The Africans (56 page)

Predictably, the world took quick notice of Nigeria. Suitors arrived from everywhere, and both Washington and Moscow elbowed for influence. Nearly a hundred foreign embassies were set up in Lagos, and the sauna-hot, jam-packed capital took on all the trappings of a frontier boom town. Diplomats and businessmen filled the hotels, stoically ignoring broken air conditioners, stalled elevators, power failures, water rationing, dead telephones and nightmarish traffic jams (known as “go-slows”). Lagos was suffocating in its own growth, but no one seemed to care. Everyone wanted a slice of the action, and in 1978 President Jimmy Carter made a state visit to Nigeria, telling gathered officials and journalists somewhat inexplicably, how much Nigeria and the United States had in common (even though Nigeria was then under military dictatorship).

But by the time Carter arrived a traumatic thing had happened: Nigeria had awakened one morning with a spending hangover. The party was over. Nigeria had priced itself out of the world oil market at a time when demand was falling. Its commitment to ongoing projects was four times the funding available. Frugality became the new order of the day. The government auctioned off two thousand official limousines, froze wages and prices to stem a 30 percent inflation rate, put most of its flashy development plans on ice and banned a long list of nonessential imports ranging from toothpicks to macaroni.

No one, to be sure, is crying poverty these days. Nigeria, which owns 55 percent of its nationalized oil industry, still has known reserves for about forty years at the extraction rate of 2 million barrels a day. It also has vast untapped quantities of natural gas. But Nigeria learned that petrodollars alone will not bring prosperity. It paid the price for having a one-commodity economy and discovered the dangers of trying to go too far too fast. The oil that was Nigeria’s blessing had provided as many curses as it had cures.

Like every African country endowed with mineral wealth, Nigeria forgot its farms—and the fact that a nation unable to feed itself cannot be truly free. As people flocked into the cities, food production tumbled and imports soared. The country that was once self-sufficient in agricultural produce now imports four times more food than it did a decade ago at an annual cost of $1 billion. Before the boom faded, Nigeria was spending $5 million a month just to fly frozen meat into Lagos, a luxury best left for Third World countries like Saudi Arabia. The rural exodus also strained the already meager urban services to the breaking point and beyond. Nigeria had become
a prisoner of its own wealth, and Lagos was a capital that tourists avoided and numerous Western diplomats refused to be posted in.

Government offices in Lagos are so overstaffed and under-equipped that hundreds of civil servants work at desks lined up in stuffy, dimly lit corridors. Most telephones don’t work, so businessmen must make appointments in person, a Herculean feat in a city where it can take an hour to travel a few blocks by car. One U.S. bank, Morgan Guaranty Trust, operated for more than a year in Lagos without a telephone or telex, not bad for an institution dealing in millions of dollars every day. Guests are lucky to have water two hours a day in their $90-a-day hotel rooms, and diners in downtown restaurants merely shrug and light candles when the electricity flickers, then gives way to darkness. What had happened was no mystery. Lagos’ population had exploded from 300,000 to 3 million in a decade, and the city was sinking under its own weight.

Traffic congestion became intolerable—the thirteen-mile trip from the airport to Lagos used to take five hours. Policemen routinely pulled errant drivers from their cars and beat them senseless. After one Nigerian head of state, General Murtala Rufai Mohammed, was ambushed and assassinated in 1976 while his limousine was stuck in a “go-slow,” the government decided some tough measures were in order. It decreed that on alternate days cars whose license plates ended in an even digit were banned from the road. Wealthy Nigerians circumvented the restriction by buying another car whose license plates ended in an odd digit.

Big money was everywhere. The rich grew richer, the poor poorer, and Lagos became one of the world’s most expensive cities. The last time I was there a Christmas ham cost $88, a head of cabbage $5, and lettuce was sold by the leaf. Modest three-bedroom homes rented for $50,000 a year—three years’ rent in advance, please—and the London-based Executive Resources International reported in 1980 that the cost of food and drink in Lagos was two and a half times more than in London, and three times more than in New York.

