Unraveling Nigeria, if you can

If Nigeria’s corruption had a heart, it would no doubt beat at the Transcorp Hilton in Abuja. As you sit with a coffee and charge your phone, you can almost feel the dirty deals and the suitcases full of cash being exchanged all around you in the light of day. I’ve heard up the road at the Sheraton – another five star hotel in Abuja – a particular bar is stocked with “nightcrawlers,” or, the most grotesque sort of prostitution that hits its heyday when oil workers are in town. There is a reason the word Nigeria is synonymous with these sorts of things.

I’ve been to Abuja multiple times now, for this and for that. On my recent trip, the national petroleum corporation was on strike over pensions, and so, with all the gas stations shut down, our driver was forced to buy on the black market, side of the highway, at three times the price – from the same people who would normally be working at the gas station, now simply siphoning out of the station’s tank. Across the road, cars were lined up behind an Oando petrol truck, the driver having pulled over and partaking in the same exercise. The company gets its cut at market price, and the employee, or thief, or whatever you call it, pockets the rest. A good day for him, and just another day in Nigeria.

The Federal Capital is a world away from Lagos – organized, paved, and feeling like a real Western city. It was built for government some years ago after colonial rule, when rich policymakers basking in the glow of new oil money from the Delta decided they needed something more functional away from the messy metropolis they alone had created. With this in mind, I find Abuja the most tragic as I fly out at night. You see one perfectly manicured circle of light, and then complete darkness as far as the eye can see. In a country of 170 million people (though no one knows the exact number), there are also people as far as the eye can see, but still no lights. And this again, is Nigeria; the insulated bubble and all the rest that is forgotten.

Screams for equality are echoed all over the world, in varying degrees and stages, but it cannot be much worse by any construct of reality than what happens in this country. Champagne bottles are popped by hands roped in Rolexes every Friday night at Spice Route or Escape, while the infamous Makoko Slums sit just up the road, hovering above the water on stilts and built with layers of trash. Back in Abuja the election campaign has informally started with banners – which teeter on outright propaganda – lining the highways and bridges and lightposts. “Having performed so well, Nigerians demand…” it says, with a smiling President in his trademark hat looking out gleefully at nothing. I was told before arrival that Nigeria is the best example of what happens when a country does everything wrong. Hopefully, by way of this example, the newly rebased biggest economy in Africa can instruct a few others on how to do things right.

It’s no surprise then that bombs go off in the North and school girls are abducted (and still not found) and the formidable force of Boko Haram expands their caliphate and takes more ground in the country, mirroring the brutality of ISIS in the Middle East. In Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, Richard Dowden challenges Westerners who sigh at another news story on violent Africa, apathetically changing the channel, accepting as a subtle half-truth that “that’s just is how they are in that part of the world.” He argues:

“… I sometimes feel Africa is not violent enough. If Africans fought back sooner against theft and oppression instead of allowing themselves to be slaves to the rich and powerful, Africa would be a much more peaceful place. Instead, African patience allows exploitation and oppression to thrive until everyone loses their temper and explodes.”

Marginalization creates a vacuum that must be filled by something. This can be a movement for good, such as when Martin Luther King marched on Washington and peaceful protests bred the despicable black and white photos of America in the 1960s. Likewise, it can be an Islamist assault on Western education, fought against by underpaid defense forces accused by Amnesty International of torture and outright human rights abuse. As always, the people who lose out most are the civilians and families just trying to go about their lives but stuck hopelessly in the middle.

I go back and forth on a seesaw that balances the realities that made up my former life – Starbucks, football games, homecoming mums, television shows about weddings, television shows about people with sex tapes, hearty evangelical churches the size of stadiums, white picket fences protecting gardens and green space – and what I see out my window these days. Most businesses write on their gates, “please do not urinate or defecate here,” and I think this is a distinctly Nigerian problem. Most houses write “this house is not for sale,” combating a typical Nigerian con, dubbed a 419, in which fake agents sell houses already occupied, and the unsuspecting movers show up one day surprised someone already lives there, and has lived there for years; the fake agent is nowhere to be found. It's true that the deeper you dive into any issue in Nigeria, the further the rabbit hole runs.

And more: I've seen sheep and chickens muddle their way through city traffic; I've sat in Lebanese armored cars; I've sat with the Ministers who make this country run; I have stood with the guy selling gum and mints outside the bar, hoping he will eat tonight; I've talked with the guy at the American consulate who denies and approves visas that get people out, or keep them in; I've danced with two extravagant young newlyweds, who's names I still don't know; I've drank too much Hennessy with a prince. And I've seen the lives of the rich and the poor weave their way in and out of one another unlike anywhere in the world, and somehow, in a way that transcends comprehension, it all works; messy, corrupt, wrong in every way, tragic because it could be done better, but it works and people survive which is all we can do in the end.

