Nigeria is chaos. The cities are extremely crowded, dirty (more on that later), noisy, and lively. Everyone seems to be talking all the time, often over each other. Outside the few modern sections of Lagos (and probably the capital, Abuja), Nigerian cities are made of endless winding roads and alleys periodically packed with open-air markets. Middle class and rich people all live behind walls topped with barbed wire or broken glass, and are protected by guards. Poor people live in slums that sprawl eternally in and around the cities, consisting of concrete, wood, or metal hovels stuffed into every square inch of space. A significant chunk of Lagos holds slums built on stilts on the water populated by fisherman and boat people.
I wasn’t sure if Nigeria or India is the poorest country I’ve been to by sheer number of impoverished people. It turns out there is much tighter competition here than I thought (...)
You really do feel it on the ground. I’ve been to a lot of poor countries, but Nigeria felt just a bit poorer. Part of it was the omnipresent shacks and slums in the major cities, but it was also the constant haggling over extremely small amounts of money (often under $0.50), or how even decent restaurants have ugly florescent fluorescent lighting, or how a chair collapsed under me in the airport, or how my driver in Kano stopped for a 30 minute detour to buy a bag of rice. I’ve encountered plenty of child beggars, but I’ve never had two (a boy and girl) grab each of my hands and refuse to let go as they followed me down the street for 100 yards until a helpful onlooker yelled at them.
Or maybe it’s the literal piss and shit that makes Nigeria seem so poor, though in my experience, this is another area where Nigeria has a close rivalry with India. There is no other way to say this – I saw a lot of people pissing and shitting, and not in bathrooms. I saw them do it on the side of the street, in alleyways, basically anywhere. I actually saw it on my first night, when a guy pissed out the side of a boat in the open, and then I saw it again on my final day, when a guy was squatting on the side of the road leading out of Nigeria and into Benin. (...)
Different parts of Nigeria look and feel extremely different. Lagos is a megatropolis reminiscent of Manila or cities in India, while Kano looks like it could be in the Middle East. Lagos is the NYC of Nigeria, the bustling heart of commerce with lots of waterways and canals and some extreme luxury areas. It’s definitely more socially liberal (there are advertisements for alcohol, women sometimes show cleavage) and has a tropical climate with a nice breeze from the ocean. There are KFCs and Domino’s, though oddly no McDonalds. I saw one white guy my entire time in the city.
Kano, the capital of the Islamic northern desert; it’s quieter, dusty, dry, the women are almost all covered in headscarves (they almost never spoke to me), and the men wear long Islamic robes and those little fez-like hats. Throughout the day, you’ll see people praying by the side of the street in little groups, and my driver had to pull over at one point for one of his prayers. The marketplace sells camels even though no one rides them and almost no one eats them, but my guide said Muslims love them. I didn’t see any white people in Kano (but a few Chinese and Arabs) and thus stood out more than in Lagos, but Kanoans love when I hit them with a little “as-salaam-alaikum.” (...)
The Savant Dictator
I want to preemptively acknowledge that Sani Abacha was a terrible human being who killed, imprisoned, and tortured thousands of people while engaging in an unprecedented amount of national looting. And he did all this about 20-25 years ago, so his victims and their descendants are mostly still alive.
With that said, I can also say that Abacha is probably my favorite African dictator. Not “favorite” in the sense that he was good or heroic or even tragic, but favorite in the sense of being interesting.
I don’t know if Abacha was literally autistic or something, but that’s how he seems based on his depictions, and Paul Kenyon even calls him an “idiot savant.” Kenyon relates that when Abacha was a child, he was so shy and reserved that some people thought he was mentally challenged. Adult Abacha is described as:
“Unemotional, often mute, always difficult to read.”
“Some interpreted his personality as a sign he should be feared. Others thought he was just stupid.”
A savant is basically someone who has innate mental challenges but is extremely competent in a particular narrow domain. Some savants become obsessed with trains and become great engineers. Some become obsessed with computers and build software wonders. One of Abacha’s predecessors said of him:
“He might not be bright upstairs, but he knows how to overthrow governments.”Kenyon elaborates:
“It was as if Abacha was an idiot savant. Dull, even gormless, he filled his days with cowboy movies and sleeping off the previous night’s indulgences in alcohol and prostitutes. But he was prossessed of a prodigious flair when it came to coups.” (...)Abacha proved to possess one of the most unfortunate attributes of a cruel African dictator – competence. His strategy was simple – the oil must flow. He made deals and gave bribes to some of the more prolific oil thieves (more on that later), and deployed the military and his death squad to the Niger Delta to protect Nigerian and foreign oil drilling operations. Early in his reign, Abacha chose an old schoolmate to lead the crackdown and promised him an ongoing cut of the oil revenue in exchange. Together, Abacha and his friend devised a strategy wherein they regularly deployed some undercover black ops soldiers into the Niger Delta, the soldiers would randomly slaughter villagers, and then some other soldiers would spread rumors that the slaughter was done by a rival ethnic group. This would typically spark local tribal wars that would both sap the strength of potential oil thieves and redirect anti-Abacha sentiment.
The result was an increase in oil production by about 50% during Abacha’s reign, which, on paper at least, pointed Nigeria in the right direction. Under Abacha, foreign currency reserves rose from $494 million to $9.6 billion, external debt was reduced from $36 billion to $27 billion, inflation fell from 54% to 8.5%, and Nigeria’s roadways were considerably expanded.
While the Nigerian economy did pretty well, Abacha and his family did much better. A 2004 report ranked Abacha the fourth most successful kleptocratic African dictator, with his family stealing up to $5 billion in government funds, $480 million of which would later be seized by the American government.
Abacha accomplished this staggering level of theft in a mere five years, and all while being a reclusive weirdo.
Image: Matt Lakeman
[ed. Just found Matt's site from another reference. I doubt anyone even knows where Nigeria is, let alone anything about it. This and the following essay are, I think, fascinating.]
