The Managing Director of the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC), Alhaji Umaru Ibrahim has just made the claim that about 3 million Nigerians lost a total of 18 billion Naira to the MMM scheme. A scheme that sneaked in on Nigerians in a year of need #2016 and promised to give help – monetary – to anyone willing to put in “spare cash” to provide help to others.

It’s important to note at this point that the NDIC boss’ claim is still being fact checked so we are not certain if 3 million Nigerians really did lose 18 billion Naira to the Ponzi scheme but it seems like it could be true. In any case, a lot of Nigerians did get duped into participating in the scheme and we seem to have unlocked a few reasons how that happened.

Read and learn:

The recession was ruining us

Lat year was a bad year financially, let’s not lie. Did you notice how we did not spend as much time talking new year resolutions and stuff? It’s because we spent the better part of the first quarter wasting away on fuel queues. We then went from there to the shitiest that the Naira has ever been against the Greenback. Consequently, we had to share the scant resources available to us Nigerians with all the IJGBs that trooped in mid-year because even the abroad was becoming hard fro them due to all the Buharinomics Baba was playing with forex policies. Sigh.

Can you blame Nigerians then for rushing into a scheme that guaranteed 30% profit for simply putting their spare cash in escrow for some other Nigerian to use?

Nigerians are greedy

So by October many people had made quite enough money and the Nigerian government was already putting out PSAs back to back about how the scheme was a scam and they wouldn’t provide any bailout for duped citizens. Honestly, at this point, it was less about the warning than about the fact that Nigerians had made money but they kept going back. That’s greed.

But we guess that’s how the game works right? Win it till you lose it!

The FG told us not to do it

This one is real guys! First, it’s the way things work: ask humans not to and then they just do it!

Secondly, Nigerians are so untrusting of their own government that it became almost impossible not participate the moment they got on the screen asking us not to do it.

We didn’t get out fast enough

This ties into the greed phenomenon but worst still, why did anyone still participate in the scheme after the first time they froze the accounts. Why did this groom-to-be do it?

And finally, c’est la vie!

It’s just how life is. You cannot win!