Courtesy Vanguard Nigeria

The history of Nigeria has for too long been like a bad Nollywood movie. Nigeria is that battered housewife who has taken her beatings quietly, allowed her earnings to be squandered by her wasteful, alcoholic, extravagant, unworthy husband.

Even when we choose our leaders, it seems we choose to stay on our most destructive trend. Our political leaders and our religious leaders often look the same. We flock to pastors who call our children witches, imams who sleep with our daughters, empty suits who take our tithes to buy exotic cars and gallivant around the world, then return to us to preach humility and simplicity. These beatings, these abuses, these insults to our intelligence, we have taken silently.

For decades, nothing has happened. But 2011 has taught us, from Egypt to Tunisia, right down to the most intractable situation in Libya, that in a moment, decades can happen.

Pres. Goodluck Jonathan has decided, upon meeting with faceless stakeholders who apparently do not represent the people who will be most affected, that the most beneficial thing that can be done for the people of this country is for a fuel subsidy to be removed without any cushioning effect.

It is not clear what is most infuriating to Nigerians about this fuel subsidy removal. In the fuel subsidy townhall organized in response to questions of why the government will not wait to improve the capacity of the already-existing refineries with an eye to bolstering the production and reducing the need for the subsidy before removing it, Central Bank Gov. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi and Petroleum Min. Diezani Alison-Madueke insist that the government cannot be trusted on such infrastructure spending, because of failures in the past. According to the Minister of information Labaran Maku, the fuel subsidy is to be removed for the government to find money to invest N1.12 trillion in, yes, infrastructure spending.

But we have irrevocable evidence of why we cannot trust them. We have seen this story before. And they told us themselves.

This government has done nothing to earn our trust. Boko Haram has been striking at will for the past year, and Jonathan’s statements concerning the strikes have been all but encouraging. The economy has continued its lackluster performance. The country’s most pertinent problems — from education to public health, from transportation to infrastructure – have stayed with us, persistent and, we fear, permanent.

Or perhaps what is more infuriating is the fact that Nigerians now face the specter of rising costs on everything. Majority of Nigerians are low-income minimum wage-earners, and they will now find the cost of transportation to and from work take an even larger bite into their monthly salary. The cost of food will increase. The cost of production of goods and services, already high from lack of constant electricity will also rise. Children who rely on school buses to go to school will find some schools discontinuing that service, or increasing the school fees to cover the price hike.

Jonathan and his band of policymakers seemed not to have taken this into account. Yes, there will be some discomfort, allowed Min. Allison-Madueke and Min. Okonjo-Iweala, but Nigerians must accept these difficulties for the greater good. Nigerians must sacrifice.

Perhaps Nigerians’ annoyance is their irony-free usage of the word ‘sacrifice’. When Boko Haram struck on Christmas day, Pres. Jonathan’s statement on the most recent bombings says we must learn to live with the strikes. When the government makes our lives harder, we must also grin and bear it. He and Vice-Pres. Sambo would spend U.S.$15m on personal expenses and billions on food for the Aso Rock kitchen. Never mind, of course, the amount of money that the Nigerian government pays its lawmakers. Wastefulness is to our ‘leaders’, as ‘sacrifice’ is to us.
Nigerians are spoilt for reasons to be angry. And our anger is long overdue.

It is time we demanded from this our leaders. This fuel subsidy will have a radical effect on the cost of living of all Nigerians. If we do not force change on matters most essential to us, then we will never force change.

The columnist this month is Femke van Zeijl.

1. Surround myself with true friends who will tell me that I am full of shit if I am. Those who won’t pretend everything I do or say is wonderful, just because I’m white. This is imperative. If I don’t, I fear if I stay long enough my personality will change for the worse.

I have met them, the white people in Nigeria who, thanks to lack of criticism over the years, have started believing they are God’s gift to humankind. Grey-haired men mostly, boasting several chieftaincy titles with attitudes to match, bossing people around in a way they wouldn’t dream of if they still lived in their own country wherever in the West. I must not start behaving like an oga. And if I ever do, I want a friend to come up to me and tell me that I’m full of shit.

2. Try to sound more like an oga. Meaning I’ll have to rephrase my sentences so that they won’t sound like a question when they in fact concern an order. Have learnt that ‘Isn’t it a good idea to do this like that…’ is not an effective way to get anybody to lift even a finger in Lagos. ‘Do this’ is the only wording that gets things done and interestingly enough nobody – apart from the big ogas – feels in the least bothered if they’re addressed to in this manner. I will learn not to feel rude when I do not even add ‘please’ and not to be annoyed when others don’t.

