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Letter from Lagos: In my father’s land
By Adewale Maja-Pearce
Ten years ago I decided to relocate from London to Lagos. It wasn’t a
sudden decision. For some time before then I had been making extensive
visits to Nigeria, either in a personal capacity or for work, but at last the urge
to return full-time became too strong to resist and I took the plunge. I was
helped by the fact that I had inherited a small property which could also
comfortably double as an office and that I no longer had any dependants to
consider. At the same time, I felt that I was reasonably well known in literary
circles to generate enough work as a freelance writer and editor.
My reasons for relocating were two-fold. The first was nostalgia. Lagos
was the scene of my childhood and I had always retained warm memories of
it, not least because I had had a privileged upbringing. The second was a
belief that Nigeria, with its vast resources, was a coming country. A person
could make something of themselves if only they were prepared to work.
Britain, by contrast, seemed a restricted place. You had the security of living
in a rich country with all-found but I couldn’t shake off the impression –
rightly or wrongly – that there were also limitations as to how far you could
go. There was more to life than comfort and, in any case, I wanted a change.
I might also add that I liked the Nigerian weather. The cold and damp of an
English winter has never agreed with me.
So it was that I moved. At first it was exhilarating, helped in no small
measure by the number of friends and acquaintances who were pleased by
my decision. Nigerians were used to people making the reverse journey, as
a visit to any of the foreign missions easily confirmed. Indeed, the treatment
of would-be travellers was to remain a scandal throughout the ten years I
lived there, as I saw for myself when I eventually married a Nigerian and she
applied for a visa to accompany me to Germany on an official trip paid for by
that country’s foreign ministry. Although they eventually granted it to her – it
was difficult for them to refuse - I was appalled by the hostile manner of the
official concerned and had to excuse myself from the interview room before I
allowed my anger to scupper her chances.
I should also say that it was exciting time to be in Nigeria. The long years
of military rule, effectively beginning with the civil war in 1967 (and only
briefly interrupted in the early 1980s by the ill-fated Second Republic), were
at last coming to an end. There was optimism everywhere that the ‘giant of
Africa’ was about to take its rightful place alongside a recently liberated
South Africa and – to paraphrase a Nigerian saying - move the continent
forward. That said, my own sense of euphoria was tempered by the fact that
the powers-that-be within and without the country seemed intent on installing
Olusegun Obasanjo, a retired general and himself a former military dictator,
as the new saviour of democracy, and so it happened. My doubts were
reinforced when I had the opportunity to cover the 1999 elections and saw
for myself the extent to which the people’s will was callously subverted. That
boded ill for the future, and so it happened.
As everybody knows, Nigeria is generally regarded as one of the most
corrupt countries in the world. I had experienced what it meant at first-hand
when I tried to get a telephone line, a pre-requisite for my work in the days
before licences for mobile phone companies were finally approved. To
understand what this meant I should point out that NITEL, the government-
owned parastatal which enjoyed a monopoly, had managed only 750,000
lines for a population of 120 million, of which only two-thirds worked at any
one time; and that this was in part because, as a previous minister of
telecommunications - and the current president of the Senate - put it,
telephones were not for the masses. I wasn’t so naive as to imagine that I
merely needed to apply for a line at my local NITEL office but, fortunately, a
friend of mine put me onto a tout who promised to get me one within a month
for $2,000, a mark-up of over 90 per cent of the official rate. One year later,
I was still waiting. I finally went to the police (a story in itself) who charged him
to court for advance fee fraud, otherwise known as ‘419’. And so I got my
line. Six months later, it ceased working. By then I wasn’t bothered. Mobile
phones had finally arrived and, frankly, maintaining the line had been too
much of a hassle. I had to anticipate when the next monthly bill was due and
send my p.a. to queue all day, every day, in order to pay it before they
tossed the line, with the added expense of getting it un-tossed.
