The term mugu is a Nigerian slang used to describe someone regarded as a fool or a someone who is very gullible or being conned. Another related Nigerian slang is guy man who is a person involved in a scam. The prevailing scam in Nigeria today is the advance fee scam. I will expand on this, later. When the above words, mugu and guy man, are used together in context, it leads to the axiom, “If mugu no fall, guy man no go chop.” In plain English, this axiom states that without the presence or existence of the gullible, a fraudster will not have the opportunity to thrive.
As someone who grew up in Nigeria, I used to think that there were too many guy men in Nigeria until my immigration to the USA when I noticed that just as the USA is considered to be God’s own country, it is also the headquarters of scam and fraudsters. Don’t quit on me yet, I will explain why and how.
Being a prolific reader of real crimes and crime fictions, I speak from experience when I opine that the USA is the headquarters of scam and continues to lead in that field till date. Nigerians being great imitators of both the good and the bad have continued to copy their role model – the USA.
In September 2008, the biggest and worst financial crime in the world was committed here in the United States. Prosecutors estimated the fraud to be worth $64.8 billion based on the amounts on the accounts of the fraudster. I returned from work that September evening and turned on the TV to behold the announcement of the mother of all financial crimes being announced on all television channels around the US. Tired to the bone, hungry, and rummaging the refrigerator for food, I was forced to pay attention to the announcement when the anchor on CNN blurted that the biggest financial crime in the history of the world has been uncovered. Thinking that Nigerians were once again involved in something, I paid close attention to the picture and name and boom, Bernie Madoff, a Jewish American, was revealed as the culprit.
The thought that it could be a Nigerian did not stem from ignorance; it was mostly from the bad press always directed at Nigerians. Any black African who is caught in any form of crime is labelled a Nigerian, until his or her real identify emerges (I am not implying that Nigerians are angels, no, we are not). For example, the crazy Houston-based hydroxychloroquine doctor who works closely with “Dr.” Donald Trump was first introduced to the world as a Nigerian before people realized that she is actually from Cameroun. This brings me to the focus of this article.
“If mugu no fall, guy man no go chop.” The second biggest scam ever to hit the world happened eight years later in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump. A world full of so-called smart people watched in plain view as a widely known con artist conned millions of Americans and emerged the President of America. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, so many New Yorkers, and millions of others familiar with Trump’s antecedents warned us but the mugus and most gullible still fell for the scam. This is not dissimilar to what happens when a buddy of yours comes beaming and glittering with happiness because he believed that he was at verge of striking it big. When asked how, he would tell you that the deal is too complex for you to understand, but in a few weeks, he would be moving into a mansion with a Bentley. Almost immediately, you would figure out he had either too much to drink or was getting ready to fall victim to a scam. However, nothing in the world could dissuade him from carrying on with his “complex deal” until his “eyes clear” as we say in Nigerian parlance.
Fraud and fraudsters are as ancient as the world itself; although their methods of operation change with time. Growing up, I heard about “wash-wash” which is an early form of crime where the victims are conned into advancing money to fraudsters to purchase chemicals for “cleaning” plain paper and turning them into real money. The scam later evolved into advance fee fraud where victims are asked to provide some money for a guy man to help them settle bank fees before transferring a bulk amount of money from a deceased person’s account into the victims’ accounts. Now, we are in the era of Yahoo-Yahoo crime where the Internet is used to scam mugus. In the political arena, we are in the era where a con artist is leading the greatest country in the world.
The third biggest scam is yet again to be committed with the help of most of the gullible working to re-elect Donald Trump, the poster child for guy men. When are we going to smell the coffee and wake up? Once again, before you call out or blame the mugus, you must ensure that you are not one of them. The election of Trump in 2016 was a big scam and a terrible mistake. If we allow this mistake to re-occur, it will become a pattern, which will change the label of his voters from mugus to supper mugus or from gullible to idiots. To God’s glory, I was not among the mugus in 2016 and will not be in this 2020.
I hope you would make the right decision for this country on November 3, 2020. Don’t allow him to lie his way into another four years of continued torture and monuments of lies. Enough is Enough. Good luck.
Chris Ikeanyi
Los Angeles, California