I’ve thought about why a society so big on politeness seems to have done away with such formalities in everyday street life. My conclusion: the human voice is so muffled by the urban noise of traffic and generators that it is hard enough to get even the shortest sentences across to your conversation partner. Why waste the little audible content on unnecessary words? I learned this the hard way when I asked the danfo driver at Ojuelegba ‘Excuse me Sir, could you tell me if this is the bus to Yaba?’ At ‘Sir’ the vehicle was already speeding towards Barracks bus stop, leaving me by the side of the road. The proper question should have been a loud, dual-syllabic ‘Yaba?’

3. Unlearn my inbred Dutch rudeness. Contrary to the impression my last point might have given, I come from a country where formalities are much less valued than in Nigeria. In the Netherlands, we get right to the point when we meet someone, and skip any reference to family members, friends and their state of health. It is not uncommon for a parliamentary journalist to call the president by his first name; they see each other every day. Bear in mind my country’s unofficial motto is ‘Behaving normally is crazy enough’. That makes it one of the most egalitarian places on earth, whereas in Nigeria I cannot see anyone addressing former president Olusegun Obasanjo as just ‘Segun’. Would anybody call him by his first name, I wonder.

I will, however, sometimes claim the prerogative of a foreigner to be rude, and pretend not to notice. The beauty of being a stranger is sometimes getting away with stuff the locals cannot.

4. Learn to read between the lines of Yoruba politeness. A tough one. Haven’t mastered that at all.

5. Learn Yoruba, my first tonal language. This is likely to be a nightmare, since my ears refuse to register the different melodies that give a word in Yoruba another meaning. Even after having the words òjò, òjó and òjó repeated to me for the umpteenth time, I still remain in the dark.

I’m more optimistic about Pidgin. I get most of it now, thanks to two patient students who taught me while I was staying on UI campus in Ibadan a couple of years ago. Speaking is still a problem. People roll over the floor laughing when I try.

6. Find a way to avoid people paying my tab when I know they are probably spending a week’s salary and really cannot afford to. Also find a way to gracefully accept people paying for me when they can. Find a way to pay people’s tabs myself once in a while. And find a couple of friends to go Dutch with. After all, that’s what I am. Try and explain to them my hang-up on equality in human relationships – see number 3.
Meanwhile I will strive to mention the incredible hospitality and generosity of Nigerians to anyone within hearing distance when I visit Europe. Especially to those who react with shock when I tell them I chose to live in Nigeria voluntarily; those in whose eyes I read fear when I speak of Lagos, as if I decided to go and settle in a war zone; those who have never been to Nigeria — anywhere in Africa for that matter — but have heard of 419 scams and the kidnapping of foreigners in the Niger Delta (which they wouldn’t be able to find on a map if their lives depended on it) and judge an entire population of 167 million by it.

But I will not pretend these phenomena do not exist. This also is my answer to Nigerians asking me whether I am finally going to write positively about their country, assuming I am one of those white journalists scrounging Africa for sad stories: I will not tell only positive stories. Nor just negative ones. Good reporting should strike a balance.

7. Not get into a relationship with a man who is interested in me, not because of who I am, but because of what I represent as an oyinbo woman. How can I tell? Need help of aforementioned true friends on this one.

8. Not allow myself to get used to the craziness of Nigeria and go numb. Because seriously, how is it possible for a country that is the biggest oil exporter on the continent to depend on generators? How can oil tankers and BRT buses disappear into thin air? How is it you pay dearly for a 24/7 online modem and then count yourself lucky to have a couple of hours of infuriatingly slow internet per day, and there is no government body setting the malfunctioning provider straight? And how is it that nobody seems to be revolting against this madness?

9. Explain endlessly why I am not living in Lekki 1. First of all, I couldn’t afford a place in this overpriced flood zone. More importantly as a writer I need life around me. So you will find me on the mainland somewhere in Surulere. Mind you, not on the ground floor. I’ve always managed to keep my feet dry in my own country – situated partly below sea level – and intend to keep doing so once I’ve moved to Nigeria.