Electricity, however, was a more serious problem. If I say that we didn’t
have any I mean that we were lucky to ‘enjoy’ two hours a day. Worse yet, it
could come at any time and go at any time, even in the blink of an eye, which
is not a metaphor but a fact. Then again, the current could be so low as to
be useless or so high as to blow your appliances, which also meant that you
had to invest in a whole plethora of gadgets to protect particularly sensitive
equipment. Obasanjo, in his usual bullish manner, kept promising to fix the
problem within six months, two years, before the end of his tenure, but eight
years later, having tried and failed to alter the constitution in order to secure
a third term, the power situation was possibly even worse that it had been
before he entered office. And then it transpired, in a series of televised
revelations from the house of representatives, that in the course of those
eight years he had awarded contracts to the tune of $16 billion to various
local and foreign companies, all of whom merely shared the money at source
without importing a single transformer.
The revelations of such ‘squandermania’, all-too typical in the Nigerian
context (witness, for instance, the recent revelations in the banking sector),
sent me into a depression more severe than I realized at the time. To
understand why this was so one has to understand what it means to have to
provide your own power. It is expensive enough to buy a generator
(although, ideally, you need at least two) but fuelling it is even more so,
especially when, as often happens in Nigeria, there is a short at the pumps
because petrol is imported because the local refineries don’t work because
the funds awarded to fix them are looted by the contractors, who themselves
only get the contracts because they have the right political connections.
Then there is the engine oil, the servicing, the spare parts (which, as likely
as not, will be fakes), the noise, the fumes and the sheer hassle.
This last is not to be underestimated. You wake up in the morning all primed
to write that article for, say, the New African, but the thought of putting on the
generator and all it involves – turning off the water pumps, the freezer, the
fridge; the bedroom lights and fans and television – encourages a kind of
lethargy. Perhaps the vendor has delivered the newspaper so you settle
down to scan through it, telling yourself that there might be something you
need to note down for a future article. Time passes. A friend drops by, then
it’s time for lunch, then you have to go to the corner shop, then you decide it’
s not too early for a beer, and then the day is gone. Tomorrow, then, but, of
course, tomorrow never comes. The weeks pass, the months pass, your
whole damn life starts passing and you’ve done nothing.
But this is not the whole story, and I’m aware that some of my frustrations
had to do with trying to survive as a freelance, which presented a whole new
set of problems to do with certain attitudes towards work. Let me make a
blanket statement and say that Nigeria is a country geared towards what we
might call anti-work, which is why the government is less interested in
delivering electricity (or water or roads or health or schools) than in
providing the opportunity for the well placed – necessarily few - to benefit
from such a state of affairs.
Let me give an example. Once upon a time I was employed as an external
consultant on a World Bank project which was supposed to overhaul the
Lagos State Water Corporation preparatory to breaking it up and selling it
off to private investors. A good thing, you would think, given the dilapidated
state of a parastatal which has seen no improvement since the colonial
power exited the scene nearly half-a-century ago, which is to say when the
population of Lagos State was one-twentieth of what it is today – and
growing. My own role was to edit their press releases, quarterly newsletters
and annual reports in order to ensure that they met acceptable international
standards.
Or so I thought. The reality turned out to be the opposite. At first I couldn’t
understand why the department I was working with employed 12 people who
between them couldn’t write a simple memo without making elementary
grammatical mistakes. When I realized the scale of the problem I got up a
rudimentary style guide to ensure consistency. This was ignored. Time
passed, we held meetings, took trips to various waterworks, but nobody
seemed interested in the work itself, least of all in me doing it. The money
itself was good but over time I became increasingly frustrated.
And then, one day, the World Bank representative, an Italian with so-so
English, came to town to see how far, as we say. You could see at once that
he was frustrated at the obvious non-action but uncertain how to get his
message across. I tried to help him out. It happened that the oga had kept
us waiting, as was his wont (well, no point being an oga unless you can keep
people waiting) and for the first time I actually studied the headed notepaper
informing us of this very meeting. It contained telex and telegram numbers
but no email and the phone numbers were clearly outdated. In other words, it
was the same one they had been using since the colonial days yet they had
spent a small fortune acquiring new computers and internet facilities for their
brand new website.