In true Nigeria fashion – the naija factor, as some people call it – not even leaving is easy. On Friday night, after being lied to for two hours, it turns out all flights back to Lagos are full, except a protocol officer in a yellow vest promises two seats on the last flight out – Dana Air, which had its license suspended last year after its corrupt CEO neglected safety regulations and a plane fell out of the sky. We pay double the price and then some; it’s the only way, and I wonder what I’ll do at some future date in another country where a handful of cash does not solve all your problems in one go. Next to the officer, a guy sits at a computer wearing a shirt with a better motto, one that speaks to all this terrible mess, the place that should fall apart but never does, the chaos of Nigeria’s infallible heart, constantly beating all around us. “The ghetto is my reality, am from the city where your hustle determines your salary.” The plane takes off, and lands sometime later, and the country keeps stumbling along. 

In and Out of South Africa

Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope over 500 years ago, circumventing Arab traders and successful finding a sea route from Europe to the East Indies. This cemented the legacy of Portuguese naval might, and proved at the time, that Africa did indeed have an endpoint. It was named "Good Hope" later, replacing "Cape of Storms," almost suggesting "good luck" given the number of shipwrecks that occurred in those unpredictable waters where ocean and currents smash together. It is one of the real landmarks of human existence, still serving as a halfway point between journeys for boats long at sea, and still carrying some romantic obsession in modern times. The obsolete lighthouse looks out from the bottom of the world, flashing its light in the fog and the rain, all the way down to Antarctica.

And so the tip of South Africa blossomed before me, some 500 years later, like a bright beacon of civilization in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Out beyond the colonial blocks of Cape Town, it felt as though the many worries of my life twisted and turned around Chapman's Peak Drive, before spinning off into nothingness or falling down the cliffs right into the sea. Past the Portuguese padraos all the way to the Cape, I hiked the last remaining cliff to the end of it all, where every nationality converged for seemingly the same picture. Then I meandered my way back down the peninsula to Boulders Bay, Simon's Town, and Fish Hoek, all lovely little formerly Dutch and British communities with one foot in the past and one in the present. The panoramic views sprout again over each hilltop. At one lookout I overhead someone say, "eventually you just stop taking pictures because the beautiful views don't go away."

Thoughts of Nigeria are everywhere these days, that corrupted, intense, mess of a place always dancing on the brink. Two greater paradoxes do not exist on one continent: the majestic view of Table Mountain reaching into the sky and dubbed a new wonder of the world, and then as an afterthought that one time I saw a woman with spread legs and a hiked up skirt peeing aside the public highway in Lagos, sheep scurrying about in the urban background. I was told from the beginning you have to get out of Nigeria to remember the world is not like Nigeria. You have to get out so it does not break you. Thus the Rainbow Nation of South Africa was as necessary as it was desired for a few bright days in September.

I got excessively drunk with strangers in old wine country around Stellenbosch one afternoon, stumbling along in and out of a five-farm tour. Wine terminology, the procedures, the protocol, and the elevated status of reds and whites and pinks, it still tends to be over my head, but I can appreciate a good drink with the best of them. I can mimic behaviors, nod when asked for thoughts, pretending to know what I'm doing, and hours later and by days end, none of it matters anymore. Nine of us who began the day with a reserved greeting passed a bottle of white around the back of a van laughing at the end, and Ebola and pollution and traffic and corruption and poverty and dirt and inefficiency and the entire terrible world of Nigeria seemed very far away and like it would never come back to me again. "Wine brings people together," our tour guide said at the beginning, and reminded us of again at the end.

In one great culmination, I almost burst into tears at breakfast on my last day when a waitress brought me an omelette and big latte and I realized how fresh and good and affordable it all was, and even more, how much the deep crevices of my body had missed and nearly forgotten exactly what real food was. It is amazing when you wake up and realize the simple things one country can make you appreciate. And likewise, there is no feeling more terrible than boarding an airplane that leaves the best place on Earth for another stint in the worst. My black South African waitress laughed when I said I live in Nigeria, telling me she was not aware white people chose to live there, and I do follow her logic at times. However I remain firm in my belief that there too remains great value in the dark parts of the world, and returning to the dark parts of the world again. Even if there isn't, it's sure too late to go back now, so we might as well make the most of it until the end of it all comes, I pack my bags, and run off somewhere else.