10. Refuse to get used to tardiness. I’m Dutch. We are on time or, better still, early. I realise arriving early is hopelessly uncool in Lagos, but I am intent on setting a trend, even when this means having to wait long hours for the rest to finally show up. I’ll bring a book. There’s plenty of wonderful Nigerian authors I haven’t read yet.
Lagosians often blame their being late on traffic, and I am not buying the stuck-in-traffic excuse anymore. Too many times I’ve had people on the phone explaining they couldn’t make it on time because they were caught in this terrible hold up, only to be given away by a complete silence in the background. They were obviously still at home on the couch with their spouses. Traffic jams sometimes are just a convenient excuse.

Courtesy http://nigeriansabroadlive.com

True, Lagos traffic is horrific. This is a given. So I take that into account and leave early. Hours before if I must. Or take the BRT. I love whizzing over the bus lane, passing by all those cars at a standstill on the Third Mainland Bridge.
Although most four-wheel-driven Lagosians seem to disagree, I do not consider being seen in public transport as damaging to my image. On the contrary, being able to use a well functioning public transport system is a sign of social progress to me. The every-man-for-himself laws of the jungle are so much less sophisticated than a widely shared sense of public interest. Once it becomes fashionable in Lagos to ‘just take the bus’, I know I’ll have at least done something right.

Femke van Zeijl is a writer and multimedia journalist from the Netherlands who soon will be settling in Lagos. Her website is www.fvz-journaliste.nl/

This month, Jim de Wilde puts forth a model for how Nigeria can make the most out of its relationship with China.

Imagine a Nigeria in 2016 where a Nigerian Sovereign Wealth Fund has created a Global Tropical Agriculture Fund in partnership with a Brazilian biofuels company.

Imagine that it has also created 40 local entrepreneurship funds around Nigeria that collaborate on a Digital Education ECOWAS project designing mobile video curriculums for West Africa.

Imagine that there is a joint Nigeria fund coinvesting with Chinese venture capitalists to back Chinese entrepreneurs using Nigerian creative talent like designers and musicians.

Imagine a Nigeria-Brazil sovereign wealth fund ensuring that the resources from the Gulf of Guinea are transformed into social assistance and pension instruments for the citizens of the entire region.

Imagine an ECOWAS investment fund commercializing the idea of African technologies of the type profiled in Timbuktu Chronicles and capitalized by Chinese investment in African intellectual infrastructure.

Imagine a Nigeria in 2016 where the China-Nigeria relationship has created the new business models of South-South trade and investment that we know are going to be a defining part of the global economic realignment and economic growth in the 21^st century.

None of this can happen without the rule of law and the alchemy of a capital market that turns oil revenue into productive patient long-term investment linking capital to entrepreneurs. But all of this could happen if the oil wealth of Nigeria and Chinese foreign investment into Nigeria is converted into patient productive capital, linking Nigerian entrepreneurial and financial talent to new pools of capital.

South-South trade creates is a new phenomenon of wealth creation in the global economy. The countries with the most transparent and innovative capital markets, with the least corrupt management of resource wealth will become the most successful economies of the 21^st Century.

Turning Chinese Investment and Engagement Into Nigeria’s Longterm Gain

I want to look at the management of national economies in the period after the 2008 global economic realignment:  designing new strategies and economic innovations to successfully create win-win economic arrangements with China.

African entrepreneurship and Chinese capital could have a synthesis and create some of the most influential business models in an expanding global economy.

China is on a learning curve in terms of its relationship with Africa. Canadians know these issues from both sides.  Their mining companies have invested heavily in countries like Madagascar and Peru. Meanwhile, much of the resource rich mining base of northern Ontario is owned by Brazilian mining companies.

There are important lessons to be learned from the Canadian experience of managing foreign investment:

(i) A country is only as rich if it can be technologically innovative, ensuring that resource wealth is turned into shared prosperity (pension funds) and longterm investments (venture capital);

(ii) Strong national players ensure that there is the capacity to do new things in the way the country being invested in wants it to happen.  Designing the investment instrument to manage resource wealth is the first task of government in a resource-rich economy;

(iii) It is essential to have a completely transparent process in all resource relationships to ensure that the wealth produced goes into pension funds of investment funds that become Nigerian or Madagascan sovereign wealth funds capable of securing a place in the global economy for the suddenly wealthy economies.

The asymmetrical relationship between China and the countries in which it invests creates a number of challenges going forward from here.  From a Canadian perspective, we have to emphasize reciprocity of relations. For Nigeria, the issues are (a) to design investment strategies for Nigerians to coinvest with Chinese actors or invest in China and (b) to ensure that the revenues generated by foreign investment in Nigeria’s extractive industries are translated into productive and patient investment capital in a disciplined and efficient Nigerian capital market.

