The Painful Paradox of Nigeria's 'Self-Imposed Poverty'
By ROGER COHEN
LAGOS, Nigeria -- By night, many homes here have no electricity. But by day, the street lights across the long bridge connecting Lagos island with the Nigerian mainland are often on, mile after mile of feeble glows in the sunlight. Someone, it seems, forgets to turn off the switch.
The National Electric Power Authority, or NEPA, has long been derided, its acronym widely held to stand for "Never Expect Power Again." But the daytime illumination of sun-drenched streets amounts to a new twist in the long tale of waste that has brought Nigeria to its knees.
Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, is rich. It has vast reserves of oil and minerals, fertile land, more than 30 universities and many talented, highly educated people. But after decades of gross mismanagement under military rulers, it is also marked by sweeping poverty and ethnic tensions.
A senior officer, Lt. Gen. Jeremiah Useni, said recently that military rule for 28 of the last 32 years had been necessary to "put the house in order." But the country where one in six Africans live has been reduced to mind-bending disorder.
Wires that never deliver electricity dangle all over the place; people in Lagos call them "decoration." Unfinished construction projects dot the landscape, whims of past dictators whose days in power ended as they had begun -- with sudden coups.
Potholes big enough to swallow small cars multiply. Electrical turbines, oil refineries and water installations collapse, depriving people of light, gasoline and running water. Airlines make official announcements that they will fly when they "can find some fuel."
"This is a land that lives in self-imposed poverty," said Samuel Aiyeyimi, 60, a former worker for the Lagos port authority. "If we had invested some of the billions of dollars from oil in agriculture, then we would have provided work and food for the millions of jobless. Instead, we import food and people are hungry."
Like many of Nigeria's problems, the failure to develop agriculture -- which thrived until the 1960s and the move toward an oil-dominated economy -- has an explanation that seems to reside in the pockets of the powerful.
Sugar cane, for example, would thrive here, but its cultivation would end the highly lucrative trade in smuggled sugar controlled by a coterie of powerful business people. Similarly, repair of the refineries would halt senior military officers' profits from transactions in imported fuel, and the refurbishing of petrochemical plants would shave the big profits on imported fertilizers.
Ismaila Gwarzo, security adviser to Gen. Sani Abacha, the dictator who died unexpectedly in June, was arrested recently in connection with the disappearance of $2.45 billion from the Nigerian central bank. The arrest appeared to indicate a determination to set new standards and recover some of the money stolen by the Abacha government.
With official theft on this scale, it is little wonder that the state lacks funds to fix the lights. Or to build schools. Or to pay a decent wage to customs officers, civil servants, police officers and young soldiers, who with monthly salaries in the $40 range have little incentive to work and overwhelming incentive to procure dash -- the bribes that almost universally grease the wheels here.
The "What do you have for me today?" greeting at military roadblocks often comes close to armed robbery. At airports, the small baskets intended to ferry objects like keys or coins or wallets through metal-detector machines are instead proffered by officials with a whispered "Dash me something!" In any event the machines do not work.
By Western standards the sums involved are usually small, but by the same standards these practices are corrupt.
The system in Nigeria, from top to bottom, has become based on such behavior. Any right, even any notion, of redress or the rule of law has disappeared through years of dictatorship. In their place Nigeria has succumbed to an army-run system where any contract requires a payoff.
"Our military leaders have been lifting oil and money for years," said Bola Ige, a leader of the southwestern Yoruba, the ethnic group of Moshood K.O. Abiola, the late opposition leader. "They have shown no love of their country. Only love of their pockets."
Far from those pockets, and the American investment that has continued to pour into the Nigerian oil industry, lie the tens of millions of Nigerians with nothing. Nobody knows how many they are. The last census has been kept secret because, in a country where each ethnic group wants to appear more numerous than the others, it may be explosive material.
The one thing everyone knows is that poverty is spreading -- per-capita income is one-fourth of what it was in the 1980s -- and the population growing so fast (close to 3.5 percent a year) that Nigeria's population may rise to 280 million by 2025, from an estimated 105 million today.
The millions of young people without jobs try any means to get by. They surge forth at any of the staggering "go-slows" -- bottlenecks -- in Nigerian cities, an army of desperate peddlers darting through the black exhaust fumes and offering chewing gum, wrenches, garden shears, coconuts, pipes, roasted corn, even copies of The Economist.
Do not ask how The Economist reached them. This is a country of intellectual vibrancy where a dingy newspaper store in a rundown provincial airport will offer copies of "Middlemarch" and "Jude the Obscure" beside a bar enveloped in the stench of broken toilets and adorned with snail kebabs so old they look like sinister waxworks.
Among the desperate is Dhadrack Adason, 29, who has never been able to find a steady job and now drives an Okada. There was once an efficient Nigerian airline called Okada. It is now bankrupt, but the name has stuck for the countless drivers of motor-scooter taxis who weave through the chaos of Lagos.
The view from the back seat of Adason's scooter is instructive: He splashes through pools of filth, past mountains of garbage, through the thick waft of sewage, into a pall of grit and dust. A bent woman tries to clean a Lagos highway with a dustpan and brush, an act akin to trying to clear the Sahara of sand with a beach bucket.
Adason pays $5 a day to rent the scooter. Working 10 to 12 hours, he may make $8. With the $3 in profit, he tries to maintain his wife, Patience, and his year-old daughter, Blessed.
Unlike most of the drivers, he has a helmet -- an old police model given to him by his brother, a policeman. He has no savings but hopes that "by the grace of God," he may one day buy his own scooter.
After a 40-minute drive, he reaches his home in the Ilasan estate, a slum on the edge of Lagos. He has a single tiny room decorated with a poster of Abiola, the opposition leader who died in detention in July. "Abiola lives on," it reads.
Ilasan was begun years ago as an ambitious state project to provide cheap housing. But the buildings were never finished, the "contractor" took his money without doing the work, and today 600,000 people live without water, electricity, roads or a sewage system.
Among them is Aiyeyimi, the former port authority worker. Like many people in Ilasan, he once lived in Maroko, a poor area on the edge of the up-market Victoria Island. Its real estate was coveted by developers in league with the military.
On July 14, 1990, bulldozers flanked by thousands of soldiers, with air force planes sweeping overhead, appeared at Maroko and leveled the place. Aiyeyimi's three houses, representing his life savings, were flattened, he said.
"The soldiers came with coffins, not ambulances, and said if we wanted to die, they were ready to bury us," he said. In all, about 300,000 people were evicted, turned out onto the streets with nowhere to go and no compensation. Many were killed.
After weeks of protest, the military government said some of the homeless would be rehoused at Ilasan, more than 10 miles from Victoria Island. Aiyeyimi was awarded Apartment No. 4 in Block No. 309.
But the apartment, supposedly on the second floor, did not exist. "It was empty air," Aiyeyimi said, pointing to the still-unfinished structure. "The government gave me a flat, but the flat was emptiness." When he protested, the military authorities said that if his new home was "incomplete," it would be finished within six months.
No work was ever done, he said. So he eventually rented a room in Ilasan. Describing himself as a ruined subsistence farmer, he tries to cultivate beans and sugar cane on a small patch of land.
"Our only sin was that we were in a disadvantaged position," he said. "It was the oil boom. All the big military men, all the number ones, had to have a building on Victoria Island. Space was running out, and the people in Maroko were in the way."
Aiyeyimi continues to fight for the evicted. "It is a matter of right," he said, "and without rights for all, Nigeria has no future." A case brought by rights groups is still before the courts, although many buildings have already gone up on what was Maroko. Among them is the Nigerian headquarters of Mobil Oil.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)