Steve writes:
Have you got any solid evidence about the crime rates in northern and southern Nigeria? How do you know its a lot less in the North? Is it recorded the same way in both? What anecdotal evidence have you heard?
Our anti-scammer group was first set up to fight Nigerian scammers. Later it was somewhat expanded to include other countries. We also worked very closely with a number of Nigerians in the course of our work. One guy was sort of a spy for us, and he even wrote a book on the subject. He went undercover to research in the scammer cafes, etc. We learned a lot about Nigerian society just talking to these people.
You know the type of person I am. I have to become the world’s leading expert on everything I dive into. So I dove into the study of Nigeria to figure out this scamming phenomenon. And I studied that country a lot for ~3 years.
One of the things I learned was that there was almost no corruption in the North for some reason. The South was the source of all of that. Also more important to what we were doing, scamming was nonexistent in the North, whereas in the North it seemed to be a way of life. All of the reports out of Nigeria that we received that portrayed as Dante’s Inferno on Earth were all talking about the South.
We never heard anything about the North other than that there was little corruption, basically zero scamming and apparently quite a low crime rate, especially for an African country. If you look at other African Islamic countries in the Sahel, you will find some of the most stable and orderly societies in Africa with some of the lowest crime rates in the sub-Saharan region. Even on the coast in the Muslim areas, the Blacks are a lot more orderly and controlled and much less criminal than in the non-Muslim regions. Blacks in Yemen commit almost no crime.