African nations have to manage Chinese investment and involvement.  Foreign investment is in itself beneficial. Ports and infrastructure can be financed, but the deal making between African institutions  (SWFs, pension plans, venture capital funds, African-formed multinational corporation, multi-nation economic entities like airlines) has to channel Chinese involvement and investments into directions that are made by African institutions.

There are many aspects of the China-Africa relationship about which we can only speculate in 2011. These trends will start to develop form in the next decade:

(a)  What kind of new business models will grow out of the China-Africa collaboration?

(b)  How will Africa affect China as China is forced to be more self-examining in its foreign policy and in the maintenance of its supply line?

(c)   How will Chinese business models affect Africa as Africans attempt to build scalable companies, which are capable of being so-called Second World multinationals?

(d)   How is the valuation of African assets, particularly non-mining resources like agricultural products and arable land affected by the Chinese pattern of investment?

(e)   How can African democratic leadership use the Chinese presence to create different capital market structures that work to the advantage of African economic development as opposed to the short term orientation of the Globalization 1.0 and Globalization 2.0 models?

Chinese foreign policy is evolving rapidly and remains a combination of many agendas:  the agendas of western-educated entrepreneurs seeking global markets, the agendas of state-owned firms seeking security of commodity supply, the agendas of regional groups and their military mirrors concerned with either Uighur nationalism, the Russian role in east Asia, the Vietnamese role in the south China Sea or the potential for a China India rivalry over Burma and Sri Lanka.   From this will come another of the most significant trends of the 21^st Century, a statement of China’s vision of a new international system in which Chinese values and aspirations are of increasing significance.

For Nigeria, the opportunities presented by China relationships are particularly significant. Because Nigeria brings to the table the mix of an entrepreneurial diaspora and petrocapital, it is possible to imagine a number of business models that are innovations in global commerce.

It is possible to imagine new fund structure that financed Nigerian-Chinese collaborations in designing new funds with targeted purposes:  mobile telephony for banking services, increase protein yield per acre agriculture funds.    It is also possible to finance Nigerian entrepreneurs in designing business models for export specifically to the Chinese marketplace.    At the core of any African strategy for managing China is the necessity of creating vehicles for ensuring that all foreign investment, including Chinese is turned into instruments of patient capital.

There is no limit to the creative imagination of such a Nigeria, beyond the oil curse and beyond the corruption that ensures there will be low productivity and little economic growth. Nigerian capital could create a Nigerian Tropical Africa Innovation Fund, a Nigerian Water Purification Technology Fund, a Nigerian Biomaterials from forestry products fund, a Nigerian China Creative Industries fund invest in Chinese entrepreneurs using African design. The Nigerian diaspora could be attracted back to manage dozens of smaller south-to-south-funds and local incubators. Nigerian investors could become agents of productive economic growth in other African and southern zone economies. There is no limit to the concept:  Malaysia-Nigerian investment instruments, Qatar-Nigerian investment instruments targeting growth in other parts of the global economy.

Jim de Wilde is a PhD holder in political science from McGill University who has taught at a number of Canadian Business Schools including McGill, Rotman (University of Toronto) and Ivey (University of Western Ontario).  He is an Executive in Residence at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University in Toronto, and can be reached via www.jimdewilde.net and followed at www.twitter.com/jimdewilde.

This month, Cara Harshman, aka Titilayo Oyinbo, weighs in on why Nigerians need to retake their own story.

Nigeria has a misleading wrap in America. When I told people I was going to live in Nigeria for nine months and learn Yoruba, the most frequent response I heard from friends and family was, “so I should be expecting more scam emails then?”

Not exactly, Grandma. Not everyone in Nigeria sends out 419 scams claiming to be princes in need of lost money. Not everyone in Nigeria treks through oil covered fields, and not everyone is part of a militant Islamic group, despite what you may have read in the newspaper.

It was unsettling for me to go back to Chicago after a year with a host family in University of Ibadan to questions like, “did I live in a hut?”, “what are the tribes like?”, “how many times could I shower per week?”, “Did I see a lot of exotic animals?” What I experienced while living with my upper class family of five was so far off from the typical American’s perception about Nigeria that it made me wonder, have Nigerians lost the ability to portray their own story to the world in an accurate and balanced way? Did they ever have control of it and what should they do to regain it?

