Expected Dysfunction

If you were born Nigerian and were raised around Nigerian ideals and institutions, there are so many positives you learn from it. But, like many other cultures, there are aspects that leave a lot to be desired. One of such aspects is how defensive it makes you, even when you don’t need to, sometimes even for the rest of your life. You’re trained to expect dysfunction and prepare in an overextending way to protect yourself against that dysfunction.

I recently had to renew my Nigerian passport. I had started the process back in February, and I was meant to use the online biometric option. My passport was meant to expire in May, but I had started the process early in February because I wanted enough time to deal with the Nigerian-ness of the process and more importantly, because I didn’t want an expired passport to ruin my summer plans. My summer plans were not ruined (because I improvised), but Nigeria really tried. The online biometric option didn’t work, and while trying to resolve the issues I encountered using it, the support teams were really nonexistent, the only one that showed up at all was the Nigerian Servicom. I also saw plenty of complaints online from people facing the same issue without a resolve. After trying this for almost a month, I decided to book a physical appointment for many months later.

Today is finally the day of my renewal appointment, so I write on this train to the Nigeria High Commission. I’m hopeful. Nothing more. But what has brought all of this to the fore of my mind is how much defensiveness I’ve had to build into the preparation for this appointment. The appointment slip requests three documents, and all the information on the internet points to the fact that black and white prints will suffice. However, I’m dealing with a Nigerian institution and expect that someone who has decided to have a bad day will ask for coloured copies, so I’ve printed those as backup. I’ve also taken extra envelopes with me, and some more of my Nigerian identity documents that weren’t requested - essentially every doc I have on me that proves that I’m Nigerian. All of this because, like I said, it takes “one person who has decided to have a bad day”.

That’s not enough, too. In expectation of this dysfunction, I ran on inadequate sleep after having arrived home late from a friend’s party last night because I planned to get to the appointment 3 hours before its actual time. If you’re Nigerian, and on reading that last sentence, you feel your mind playing phrases like “well, this happens when applying for a German visa too”, I’m sorry to inform you that that’s the normalisation of dysfunction that motherlan has done to you.

Now I’m no psychiatrist, and I haven’t bothered to confirm my assumption because I have a thing about medical labels and their wide misuse, but there has to be a term for this.

This defensiveness is not limited to institutions, by the way. After spending the last 3 years living in London, there’s a pattern I’ve observed where when walking with non-Nigerians, they are almost always amused by how much I check both sides of the road when crossing, which is in contrast to the “I expect the driver to be a functional, sane person” and “look left, look right, just cross” manner they tend to cross with.

Interestingly, I have a whole rant about why this dysfunction is also one of the reasons why getting decent grades from Nigerian public universities seemed so hard even though the course content in itself was only moderately challenging. But I’m a struggling writer, and I won’t write about it here because struggling writers must create drafts off their new topics instead of fleshing them out as part of other whole ones.