also know that not every prophet in the Bible spoke peace to Israel at its crucial moments. Some denounced their homeland with curses. Was that (self-)hate or exhortation to righteousness? Those who still criticise Nigeria do so because they care and do not want to see it drown in injustices. I will take that over their indifference any day.

Punch