To some extent nothing–no country, no business, no person–can control what the media says about it. If we could, the world would be a very different and worse off place. These days–save for a few headlines– all of the international reports about Nigeria have to do with Boko Harem attacks in the north, unrest in the Niger Delta or some Nigerian trying to get past airport security. However important and real these stories are, they show one side of Nigeria, an extremely rich, dynamic and rapidly changing country. Maybe all journalists should watch the speech about the dangers of the single story by one of my favorite authors, Chimamanda Adichie.

Picture featured in an April 18th New York Times article headlined: Nigeria's President Wins Election.

Nigeria is not alone. Many other countries in Africa are one big misconception to the West. Off the top of my head, Algeria, Liberia, Namibia, Maurtania, Cameroon and Zambia hardly come up in headlines and when they do, it’s usually ugly. People read one headline or listen to a 10 second sound byte about a group of militants in the Niger Delta kidnapping an oil worker and think they know something about the entire continent. Blaming Westerners for not digging deep enough into the story about Nigeria and its neighbors is futile, though. You cannot force someone to be interested. The conversation about Africa will continue to center on poverty and instability until Africans take a greater stake in international discourse to bring out the positive. Africans and those of us in the U.S. who are interested in digging deep need to step up and talk about what makes these countries good–and bad.

I am a Caucasian American, from an upper middle class family. I could easily have fallen into the ranks of one of those Americans whose perception of Africa is thatched huts, tribes and kids with flies all over their faces, but I am more educated and curious than that. I am uniquely able to write and express my thoughts about Nigeria because I lived there amongst the people for a year. I dealt with the trials of NEPA, bad roads and frustrations with the education system. Mo jasi! My education at a premier high school and university in the U.S. enabled me to travel a great deal, and eventually led me to Nigeria. Through opportunities from my high school, I went to Angola in 2006–I was 17– and taught training workshops for teachers. I saw people with few possessions, kids with soda cans as toys and cities destroyed by war. In every white toothed smile I saw joy and strength. My experience in Angola redefined the meaning of happiness for me and planted a spark in me to return to Africa. In University I started to study Yoruba language because I love languages and hoped the language would bring me back to the continent one day. It all worked out. I received a scholarship to send me to Nigeria in 2009, started a blog, and here I am.

For me, it is critical to challenge and correct people’s perceptions about Nigeria because I feel a strong connection to it, an identity with the people, language and culture. While I cannot instantly transform a person’s opinions that Nigeria is much more than tribes and militants, I can tell stories that start to change their views. It would be a lot easier to do my work if Nigerians and other Africans contributed more to the global discourse about the good things: the entrepreneurs, the entertainers, the artists, the professors.

Pitching in means being a watch dog of the media and writing a counter piece to every article published that is imbalanced or one sided. It means all of the modern artists in Nigeria showing their art in galleries around the world. It means hip-hop stars like D’banj, MI and Mo’Chedda publicizing to other demographics. Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola cannot call up the Wall Street Journal and say, “I am starting a public transportation system in Lagos that will help in turning Lagos into a functional mega-city, write an article on it.” But he can continue to promote it through advertisements and press releases, like he did recently. Rummaging through a stack of papers in my house the other day, I came across an open page of a magazine that said “Lagos” above of a large picture of Fashola. It was a New York Times Magazine from May 29, 2011. I slid it out of the pile and flipped through a seven page special made-to-look-like-journalism advertisement all about how Fashola and other public/private firms are working to develop Lagos into an economic powerhouse, a model mega-city in Africa. Èkó ò ni baje o! I was very excited to see this in the NYT Magazine, a bourgeoisie publication only delivered on Sundays, because it means more Americans now have an idea about what a mega-city in Africa is like.

The outpouring of social media from Nigeria in the most recent presidential election is a testament to Nigerians starting to retake their reputation globally. I saw a lot of positive change while reporting on the election at polling stations inside the University of Ibadan. I talked to students and adults who stood outside at polls for hours–cell phones in hand– to report any wrongdoing. The millions of messages that came through Twitter talked about how dedicated they were to creating a fair democracy and stopping anyone trying to get in the way.

Saying Nigeria is a dynamic, eccentric place is an understatement. Heck, it’s the most populous country in Africa and has over 250 ethnic groups and 500 dialects. You can find a Nigerian community in every country in the world, except maybe Greenland. Nigeria has a large stake in the global economy. A new United Nations study of world populations forecasts that 730 million people will be living in Nigeria in 2100. In other words, Nigeria and Nigerians matter. We all deserve to know the full story about this country. The single sided story is too often told and Nigeria is being deprived of her richness. Everyone can pitch in to put forth the full story about Nigeria, because everyone deserves the truth, even the 419 scammers.

