Public speaker, socio-economic and political commentator and social media expert, Japheth Omojuwa has weighed in on trending rumours of Mercy Aigbe and Toke Makinwa living off a wealthy sponsor.
Omojuwa came in defence of the women and according to him, in our society, people suspect progress and wealth especially of young women.
Below is the full text of his post:
A society can never advance beyond the collective mentality of its people. Poor societies are poor because their systems are set up to make people poor but essentially because there is a mentality that drives poverty, cultures it and amplifies it.
The same mentality that kills or gets on the way of enterprise. I know these two enterprising ladies. Without knowing them personally, you see them creating businesses and products and getting stuff done. They create products, write, create platforms, movies, sign endorsement deals…their path to wealth is apparent to any rational person. But ours is a society that suspects progress and wealth.
When a young person is rich, even with an apparent value creation system, we ascribe their success to everything other than the fact that they create value and earn income. These days, we have blogs and sites focused on damaging people’s reputation than pushing progress. You create a product and they look away; someone starts a dirty unfounded rumour and they jump on it.
They amplify. They drop denigrating comments. Some people subconsciously think that the reason their own lives are failing is because others are progressing. We need to do better. When a lady succeeds or starts to shine, we ascribe their success to the rich and powerful. Even some women with powerful platforms either push or amplify this madness. We are disempowering young girls.
We are telling them being enterprising is a lie. That working smart and hard is useless because to succeed you have to be dating a governor. They believe this because of the lies we form and amplify about the successes of those they look up to. We go to church on Sundays, to the Mosque on Fridays, to the Shrine and we pray to succeed. To thrive. We work hard too. But when we see others succeed, we insist they had sex with someone, they are gay, they are anything but the culmination of their sweat and intellect.
Our leaders are mostly bad. Our collective mentality is actually worse. These are human beings. Young girls making a living. For each time you push this myth that these folks succeed because of some immoral acts with men, remember your daughter, your sister…let’s do better!
