Naija Enterprise

There is something I love about the country, Nigeria: the prevalence of the spirit of free enterprise. I'm not much of an economist but I can't think of any suitable term to describe the Nigerian economic system. It's not capitalist like the US, socialist like the Soviet nations, or even a mixed economic system as seen in certain developing economies. It changes depending on an innumerable number of factors: the political party in power, time of the year, state of financial morale of the populace etc. This dynamism often manifests itself subtly in various facets of Nigerian culture and induces peculiar reactions from the people which foreign nationals would find strange. It works both for good and bad as the average Nigerian would overlook some blatant acts of injustice, seeing them as a part of life's normal routine while the same person would flare up at the mention of a trivial matter especially if it has to do with religion or helpless kids. There is hardly a place where this peculiar nature is more manifest than the way we handle intellectual property rights. Simply put, such a concept doesn't exist in a Nigerian's lexicon. If you can produce something and my having it doesn't prevent you from using your copy, then I'm welcome to use it as I please, regardless of whatever pains and sacrifices you might have had to make to produce said thing. As Nigerians say: sharing is caring. In Nigeria, people hardly ever pay to listen to songs, watch movies or read books; everything has to be free. Anybody who wants to make money from intellectual products must resort to some very creative marketing approaches, approaches which are also likely to be pirated. For example, if a fictitious artiste called RhymzBoi releases an album today, he can rest assured that within a few hours his entire album will be available for FREE download on the net. Within a few days, derivative tracks and cover songs based on his album would have flooded the net, choking any immediate revenue he might have expected from the album. The fact is, Nigerians don't just want a product to be free, they also require the means of obtaining said product to be free, hence the proliferation of free browsing cheat codes. This is equivalent to a guy who orders a product by mail and expects the courier company to deliver his package for free and when they don't, he finds an alternative means of making them do it. In essence, Nigerians can not only pirate physical products but full-scale courier companies - DHL and UPS beware. As they say, again: we too much! Nigerians are intelligent, enterprising people who always find ingenious ways to extricate themselves from even the tightest of corners. We are a hardy breed; able to take knocks - both literal and figurative - from multiple directions without capitulating. Regardless of our ethnic, religious and political differences, we have managed to soldier on as one nation; united in our goal to achieve a prosperous and peaceful country. Even with the recent emergence of certain elements who would see the fragile cohesion of this country's people come to naught, we have still managed to stand strong. With this in mind, I want to wish all Nigerians the best as we celebrate 54 years of freedom from colonialism. May the years and anniversaries ahead be better than those yet seen. Note from RhymzBoi : If you are a musician, artist, movie producer, inventor or creator of any form of intellectual property, you can discover ways of protecting your work from pirates in my album to be released tomorrow. If you like, follow pirate that one, God dey heaven dey watch. The thunder wey go handle you still dey Shaolin Temple dey learn work.