The distribution of national wealth under a capitalistic system in most Third World countries, however, is far more inequitable than in the developed world—the money just keeps circulating around at the top—and Nigeria proved no exception. While 1 percent of the Nigerians control 75 percent of the country’s wealth, and elegant
suburbs reach to the doorstep of ghastly slums, the average Nigerian earns less than $600 a year and one in ten children dies before the age of five because of inadequate medical care. Outside the cities much of the countryside remains woefully undeveloped, and despite large governmental expenditures on education, only one fifth of Nigeria’s 25 million children attend school. To survive one has to hustle, and to hustle one has to move through a labyrinth of corruption and bribery known as “dash.”

Generals and civil servants grow rich on meager salaries and almost everyone has his price. You have to “dash” the receptionist to get a hotel room, the immigration official to get an entry permit at the airport, the doctor to get a bed in his hospital. Fifteen percent kickbacks on construction contracts are standard practice, and one British medical-supply company set aside $50,000 in its budget to cover annual “dash” costs. In 1976 alone, smuggling of Nigerian goods to neighboring countries cost the government $480 million in lost revenue. By 1978 the government had ordered the firing squad for smugglers, but the edict had little effect. Nor did the public executions of young thieves have much impact on Lagos’ burgeoning crime rate. Each Saturday on Bar Beach, a five-minute walk from the Eko Holiday Inn, three or four youths would be tied to oil drums while enthusiastic crowds cheered and clapped. The government executioners were not good shots and they banged away as though they were taking target practice, often needing two or three minutes and dozens of bullets to kill the suspected criminals. The spectators roared approvingly as errant bullets thudded into an arm or a shoulder or a leg. At last count, six hundred Nigerians were in prison awaiting execution—which now takes place behind the prison walls instead of on the bathers’ beach.

“Before you criticize such behavior, please remember that this is Nigeria, not England or the United States, and you cannot judge all the world by your own standards.” The speaker was Chief Godfrey Amachree, a British-educated, millionaire businessman and attorney with whom I lunched one day. His financial interests ranged from oil to imported furniture and a local Schweppes bottling plant, and he is as at home in New York or London (he has apartments in both cities) as he is in Lagos. His wife, Wylda, was born in Arkansas and attended the University of California, and Amachree wants nothing less for his four children than what his father gave him: “The best education money can buy.” Amachree is a big man, articulate in
tone and distinguished in demeanor. His graying temples and tortoise-shell glasses give him the look of a college professor.

Like Nigeria itself, his world is a medley of the old and new. In Lagos he wears three-piece Western business suits, speaks impeccable English and carries an attaché case. But on the Friday after our luncheon he was to travel to his native village, forty miles upriver from Port Harcourt. There, dressed in traditional robes, he would address his gathered clan in his native tongue, Kalahari. At stake was the distribution of a deceased cousin’s property, and in his role as chief, Amachree would be both judge and jury. “I’ll listen to what everyone has to say,” he remarked, “and then I’ll tell them what to do.”

At other tables around us in the rooftop Quo Vadis restaurant, Nigerian businessmen, government officials and a handful of Europeans huddled over bottles of French wine and $40 entrées. Waiters in tuxedos hovered about, moving unobtrusively through the bright air-conditioned restaurant, dusting crumbs from the checkered table cloths, filling long-stemmed wine glasses to just the proper level. This was a quiet, comfortable world populated by men who had succeeded, isolated from the city of Lagos, which spread out eighteen floors below us, an incubus of uncontrolled growth. Down there the open sewers ooze odors of the foulest sort, slums languish in the shadows of high-rise office buildings, filthy streets teem with traffic and people. But unlike most African capitals, there is no idleness in those streets. Nigerians and foreigners jostle and hustle through the crowds, sweat dripping from their brows, dodging honking cabs, hurrying at a New York–style pace to their next appointment. A din of voices engulfs the streets, arguing, bartering, insulting, challenging. “It may sound like we are quarreling all the time, but it’s actually just affectionate banter,” a Nigerian newspaper editor told me. “We tend to say harsh things to each other. My father used to say, ‘If you are a rich man, Nigerians will abuse you for being rich. If you are a poor man, they will abuse you for being poor.’ ” The Nigerians are a people in a hurry, and to understand Nigeria, you have to understand their language of abuse.

