NewStats: 3,262,375 , 8,176,966 topics. Date: Monday, 02 June 2025 at 04:43 AM a4p36

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

The increasingly central role that British think factory Chatham House is playing in Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election, which has seen most of our top presidential contenders trooping like giddy little children to speak there, is the most absurd extreme I can find in recent Nigerian history of a phenomenon that social anthropologists call the cultural cringe.


First put forward in the 1950s by an Australian scholar by the name of Arthur Phillips to describe Australia’s complicated cultural relations with Britain and the US, cultural cringe is the deep-rooted inferiority complex that causes psychologically damaged, formerly colonized people to inferiorize and disdain their own country and its culture and to uncritically valorize other countries and their cultures. 

There is rampant cultural cringe in Nigeria, and it is manifesting prominently in this election cycle. APC presidential candidate Bola Tinubu who habitually shuns all independent Nigerian news organizations and platforms that invite him for debates and discussions was the first presidential candidate to honor Chatham House’s invitation to speak about his plans for Nigeria.

Peter Obi and his team were green with envy. They felt one-upped by Tinubu. Although, unlike Tinubu, Obi routinely engages with Nigerians, he needed the Chatham House stamp of approval to show that he, too, had arrived. When he was invited to Chatham House, his ers celebrated it as if he had won the presidential election.

Kwankwasiyya ers also hyped Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso’s invitation to speak at Chatham House as evidence that he had overcome the real and notional marginality that had dogged his presidential aspiration, which had seen him and his spokespeople expending precious communicative energies to dispel insinuations that he would drop out of the race and endorse either Tinubu or Atiku.

Atiku Abubakar is the only major presidential candidate who hasn’t (yet) honored Chatham House’s invitation to talk about his presidential contest. But the fact that he spoke there in 2017 and 2018 indicates that he has no philosophical disagreement with the humiliating cultural cringe that Nigerian presidential candidates speaking at Chatham House represents.

Even INEC chairman Mahmood Yakubu showed up at Chatham House on January 17 to speak on INEC’s “Preparations, Challenges, and Priorities for Ensuring Electoral Integrity and Inclusivity.” I bet you that if Chatham House invites the entire Federal Executive Council to hold its weekly meetings in London to the hearing of Chatham House executives, Buhari and his ministers would be both honored and flattered for the “rare privilege.” 

This may sound like an outlandish exaggeration, but the late President Umar Musa Yar’adua used similar phraseology to characterize his visit to the White House. He was so overwhelmed by the splendor of the White House and the “privilege” to shake President George Bush’s hands— that he declared his visit “a rare opportunity” and a “moment that I will never forget in my life.”

I had never seen such an effusively self-humiliating expression of gratitude, such farouche, dewy-eyed candor from the president of a supposedly sovereign country. His successors weren’t better.

In the aftermath of Yar’adua’s sickness and the succession crisis it precipitated in 2010, Jonathan sought legitimacy for his acting presidency from the US. He came here and had photo opportunities with President Barack Obama and other top US government officials precisely because he wanted America’s symbolic stamp of authority for his acting presidency. 

Several sources confided in me at the time that Jonathan was brought to America—as embarrassingly ill-prepared as he was—because it was said that seeing him shake hands with Obama and other top US government functionaries would intimidate his opponents into unquestionably accepting him as a legitimate acting president. In other words, he sought the social and symbolic basis of the legitimacy of his presidency from the United States, not Nigeria.

In fact, like his successors, Jonathan left no one in doubt that he valued the opinions of Western, particularly American, leaders more than he valued the opinions of people who elected him. In 2011, for instance, he dismissed widespread criticism of his misgovernance by calling attention to the worthless, formulaic diplomatic extolments he got from Obama.

“I just got back from the US. The President of America is like the president of the world because it is the most powerful country,” Vanguard of September 26, 2011, quoted Jonathan to have said during a speech at a Lagos church in response to unremitting national criticisms against him. “Obama when he spoke commended Nigeria but back home, we are being abused.”

 In other words, if Obama, the “president of the world,” extolled Jonathan, how dare ordinary Nigerian mortals criticize him?

