From My Personal Experience

Naturally, as a human being, we tend to want to take sides with people who are either from our cities, same tribe or villages, and I used to feel that way until I moved to the east (I'm from the east) six years ago and sadly, the more time I spend here, the more I get to realize how untrustworthy my "people" can be.

Initially, I wasn't going to write on this topic because I felt my opinion on it was going to be a bit biased due to the fact that I've mainly only ever dealt with one side of this conversation, but then two of my friends recently had an encounter with some hausa men, and based off of the things they had to say, I think I'm a bit convinced that Hausa people are a lot more trustworthy and nicer than most people from the Igbo tribe, which also happens to be the same tribe I'm from.

_{photo by Fatima Yusuf}

And the reason why I say this is because throughout my six years here, studying and just living through life, I've had multiple encounters with people from the same tribe as me, and they've constantly been trying to scam the hell out of me for as long as I can remember.

Sadly, I haven't been too lucky to avoid all of them, the latest being scammed off a huge sum of money from the Igbo guy who was helping me out with my school clearance. It turned out that due to the fact that he knew that I didn't know the prices that some of these school documents were been sold for, he had added extra prices to ALL OF THEM, and these weren't little amounts.

And what was more painful was the fact that after paying all of those cash to him, I still had to pay for his services. So he got paid more than five times the amount I thought he was getting paid, and I didn't find until about a week ago when I had jokingly asked another friend of mine about those same prices, only to discover that I paid more than I should have for every single document.

Meanwhile, on the other side, the few encounter I and my friends have had with people from the Hausa tribe has been the complete opposite from that of the people from my tribe.

Funny enough, back in the day, I used to be a lot more cautious when dealing with these people because I always felt that if I was going to get scammed, it was going to be from someone from a different tribe, not knowing that the threat was a lot closer to home than I thought.

As a matter of fact, you don't have to be from the Hausa tribe to be treated well by them, just speaking their language is enough to get you into their good grace. Meanwhile, even if the Igbo guy I'm dealing with stays in the same compound as me in the same village, he still would look for loopholes that he could extort me from.

It's sad, but that's the reality.