‘So when did you last send or receive a telegram or a telex?’ I asked at a
suitable interval. ‘And what about these phone numbers?’ The Italian perked
up for the first time in two hours. ‘Yes, listen to him,’ he said, but I could see
at once that I wasn’t going to last much longer. You would have thought I
had shot someone stone dead right there in the room. The assembled
management, with their smart suits and manicured fingernails, did their best
to hide their disarray and I knew my time was up. And so it happened. They
didn’t have to write me the second query; I edited the first and sent it back
and never even bothered to collect my outstanding fee. And the result? The
good people of Lagos State, who now owe more money to the World Bank
(with interest) than they did before they weren’t given water, still have to
spend countless hours queuing up at wells and boreholes.
So, yes, it’s good to be back in a world where everything works and I am
able to wake up in the morning and sit down at my desk to write an article
for, say, the New African, without having to worry about whether there is
enough fuel in the generator, but I also feel a sense of failure tinged with
anger that so much potential is going to waste, has been going to waste for
far too many years than one would care to count, but I also miss the place,
the energy and the optimism that keep people going despite the odds and
which perhaps ought to turn to lethargy and pessimism so that the entire
rotten edifice simply collapses from its own inertia. That would at least
constitute progress of sorts, a melancholy thought which is itself a comment
on the dire situation the country finds itself in. Whether I will go back again,
or how, is not a question I feel inclined to ask for the present, and I realize, of
course, my own good fortune in having the option to choose. I think, on
balance, that I probably will, but only because I can opt out again at any
time, a luxury denied the vast majority of my compatriots, who must continue
to suffer and be broken by a system I have come to see as evil, and for
which reason must, eventually, perish.
- ends –
Adewale Maja-Pearce, the author of a number of books, is a partner in The
New Gong Publishers – www.thenewgong.com - based in Lagos. He is
currently working on a critical biography of J. P. Clark-Bekederemo, the
Nigerian poet and playwright.
Other letters:
Not waving but drowning
By Adewale Maja-Pearce
Ten years ago I decided to relocate from London to Lagos. It wasn’t a
sudden decision. For some time before then I had been making extensive
visits to Nigeria, either in a personal capacity or for work, but at last the urge
to return full-time became too strong to resist and I took the plunge. I was
helped by the fact that I had inherited a small property which could also
comfortably double as an office and that I no longer had any dependants to
consider. At the same time, I felt that I was reasonably well known in literary
circles to generate enough work as a freelance writer and editor.
My reasons for relocating were two-fold. The first was nostalgia. Lagos
was the scene of my childhood and I had always retained warm memories of
it, not least because I had had a privileged upbringing. The second was a
belief that Nigeria, with its vast resources, was a coming country. A person
could make something of themselves if only they were prepared to work.
Britain, by contrast, seemed a restricted place. You had the security of living
in a rich country with all-found but I couldn’t shake off the impression –
rightly or wrongly – that there were also limitations as to how far you could
go. There was more to life than comfort and, in any case, I wanted a change.
I might also add that I liked the Nigerian weather. The cold and damp of an
English winter has never agreed with me.
So it was that I moved. At first it was exhilarating, helped in no small
measure by the number of friends and acquaintances who were pleased by
my decision. Nigerians were used to people making the reverse journey, as
a visit to any of the foreign missions easily confirmed. Indeed, the treatment
of would-be travellers was to remain a scandal throughout the ten years I
lived there, as I saw for myself when I eventually married a Nigerian and she
applied for a visa to accompany me to Germany on an official trip paid for by
that country’s foreign ministry. Although they eventually granted it to her – it
was difficult for them to refuse - I was appalled by the hostile manner of the
official concerned and had to excuse myself from the interview room before I
allowed my anger to scupper her chances.
