The Bright Continent Lyrics

I always wondered why I never receive Nigerian e-mail scams. Perhaps my spam blockers are too good. Perhaps my obviously Yoruba name deters potential predators, who see me as one of them—wise to and thus exempt from the swindle. Imagine my delight when I received this pitch from an in-box acquaintance:

How’re you doing and I trust that I find you in good health. I’m really sorry to reach out to you this manner and I’m sorry for not informing you about my urgent trip to Scotland. I am here for a Seminar and to complete a project. Presently, I will be glad if I could confide in you and I want this issue to be confidential between You and I because I don’t want people to get worried about my situation.

Everything was fine until I got robbed on my way back to the hotel and I lost my Wallet, mobile phone and some valuables during this incident. I’m sending you this message to inform you that am stranded at the moment and need your help with a loan of $3350 to pay up the bills and make arrangements to get back home.

As a bit of an experiment, I copied this message and sent it to a random sampling of contacts. Of the forty people I e-mailed, a few warned me that my account may have been hacked. Most ignored the note. Predictably, no one offered to front the money.

Despite what looks like growing indifference, e-mails like this have made my country famous. While Web-based swindles are common in many countries around the world, Nigerians seem to have perfected the dogged pursuit of international money transfer scams, sometimes known—after the section of the Nigerian criminal code referring to such activity—as 419. Those three digits don’t quite do justice to the hundreds upon thousands of elaborate, sometimes hilarious Internet capers that have sullied Nigeria’s digital reputation.

As is well known by now, 419 predators blast pleading e-mails asking for emergency loans, or assistance in freeing vast, “trapped” sums of money in exchange for hefty payouts. The classic scam involves a Nigerian prince attempting to reclaim his birthright. Marks are asked to provide Social Security and bank account numbers that allow the criminals to drain vast sums. Some victims are urged to send cashier’s checks, or to wire money. Others cite known public figures (the wife of deposed Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, for example), or hint at the opportunity to take advantage of lax accounting and corruption in a distant bureaucracy.

The FBI has reported losses of millions of dollars a year to these scams, which have grown more sophisticated over time. Complex websites and forged ID cards and bank statements are now stock-in-trade for the gangs of scammers who have cornered the market. Telltale grammatical errors are fewer and farther between. The modern scammer exploits the authenticity of familiarity; e-mails are sent from the real accounts of our acquaintances. From 1995 to 1998, a 419 scam was responsible for defrauding Banco Noroeste in Brazil of $181 million—the third-largest bank heist in history.[i] In 2009, a Nigerian living in Singapore was arrested for trying to defraud the National Bank of Ethiopia of $27 million.

I’d argue the crowning achievement of these “Yahoo Boys” (so called because of the e-mail service that many use to spin their traps) came in 2008, when former US Secretary of State Colin Powell found himself onstage at a benefit concert in London, boogying to “Yahoozee,” a popular song by Nigerian artist Olu Maintain, glorifying the life of savvy, silent crime that had exploded in Nigeria’s backdoor economy.[ii] The lyrics tell a flashy story:

If I hammer

First thing na Hummer

One million dollars

Elo lo ma je ti n ba se si Naira?
[1]

Thousands of fans appreciated the verse—a form of swagger certification native to hip-hop. But most people see the nuisance e-mails as evidence of moral turpitude—the devil in the digital. I believe the e-mails are proof of a trend that promises to transform Africa at large.
The scams are really about connection. It is no accident that the globalization of 419 has coincided with the spread of Internet connectivity. The late 1990s explosion of Internet cafés in sub-Saharan Africa created shared and slow but cheap connections to the World Wide Web. The most common offenders of the code remain young men who exploit this novel connectivity to make a profit. By subbing in a new location for each manufactured “emergency”—Manila, Mumbai, Madrid—the scammers travel the world, bathed in the light of their computer screens.
The scams are also about disillusion. Of course, cash is a motivation. But the Yahoo Boys’ naughtiness also comes from a sense of empty formal alternatives (in fact, the 419 scramble for foreign assets stemmed from the precipitous drop in value of the naira, Nigeria’s currency). Scamming for a living is one way of exiting an institutional framework that has failed to provide jobs. One youth, having been successfully prosecuted by the beleaguered Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, gave an anonymous interview explaining how and why he became a scammer:

I come from a poor family in Lagos, Nigeria. We did not have very much money and good jobs are hard to find. I was approached to work for a gang master when I was 15, because I had done well in school with my English, and was getting to be good with computers. The gang master was offering good money and I took the chance to help my family.... In the year before I was arrested I earned about $75,000 (£46,000) for my family. I bought my family a better house and drove a BMW. I had mobile phones and laptops and everything that comes with having lots of money.[iii]

Then again, 419 is about drive. Nigerians tut-tut about 419—half joking, half mortified. But its inventors are sometimes the smartest kids in the room—the best with English, critical thinking, and computers. At the very least, they demonstrate a tenacity that is endemic to successful entrepreneurs from Bill Gates to Nigerian Aliko Dangote, the richest man in Africa. In another life, the Yahoo Boys may have enjoyed aboveboard business success. As Apple cofounder Steve Jobs noted in a 1995 interview, a thin line divides genius and crime:

I know from my own education that if I hadn’t encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I’m sure I would have been in jail.... I could see those tendencies in myself to have a certain energy to do something. It could have been directed at doing something interesting that other people thought was a good idea or doing something interesting that maybe other people didn’t like so much.[iv]

The Yahoo Boys may lack the primary school teachers, the elder mentors, or the Silicon Valley structures to guide them away from criminal activities. Instead, they leverage ambition, resourcefulness, and tools at hand—including their own wits—to pursue a vilified but beneficial livelihood. Equipped with only an e-mail address, these criminals have earned millions of dollars and international notoriety, solving the common African experience of economic stagnation and proving that you can make something from nothing at all.

Academic writer Louis Chude-Sokei, in a wonderful essay on the topic of Nigerian Internet scams, seems to be smiling.[v] “It is hard not to be impressed,” he writes. Chude-Sokei believes the scammers are “the public face of West Africa’s intimacy with digital media and technology and of Nigeria’s refusal to wait passively for either justice from their political system or global charity.”[2] While I don’t condone criminality, I, too, refuse to clutch my pearls about 419. From a bird’s-eye view, the virtual crime wave begins to look like an amazing new kind of entrepreneurship.

How to Format Lyrics:

  • Type out all lyrics, even repeating song parts like the chorus
  • Lyrics should be broken down into individual lines
  • Use section headers above different song parts like [Verse], [Chorus], etc.
  • Use italics (<i>lyric</i>) and bold (<b>lyric</b>) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part
  • If you don’t understand a lyric, use [?]

To learn more, check out our transcription guide or visit our transcribers forum

About

Genius Annotation

The Bright Continent calls for a necessary shift in our thinking about Africa. Dayo Olopade shows us that the increasingly globalized challenges Africa faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. Africa’s ability to do more with less—to transform bad aid and bad government into an opportunity to innovate—is a clear ray of hope amidst the dire headlines and a powerful model for the rest of the world.

The book is available for purchase on Amazon.

Q&A

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

Comments