NIGERIA AIR LOGO AND THE NIGERIAN MENTALITY
The mentality behind the outsourcing of the production of our football team's jersey is the same one at play with the Nigeria Air logo.
I remember back in secondary school when a classmate of mine ran away from home. He slept in the open classrooms for about two days before the school porter noticed and reported the matter to our teachers. They invited him to the staff room, questioned him as to why he won't go home. But he insisted he couldn't, that his father would kill him if he dared step foot in the house. They were curious to know the weight of his crime: did he steal his father's money? No. The teachers burst out laughing when he told them he had run for breaking a tumbler. They couldn't believe it, so they assigned a teacher to go with a few students to his house and plead with his father. We even took up collection and bought a whole set of glass cups to replace the broken one.
It was a clogged room in a heavily crowded "face me I slap you" tenement. The father, whom we had all drawn up the faces of the most fiery beasts in our heads for, was rather warm. He ushered us in and offered to bring us some refreshments, which we turned done. Then our teacher began with a long sermon about how parents needed to be patient with their children.
"He told us he broke a tumbler," our teacher finally said, trying hard to keep from laughing; "you know children of nowadays, there so distracted."
But the man looked at our teacher and said, "He told you he broke a tumbler, and dazall?"
"Yes, sir. And, in fact, his classmates decided to take up collection and get a replacement," our teacher replied pointing to the tumbler set we had set on the table.
"Did he tell you what kind of tumbler he broke?"
"Ermm...no, sir."
Aha, perhaps that's what our friend has been hiding from us, we thought.
"This boy, this useless boy, saw all the Nigerian tumblers like these ones you brought, he didn't break them. He went and broke my London tumbler!"
We were confused. I mean, what is a London tumbler?
"Tumbler that was sent to me from London!"
There you go. And this is not a strange or illiterate mentality. Change the context, and replace the tumbler with our national football team's Russia 2018 jerseys or the logo for our national carrier, and things won't look as outrageous as they seem.
When Ben Murray-Bruce took to Twitter to express outrage over the outsourcing of the Super Eagle's jersey production to Nike, Nigerians were quick to shut him up by calling him all sorts of names. But before the release date of the outrageously expensive official jersey by Nike, Nigerians were already rocking the thing, courtesy of the neglected creative industry running all by itself in Aba and Onitsha. Ben argued that these industries could compete favourably with Nike were they funded just a little bit. Not to mention the huge employment opportunities such investment could have created.
Why do you think anyone in his right senses would spend $600, 000 to get a squiggly ribbon design from abroad when a simple $100 logo design contest for Nigerian graphics designers or a $1000 prize offer for the best brand design proposal would have brought something close to divine? In fact, there are graphics designers in Nigeria who would have done it for just a prize handshake with the VP. Like my classmate's father's London tumbler, no design out of Nigerian could have replaced that Bahrain logo. It's not as simple as asking our government why they can't use the huge amounts spent acquiring the services from abroad to establish something of equal standard here. It is just the Nigerian mentality. And if that mentality was some kind of project that needed branding, like the others, it would just as well have been outsourced.
Prospero O. Anuforo is a writer, blogger and spoken word poet. He also loves hanging out with brainy, beautiful women.
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