I should also say that it was exciting time to be in Nigeria. The long years
of military rule, effectively beginning with the civil war in 1967 (and only
briefly interrupted in the early 1980s by the ill-fated Second Republic), were
at last coming to an end. There was optimism everywhere that the ‘giant of
Africa’ was about to take its rightful place alongside a recently liberated
South Africa and – to paraphrase a Nigerian saying - move the continent
forward. That said, my own sense of euphoria was tempered by the fact that
the powers-that-be within and without the country seemed intent on installing
Olusegun Obasanjo, a retired general and himself a former military dictator,
as the new saviour of democracy, and so it happened. My doubts were
reinforced when I had the opportunity to cover the 1999 elections and saw
for myself the extent to which the people’s will was callously subverted. That
boded ill for the future, and so it happened.
As everybody knows, Nigeria is generally regarded as one of the most
corrupt countries in the world. I had experienced what it meant at first-hand
when I tried to get a telephone line, a pre-requisite for my work in the days
before licences for mobile phone companies were finally approved. To
understand what this meant I should point out that NITEL, the government-
owned parastatal which enjoyed a monopoly, had managed only 750,000
lines for a population of 120 million, of which only two-thirds worked at any
one time; and that this was in part because, as a previous minister of
telecommunications - and the current president of the Senate - put it,
telephones were not for the masses. I wasn’t so naive as to imagine that I
merely needed to apply for a line at my local NITEL office but, fortunately, a
friend of mine put me onto a tout who promised to get me one within a month
for $2,000, a mark-up of over 90 per cent of the official rate. One year later,
I was still waiting. I finally went to the police (a story in itself) who charged him
to court for advance fee fraud, otherwise known as ‘419’. And so I got my
line. Six months later, it ceased working. By then I wasn’t bothered. Mobile
phones had finally arrived and, frankly, maintaining the line had been too
much of a hassle. I had to anticipate when the next monthly bill was due and
send my p.a. to queue all day, every day, in order to pay it before they
tossed the line, with the added expense of getting it un-tossed.
Electricity, however, was a more serious problem. If I say that we didn’t
have any I mean that we were lucky to ‘enjoy’ two hours a day. Worse yet, it
could come at any time and go at any time, even in the blink of an eye, which
is not a metaphor but a fact. Then again, the current could be so low as to
be useless or so high as to blow your appliances, which also meant that you
had to invest in a whole plethora of gadgets to protect particularly sensitive
equipment. Obasanjo, in his usual bullish manner, kept promising to fix the
problem within six months, two years, before the end of his tenure, but eight
years later, having tried and failed to alter the constitution in order to secure
a third term, the power situation was possibly even worse that it had been
before he entered office. And then it transpired, in a series of televised
revelations from the house of representatives, that in the course of those
eight years he had awarded contracts to the tune of $16 billion to various
local and foreign companies, all of whom merely shared the money at source
without importing a single transformer.
The revelations of such ‘squandermania’, all-too typical in the Nigerian
context (witness, for instance, the recent revelations in the banking sector),
sent me into a depression more severe than I realized at the time. To
understand why this was so one has to understand what it means to have to
provide your own power. It is expensive enough to buy a generator
(although, ideally, you need at least two) but fuelling it is even more so,
especially when, as often happens in Nigeria, there is a short at the pumps
because petrol is imported because the local refineries don’t work because
the funds awarded to fix them are looted by the contractors, who themselves
only get the contracts because they have the right political connections.
Then there is the engine oil, the servicing, the spare parts (which, as likely
as not, will be fakes), the noise, the fumes and the sheer hassle.
This last is not to be underestimated. You wake up in the morning all primed
to write that article for, say, the New African, but the thought of putting on the
generator and all it involves – turning off the water pumps, the freezer, the
fridge; the bedroom lights and fans and television – encourages a kind of
lethargy. Perhaps the vendor has delivered the newspaper so you settle
down to scan through it, telling yourself that there might be something you
need to note down for a future article. Time passes. A friend drops by, then
it’s time for lunch, then you have to go to the corner shop, then you decide it’
s not too early for a beer, and then the day is gone. Tomorrow, then, but, of
course, tomorrow never comes. The weeks pass, the months pass, your
whole damn life starts passing and you’ve done nothing.