Cara Harshman blogs at North of Lagos. Follow her on Twitter.

This month, Alex Thurston provides his analysis on the voting patterns of northern Nigerians in the last elections.

Observers have rated Nigeria’s elections this year as a major improvement over the 2007 elections. But many analysts – myself included – are still puzzling over what the results mean. For me, the differences in the outcome of the presidential election (held April 16) and the gubernatorial elections (held April 25 and 27) were surprising, especially when it came to the largely Muslim North. This region, with its large population and strong cultural unity, produced most of Nigeria’s heads of state from independence in 1960 until the democratic transition of 1999, but since then it has only briefly controlled the presidency. This year, watching Northerners vote largely along regional lines – and against the ruling party – in the presidential elections, and then vote for the ruling party in most state elections, has led me to revisit some of my assumptions about how voters in Northern Nigeria think.

Making predictions is a fool’s game, but with Nigeria’s elections I got the big calls right. When Goodluck Jonathan (a Southern Christian) became president, I predicted that he would run for re-election, that he would win, and that many Northern Nigerian voters would be angered by his victory, which would disrupt the informal regional power-sharing agreement that has obtained since 1999. All that came to pass. But as far as crystal ball gazing went, that was the easy part.

At the state level, my predictions were wrong. If Northern Nigerians voted massively for General Muhammadu Buhari in the presidential race, I reasoned in mid-April, surely they would send candidates from Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) to the governor’s mansions in several states. At the very least, given the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP)’s losses in the legislative elections in early April, I figured Northerners would vote against the PDP, and would do so in large enough numbers to take several governors’ seats away from the PDP column.

Gubernatorial election results

Instead, the PDP basically held its ground in the North, losing two of the gubernatorial elections but winning the opposition stronghold of Kano. The All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP), a major Northern party, held its position in the North East but suffered a blow with the loss of Kano. The CPC scored just one governor’s seat (in Nasarawa State in Nigeria’s Middle Belt). The state elections in the North, far from rolling back PDP dominance, seemed to confirm it.

How did the North, which was gripped by devastating riots in the days after Jonathan’s re-election, just a short time later return numerous PDP governors to office? How did Rabiu Kwankwaso, Kano’s PDP governor from 1999 to 2003 who was driven from his post by an ANPP populist, win his old seat back under the banner of a party that seemed to receive little welcome in Kano?

If we look at politics in terms of the overall political landscape in the North, we can try to explain the difference between the presidential results and the gubernatorial results as a function of various factors, including the CPC’s lack of institutional history and the fragmentation of the opposition in some areas. For example, opposition divisions contributed to the PDP victory in Kano, where the combined votes of the ANPP and the CPC could have defeated – although just barely – the PDP.

But these sorts of explanations don’t necessarily help me understand how voters make decisions, and what those decisions mean to them. That became clearer to me when I asked a Nigerian friend why he thought some voters had cast ballots for Buhari on April 16 but then cast votes for the PDP less than ten days later. My friend replied that while regional loyalties – perhaps combined with personal respect for Buhari – had motivated much of Northerners’ voting in the presidential election, other concerns came into play at the state level. For one thing, he said, voters suspect that PDP governors stand to receive more help from a PDP-dominated federal government than opposition governors do. For another thing, loyalties to Buhari do not necessarily transfer to his upstart CPC, and resentment toward a Southern president does not necessitate wholesale rejection of the PDP. This suggests that young supporters of Buhari rioted the week of April 18 because they were angry at what they saw as an illegitimate Southern victory, and not because they were expressing support for the CPC as an institution.

Voters, in other words, are more strategic, and less wedded to individual parties, than I had realized. That helps explain why the maps of the presidential and gubernatorial elections look so different. It also helps explain why 1.6 million residents of Kano voted CPC in the presidential election, but less than 200,000 voted CPC in the gubernatorial race. Or why over 900,000 voters in Borno State backed Buhari for president, but only around 51,000 chose CPC in the state elections. Or why turnout was lower in the gubernatorial elections than in the presidential vote. Or, finally, why there were few riots following the gubernatorial elections.

If “all politics is local,” then the challenge for outsiders analyzing local politics is to understand the different frames of reference that people shift between, and to consider the different priorities people try to balance. The Nigerian elections, which featured national- and state-level contests in quick succession, make a good case study for examining this process. The outcome of the state elections has reminded me that Northern Nigerians make different calculations regarding their interests at the national level than they do at the state and local levels. Fight as they may to end perceived Southern dominance at the federal level, many of Buhari’s Northern supporters have little reason to develop strong party loyalties and apply them at every level of government. The challenge for someone like me, then, is to recognize that each political decision has its own context, and that in Nigeria different contexts can come to the fore at different moments, sometimes making for big differences in national and state politics.