If Jonathan was a neocolonial president, Muhammadu Buhari, his immediate successor, took neocolonial presidency to new heights. He actually pioneered the Chatham House political pilgrimage in 2015. After the presidential election was rescheduled from February 14 to March 28, Buhari temporarily relocated to London during which he visited Chatham House where he famously made boldly airy promises that have since gone with the wind. 

“If I am elected president, the world will have no cause to worry about Nigeria,” he declared. “I’ll lead the way with the force of personal example.”

And shortly after he was elected and sworn in as president, Buhari went to London to “rest” and then, of course, visited Chatham House to repudiate two of the signature campaign documents that helped propel his party to an unlikely electoral triumph and that caused many hitherto nonpartisan commentators to identify with and him in 2015. The documents were pamphlets titled “One Hundred Things Buhari Will Do in 100 Days” and the “My Covenant With Nigerians.”

That inaugurated his tradition of reverence for the foreign and derision for Nigeria. All the consequential media interviews Buhari has granted throughout his presidency have been to foreign journalists—and often on foreign soil. He has, for the most part, avoided the Nigerian media, which Tinubu is aping.


Like Jonathan before him, Buhari gives more valence to foreign opinions about him than he does to domestic estimation of his performance. For example, a September 20, 2018, Times investigation found that the Buhari istration had “hired two American lobbying and public relations firms to plant opinion articles favourable to the President Muhammadu Buhari’s istration in American newspapers.”

This cultural cringe shows no sign of abating anytime soon because all Buhari’s potential successors are frankly indistinguishable from him when it comes to questions of national self-pride, as we have seen these past few weeks.

To be sure, independence and national self-pride don’t mean national self-isolation. There is merit in interacting with other countries and their institutions, not least countries we have historical ties with, but this should be done on that elevate, not diminish, our national self-esteem. 

As it stands right now, no Western nation needs secret agents to get our national secrets. Our elites’ egos are often flattered to no end when a white person—any white person—considers them “worthy” enough to serve as traitorous snitches against their own country.

 And that’s why they are routinely infantilized by the West. As a people and a culture, we have internalized a mentality of low self-worth and an unwarranted veneration of the foreign, especially if the “foreign” also happens to be white. 

https://www.farooqkperogi.com/2023/01/chatham-house-and-nigerias-growing.html?m=1

Previous Threads;

Democracy In Nigeria - Chatham House - 
https://nairaland.unblockandhide.com/7473839/chatham-house-lectures-emerging-neocolonialism#119051014

As former colonial masters, that is why they are still seeing us troop there

Our self inflicted inferiority complex is what makes the Western imperialists exert their dominance on our polity. Nigeria's problems are within.

So face the electorate that you will be answerable to back home first not like a druggie that is frantically avoiding the anger of a nation he sold into doom because of his inordinate ambition to be president.

This shows how hopelessly hopeless we are in NIGERIA.Tinubu refused every debate in Nigeria,but preferred London where he humiliated himself and Nigeria for exposing his hollowness when it comes to IQ for governance.

Infact, the Chattam house buried Tinubu's ego and nailed his presidential coffin, hence, his inability to give answers to simple questions made him a toddler contender to occupy Asorock. Credits OP

"...Nigeria has imperial and neocolonial trappings which it must acknowledge and see the need to vehemently reject. Our presidential aspirants should stop delivering lectures and addresses in America and Europe as a fundamental part of campaign packages prior to general elections

They should stop the surrendering of decision making about our financial and credit facilities or our political organization to the West..."

https://dailytrust.com/chatham-house-lectures-and-emerging-neocolonialism-in-nigerian-general-elections/

-Good observation and article. But I will add to it by saying you, the OP, is part of the problem by referring to Caucasian people as "White".

-The concept of "White" and "Black" People were created by the deeply-racists Caucasians in century past as part of the psychological tool to keep us down.

-Show me any society where "Black" is conceptually used for something inherently good and desirable, then I will show you the seaport I built in Daura, Katsina State.

Nigerians and most of Africa in general are still in love with their oppressors.

And Until they decide to do away with them, the stockholm syndrome will continue unabated.

Nigeria just has to get it right this time around without electing another Buhari pro max

Don’t you have respect for elders?😂😂

Obama flew all the way to to deliver a speech when he was Candidate Obama. To a crowd of over 100000 people

That does not mean that Obama was responding to the call of his slavemasters.