“There’s so much opportunity down there for anyone willing to work,” Amachree said, finishing his chef’s salad and glass of Schweppes tonic water. “But my biggest worry is that our young people today aren’t willing to work the way we had to. They have had it too easy. They want the money handed to them. They want to become millionaires overnight.

“You know, we’ve got such great potential in this country if we can truly pull together as one people, one nation. But there are these deep divisions that have torn us apart before. I can only hope we’ve learned our lesson. Have we? I don’t know. I’d only be guessing. It all depends on whether we’re ready to start thinking in terms of nation instead of tribe.”

Indeed, with its Moslem north and Christian south, its tribal divisions and its boisterous, argumentative people, Nigeria traditionally has been one of Africa’s most ungovernable, undisciplined countries. When the British arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, they found not a single entity but several regional mini-nations representing the major tribes: the Arab-like Hausa and Fulani of the north, whose feudal emirs built empires and huge palaces of baked mud that was carved into crenellations and parapets; the Yoruba of the west, self-assertive and capitalistic people who worshiped more than four hundred gods and who today make up the majority of Lagos’ population; and the pastoral, primitive Ibos of the east, who occasionally supplemented their low-protein yam diet with human flesh. Intertribal warfare and the slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had begun the deterioration of Nigeria’s cultures before the colonialists’ arrival. The British completed the process by forcing the major tribes to meld into a single colonial boundary. But true to their divide-and-rule policy, the British did not treat each ethnic group equally, and the people they chose to favor with privilege were the Ibos.

Backward as they appeared, the Ibos had a unique culture that was compatible with the concepts of Western-style advancement. They were ruled not by autocratic village chiefs, but by high achievers—successful yam farmers, warriors and public speakers. The titles and achievements of a man were buried with him, and his sons, unlike most young men in Africa, were required to earn their own reputation. The Ibos were eager to learn, and they welcomed the missionaries who brought books and schools. Soon each village was collecting money to send its brightest youths off to Europe to be educated. Those who remained behind eagerly accepted the mechanics of capitalism and administration that the colonials brought, and the British came to rely on the willing Ibos as the backbone of Nigeria’s bureaucracy and commerce. The Ibos spread out from their homeland in the eastern region and became Nigeria’s most successful and capable entrepreneurs, administrators and educators. They were proud, arrogant and given to self-praise. And because
they had become the dominant tribe of the emerging nation, they were resented by other Nigerians. They valued what other tribes decried: high personal achievement. When the British left Nigeria in 1960, the Ibos inherited the controls of an infant country.

Within months of independence, the major tribes began struggling for power and control of natural resources. (Iboland included Nigeria’s biggest oil fields and the only refinery, at Bonny.) The Ibos and Hausas formed a coalition against the Yoruba, causing the civilian government to break down. In 1966, five young Ibo officers overthrew the government, killing the prime minister and murdering or kidnapping several other prominent northerners. Six months later the northerners regained power by toppling the Ibos.

Northern soldiers chased Ibo troops from their barracks and murdered scores with bayonets. Screaming Moslem mobs descended on the Ibo quarters of every northern city, killing their victims with clubs, poison arrows and shotguns. Tens of thousands of Ibos were murdered in the systematic massacres that followed. Finally the Ibo elders in the east, fearing that reconciliation with the federal government was impossible and annihilation likely, invoked the call of Ibo brotherhood and issued a simple message to their people: Come home. From desert villages in the north, from government offices in the south, from every distant corner the Ibos came, on foot and bicycle, in wagons and railroad cars. They were burdened down with everything they could lug, and a few parents arrived carrying the severed heads of their children in baskets. On May 30, 1967, at a champagne reception in the regional capital of Enugu, the leader of the 10 million Ibos, an Oxford-educated lieutenant colonel named Chukweumeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, proclaimed the independent Republic of Biafra (named for the Bight of Biafra off the Atlantic Coast).