I saw the tweet about diasporans who used their credit cards in Lagos during “Detty December” returning overseas and initiating charge disputes, which will inevitably end up with the payment processors siding the Canadia/US/UK card owner over the Nigerian vendor.
While I have sympathy for the Nigerian businesses being cheated out of their hard-earned revenues by chargeback fraud, I also think it’s important to situate this fraudulent behaviour in its wider context – the context being that the entire thing called “Detty December” was itself, one giant fraud that everyone took part in, and could only have resulted in things like this.
At every level of participation in the so-called Detty December, you cannot fail to observe an obvious pattern of delusional profiteering, excessive price-gouging, and outright fraud, starting from the landlords who started charging N150,000/day (5x the national monthly minimum wage) for shortlets in Ikorodu, one of the worst neighbourhoods in a city that has no municipal water or sewage systems. Many shortlets on the Island were suddenly priced at levels more expensive than luxury shortlet properties in Miami, Corfu, Magaluf, Bali and other global tourism destinations.
The venue owners and event organisers also weighed in with their scams. Nightclubs and other venues started selling fake drinks at multiple times the RRP of the original product. People were making N5m profit on N600,000 worth of fake drinks sold to insecure diasporans who were desperately pretending to be better off than they actually were. The prices of everyday essentials in supermarkets across Lagos suddenly started going up, without any increase in demand or reduction in supply to justify such price movement – just because there was an opportunity to price-gouge IJGBs, even if that meant making life more difficult for the other 12 million+ Lagosians who survive at poverty level.
Even the government weighed in on the scam, breathlessly yapping about “$Xm boost to Lagos economy” as proof that it has an economic plan. Meanwhile, the actual reality is that Lagos remains one of the world’s most inconvenient places to do business, and the engines of the real economy – SMEs – are being squeezed to death daily by the multiplicity of formal and informal taxes imposed by the Lagos State Government and its proxies working in organised crime.
Nobody in government wants to do the work to get rid of the red tape that destroys the establishment and growth of small businesses in Lagos. Much easier to pretend that “Detty December” saved the economy and is a realistic economic solution. Nobody in real estate wants to touch grass and come up with a realistic pricing strategy that is in tandem with the income reality of the market that the real estate is located in. Much easier to price-gouge diasporans for 2 weeks and then watch the properties lie empty for the rest of the year. Nobody in business wants to focus on long-term, sustainable growth based on servicing the 21 million consumers that actually LIVE in Lagos. Much easier to exploit the insecurities of secretly broke IJGBs by selling them overpriced, fake alcohol, overpriced, subpar services, and sex for 2 weeks, after which everybody goes back to reality.
The purpose of all this cheating, profiteering and price-gouging was to basically rob and exploit the presence of a captive market of diasporans visiting their own country. Everybody used the quick fix of a 2-week pseudo-tourism event to pretend to solve their problems. So is it any surprise that even the diasporans later got in on the scam with chargeback fraud?
They’re scammers no doubt, but they’re just another part of the same fraudulent, delusionally hopeful, short-sighted, scammy ecosystem that characterises everything about “Detty December” and Nigerian pop culture. A place where all man na tief, everybody is scamming everybody, and nobody is actually getting anywhere in life.
Rick & Morty described you people perfectly.
~ David Hundeyin
END
Be the first to comment