Political candidates have been travelling abroad to give speeches to foreign thinktanks. It is part of campaigning.

It is how one gets noticed.

Maybe Farroq is sour because his beloved atiku was a no show .

Modified

And yes, I know what the article says...the candidates by delivering a speech at Chatam house are somehow being subversilent to their foreign masters. Yeah, that is the kind of thing that I have gotten tired of hearing.

Anything I want to hear now is about Peter Obi. The name is giving hope and joy.

na wa ooo




No need of reading any form of long epistles, whether good or bad.

All we are saying is that "SLEEPY-BAT" will never be our president.

Reading...

The major cringe is the refusal of some presidential candidates to talk to our local media.

If this country is very serious, TINUBU ought to be disqualified for refusing to face Nigerian media.

My VOTE will go for OBI for better for worse. Only God will bless him for what he has done so far.

So cringe

Exactly what I was complaining to someone just recently.

How many of their people come here during British election

Reading...

for now, the Chattam house is the only and foremost platform for Nigerian candidates to sell their personalities and candidacy. So if we want to downplay that role, then its better we get an alternative. Get another good platform to sell your candidacy

PDJT:
-Good observation and article. But I will add to it by saying you, the OP, is part of the problem by referring to Caucasian people as "White".

-The concept of "White" and "Black" People were created by the deeply-racists Caucasians in century past as part of the psychological tool to keep us down.

-Show me any society where "Black" is conceptually used for something inherently good and desirable, then I will show you the seaport I built in Daura, Katsina State.

Easier said than reality. Be a constructive critic, provide alternative.

Na so,

Don't forget to give us your website design jobs..

Thanks Prof for speaking and writing my mind!

You don't even hear of Kenyan or South African presidential aspirants trooping to their former colonial masters to campaign.

Why can't this nation outgrow this foreign dependency from leaders, politicians, down to masses?!

I don't see anything wrong with going there
PO did not go there to seek any stamp of approval..
PO have gotten that stamp of approval from us as he regularly engages with we Nigerians and don't run away from engagement like the rest.....



PO, IS THE INCOMING.

I was at the swearing in ceremony of an American governor. I received an invite and met and mixed with the creme de la creme of the state that day.


I took pictures and kept the bottled water I was given as a souvenir.

I ed where I came from . This has nothing to do with racial inferiority complex. Some locations are historically prominent.


State House Ikeja and a house in Oluorogbo road, Ile-Ife are not the same class.

Kobonaire4:
Obama flew all the way to to deliver a speech when he was Candidate Obama. To a crowd of over 100000 people

That does not mean that Obama was responding to the call of his slavemasters.

Political candidates have been travelling abroad to give speeches to foreign thinktanks. It is part of campaigning.

It is how one gets noticed.

Maybe Farroq is sour because his beloved atiku was a no show .

Farook has always loved Atiku and he has been using his write ups to do two things.

1) Promote Atiku
2) Attack anyone he feels is stronger than Atiku.

Farook would have praised Chatham House to the high heavens if it was Atiku that went

This article was not there when BAT granted his interview oo
Because Obi had upper hand in the chattam house of a sudden they're weeing on themselves 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😂

Chai..

The slave mentality is general to most Nigerians.

Even Nigerians that japa abroad think they're more advanced and enlightened than normal Nigerians.

The is the same inferiority thought I had rejected as a child but many, even in future centuries, will not still be wise enough to know they're taking the position of slavery.

Must you go to Chatham House to prove that you're enlightened and capable?

Who will come to Lagos or Abuja House to do the same.

The Writer spoke my mind with the texts!

I just checked Chatham house on the map and discovered that it is situated in the UK. WTF. I always thought it was in Nigeria!

I thought I was the only sane person in this country.. God bless you professor

In summary, people actually think that other people care about them and their problems.

People can only pretend to care, but they have their own problems to attend to

Chai..

Boyfriend: Babe, my people are ready, we're coming next week to see your family.

Wife-to-be: We must go to CHATHAM HOuSE before marriage. My family wants to see whether you're capable or not!

Boyfriend: Babe, what do you mean?

Wife-to-be: I said CHATHAM HOUSE or nothing..!