Alex Thurston blogs at Sahel Blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Heh.

It’s weird how you can always tell when a government is doing something that bears paying attention to, and when they’re not. When INEC sent out its BB Pin and Twitter handle, they also put out billboard and radio jingles with SMS numbers to report election irregularities across the country. That’s how you know that they were serious. While governors put up websites to showcase the work they’ve done in the states, they also take out ads on TV in pidgin and the local language. With this kind of forum that I See Lagos has, where’s the analog equivalent? There’s a reason why, when folks have important things to say in Nigeria, they don’t necessarily go on Facebook to say it. And it is that reason that makes things like this look unserious.

There’s nothing wrong with a bunch of diaspora folks and their internet-ready friends with strongly-held opinions batting back and forth on how best to help Lagos in and of itself, but this should not be the sum of what we can expect from our government and other people within relatively-easy reach of the resources that can make a difference in people’s lives. This has less to do with getting people talking about how to move the most populous state in the most populous countries in Africa, and more to do with Fashola getting “cool points” with upwardly mobile middle-class Nigerians and the Nigerian diaspora. Nothing wrong with that, let’s call it what it is, shall we?

I’m probably being harder on this than I absolutely need to be, but this points to a larger trend I see among more-monied, London-for-Summer-hols Nigerians like myself, where we band together in our little bubbles and beat our Proudly Nigeria drums and extol on the virtues of change. We make election monitoring forums by and for us. Our blogsphere is created by people like us and for us. We are both addresser and addressee. Think about it: do you think Nigerian newspapers have to worry about making less money because folks read 234Next/Punch/This Day/Guardian/Daily Independent online and don’t buy the physical newspaper? NYT, LA Times and the Washington Post have to worry about stuff like that, because, in the U.S., internet access is ubiquitous. In Nigeria, it’s not, so internet cannot be the default for a national or statewide conversation that we actually really need to have. Gov. Fashola and his posse really ought to think about expanding their scope and widening our conversation to those who don’t have the same access as we do. That is, Fashola and his posse should really think about expanding the conversation to within the reach of most Lagosians.

Cross-posted at Method to the Madness.

OK, that’s not entirely true. After all, there is nothing you can say to me in Yoruba that I won’t understand. There isn’t enough Nigeria in my voice, apparently, to give this understanding of the language away, but I’ve actually learned to like that. I relish the look on people’s faces when they talk about me in Yoruba as though I am not there, only to have their eyes widen in shock when I respond. Yes, I respond in Yoruba sometimes, so it’s probably not true, is it, that I don’t know any Yoruba.

I should be more clear: speaking Yoruba, speaking it well, is not the same as speaking English well. You can do quite well without speaking English idiomatically, each word an island that reveals itself through practice of conjugations and direct meaning, like a street increasingly familiar with returning visits. Words in English take their place like soldiers. Subject, verb, direct object. You can get more complex than that if you wanted to, of course, but it really is enough to convey your meaning the majority of the time.

Yoruba, however, doesn’t work that way. True, you can learn Yoruba in a classroom, like I did in my primary school days, with paperback textbooks the exact thickness as freshly-ironed adire. You could, but why would you, when you could listen to your grandparents talk, read the Yoruba daily newspaper Alaroyin, watch Yoruba movies and laugh at the grammatically-incorrect English captions? No. Yoruba is to be experienced, lived, not – in the academic sense of the word – learned.

And, anyway, the kind of Yoruba you learn is not the kind of Yoruba you want to speak. Where English lines up, Yoruba is a contortionist. I am going to the market. The market, I am going. Both correct. And as you get to more complex situations, this ability to shape and reshape itself gets even thornier, expecting the speaker to move into a thicket of idioms, metaphor. In English, this will only serve to embellish, soften the stark nakedness of one’s words. Not quite so in Yoruba. Individual words in this language can take on so many meanings, depending on where one places emphasis. Ife could be a small, university town some hour or so outside of Ibadan, or it can be love. Oko can mean husband, or perhaps forest, and, maybe, if you really butcher it, penis. This nuance is true not just of Yoruba pronunciation, but of Yoruba itself.