But this is not the whole story, and I’m aware that some of my frustrations
had to do with trying to survive as a freelance, which presented a whole new
set of problems to do with certain attitudes towards work. Let me make a
blanket statement and say that Nigeria is a country geared towards what we
might call anti-work, which is why the government is less interested in
delivering electricity (or water or roads or health or schools) than in
providing the opportunity for the well placed – necessarily few - to benefit
from such a state of affairs.
Let me give an example. Once upon a time I was employed as an external
consultant on a World Bank project which was supposed to overhaul the
Lagos State Water Corporation preparatory to breaking it up and selling it
off to private investors. A good thing, you would think, given the dilapidated
state of a parastatal which has seen no improvement since the colonial
power exited the scene nearly half-a-century ago, which is to say when the
population of Lagos State was one-twentieth of what it is today – and
growing. My own role was to edit their press releases, quarterly newsletters
and annual reports in order to ensure that they met acceptable international
standards.
Or so I thought. The reality turned out to be the opposite. At first I couldn’t
understand why the department I was working with employed 12 people who
between them couldn’t write a simple memo without making elementary
grammatical mistakes. When I realized the scale of the problem I got up a
rudimentary style guide to ensure consistency. This was ignored. Time
passed, we held meetings, took trips to various waterworks, but nobody
seemed interested in the work itself, least of all in me doing it. The money
itself was good but over time I became increasingly frustrated.
And then, one day, the World Bank representative, an Italian with so-so
English, came to town to see how far, as we say. You could see at once that
he was frustrated at the obvious non-action but uncertain how to get his
message across. I tried to help him out. It happened that the oga had kept
us waiting, as was his wont (well, no point being an oga unless you can keep
people waiting) and for the first time I actually studied the headed notepaper
informing us of this very meeting. It contained telex and telegram numbers
but no email and the phone numbers were clearly outdated. In other words, it
was the same one they had been using since the colonial days yet they had
spent a small fortune acquiring new computers and internet facilities for their
brand new website.
‘So when did you last send or receive a telegram or a telex?’ I asked at a
suitable interval. ‘And what about these phone numbers?’ The Italian perked
up for the first time in two hours. ‘Yes, listen to him,’ he said, but I could see
at once that I wasn’t going to last much longer. You would have thought I
had shot someone stone dead right there in the room. The assembled
management, with their smart suits and manicured fingernails, did their best
to hide their disarray and I knew my time was up. And so it happened. They
didn’t have to write me the second query; I edited the first and sent it back
and never even bothered to collect my outstanding fee. And the result? The
good people of Lagos State, who now owe more money to the World Bank
(with interest) than they did before they weren’t given water, still have to
spend countless hours queuing up at wells and boreholes.
So, yes, it’s good to be back in a world where everything works and I am
able to wake up in the morning and sit down at my desk to write an article
for, say, the New African, without having to worry about whether there is
enough fuel in the generator, but I also feel a sense of failure tinged with
anger that so much potential is going to waste, has been going to waste for
far too many years than one would care to count, but I also miss the place,
the energy and the optimism that keep people going despite the odds and
which perhaps ought to turn to lethargy and pessimism so that the entire
rotten edifice simply collapses from its own inertia. That would at least
constitute progress of sorts, a melancholy thought which is itself a comment
on the dire situation the country finds itself in. Whether I will go back again,
or how, is not a question I feel inclined to ask for the present, and I realize, of
course, my own good fortune in having the option to choose. I think, on
balance, that I probably will, but only because I can opt out again at any
time, a luxury denied the vast majority of my compatriots, who must continue
to suffer and be broken by a system I have come to see as evil, and for
which reason must, eventually, perish.
- ends –
Adewale Maja-Pearce, the author of a number of books, is a partner in The
New Gong Publishers – www.thenewgong.com - based in Lagos. He is
currently working on a critical biography of J. P. Clark-Bekederemo, the
Nigerian poet and playwright.
Other letters:
Not waving but drowning
