Master and Mugu 203Although Nigerians may not have invented fraud, they have certainly
contributed to its honing and perfection. Most observers of 419 scams
locate the roots of the current phenomenon in Nigeria to the late 1970s
and early 1980s. Ironically, foreign, and by and large Western, companies
played an important part in laying the foundation on which 419 scam-
mers would later build their enticing legends. During the Shehu Shagari
administration (1979–1984), corruption became deeply embedded in the
Nigerian economy. The oil boom years had brought petrodollars into
the national purse, money that was used, in part at least, for large-scale
infrastructure projects. This facilitated “kill-and-divide” practices—the
awarding of contracts by corrupt government officials to companies or
individuals under secret agreements that included “certain percentages
of the contractual amount as commission” (Tive 2006: 14). Nigerian and
foreign contractors conspired with corrupt government officials to loot
the country’s economy through such shady deals. Many of these con-
tracts were awarded but never executed, others were executed but “over-
invoiced,” a practice that involved sharing the difference between the
actual costs and the costs listed in the invoice between the contractor
and his contract-awarding partner in a so-called “payback deal.” Money
transfer–style 419 emails typically refer to such practices to explain the
origins of the huge sums of money referred to.
W hen the economic crisis of the 1980s set in, the petrodollars of the ear-
lier decades had produced not only a generation of well-educated young
Nigerians who lacked adequate job opportunities but also a number of
dismissed civil servants. The latter were former employees of government
institutions, such as the Central Bank of Nigeria and Nigerian National
Petroleum Corporation, and they were well versed in the practices their
former bosses had used in the past to siphon off Nigeria’s wealth with the
assistance of foreigners. According to Simon (2009: 7), these former of-
fice workers were the first Nigerians to send out advance-fee fraud letters
to foreigners. They used the same schemes as previously used by their
bosses, “albeit with the intention of defrauding their ‘business partners.’”
W hen they received these offers and became aware of Nigeria’s shadow
economy, foreign businesspeople sensed the opportunity to make easy
money—even without the detour of building infrastructure in Nigeria—