To understand Yoruba, then, is to know not just the words themselves, but the spirit in which the words can be used. Someone like me who merely speaks Yoruba can tell you what is bothering them. A person who truly speaks Yoruba will use metaphor as stand-in for himself, at once distancing himself from his words and bringing him – and by extension, his listener – closer to his real meaning. One realizes that this is not a language to be spoken plainly. And if you do, it is because you don’t truly understand.

The older one gets in Nigeria, the more one notices the wedges that so many drive into our society. Accent and language is one such wedge, and it is not lost on me what it means to not speak my language. One finds this in English, too, where even the slightest whiff of foreignness is noted and commented on. Immediately comes to barrage of questions: Where are you from? How long have you lived in Nigeria? How long did you live abroad? These I find more understandable and less curious than the responses one gets to the inability to speak Yoruba. One is often met with what can be described as interest, but it really is something more akin to fascination. Who is this person, where did they come from, that they were so surrounded by English that they never got to learn? On occasion, one may get the “it is your mother tongue, why don’t you speak it, eh?” But even this is spoken with in irritability directed at not the fact of one’s level of fluency, but rather a fact of one’s supposed social status. What that question means is very often “who do you think you are that you can’t even deign to speak the language?”

Collective self-esteem issues always seem to pervade post-colonized spaces, and it takes different forms from African countries to the United States, from Asia to Latin America. One may even deem the latching on to something else almost necessary, a step that acknowledges the new standard in which things get validated before crafting something of one’s own that meets that standard for oneself. As I say this, I am thinking of the way this new popular culture came up in most African counties, where young folks are no longer ashamed to request songs made in their own countries on radio shows, as they were not even quite a decade ago. I don’t know, but I do know that the self-esteem issues that relate to culture metamorphosize, change shape. From the way American conservative nativists in the U.S talk, almost spitting in their withering contempt at the effete ways and artsy sensibilities of Europeans, we from African countries can see ourselves: the way the men from Africa are the more manly; the way the black women are stronger than their frailer, paler counterparts; the way Nigerian children are smarter than white ones, regardless of where the white people come from. We may wallow for awhile, but we always somehow find comfort, grasping at the straws of our inadequacies for something bright to hold on to.

But this is not about the self-esteem of a shapeless collective; it’s about my own. After all, it’s not like all Nigerians born of my generation speak so abysmally their native language. I wonder what the draw to English and not to Yoruba says about who I was at an earlier age, and what it was that I saw then. And I wonder what this pang of regret really means, and what it says about who I am now.

The Nigerian #WhatAboutUs Presidential debate left me cold, and it’s taken me a couple of days to understand why.

Let’s forget for one moment the question of whether or not this debate will change the electoral calculus. It won’t. Probably everyone in that room holds themselves in high enough moral standing as not to sell their vote for a cup of rice or a small nylon bag of garri, or perhaps some money. I know, because I’m one of them. Indeed, most politicians can’t afford to buy off the dignity of someone who is middle to upper-class. Our tastes are too high. We already have rice, bags of it, probably eat it with stir-fry at fancy Chinese restaurants once a month when we save money. Guys can afford to buy their girlfriends a bottle of champagne (however much he’ll wince at his bank statement later), maybe even play the big boy once in awhile – if not every weekend – at Koko Lounge or Marquis or wherever it is those young Lagos folk hang out these days. No, a corrupt politician wouldn’t want to buy our vote. Our apathy is so much cheaper.

And apathetic we usually are, even as so many among us profess “Proudly Nigeria”, and believe that we are the ones we are waiting for. But we are not. Because we are already here. We have known for a long time what needs to be done, probably have technocrat friends who could us exactly how, and we have know for a long time. No, we are not any less Nigerian than them, but we are not the critical mass; those other people are.

Let it be known that there are less of the yuppy Nigerians trooping to Victoria Island than there are them. Yes, them. Those people who weren’t there in the debate. Those people who are likelier to own a radio than a TV. Those people who were probably on their okadas looking for passengers during the debate, hawking food or recharge cards, selling tomatoes in the market. Those people whose vote is up for resale because they don’t see the difference in the candidates, and are so disillusioned because they don’t have the same sense of urgency for their stomachs as they do for the country.

Those are the people politicians go to, after all, when they want votes, not us. With our Twitter and Blackberries, our Bella Naija and our good English and trips to London for summer. And I’m not even saying I blame these people. I’m just saying that we do not have the humility to see the smallness of our number. I’m saying that, if we did, we would have had a debate beamed from a market somewhere, with the head marketwoman or Iyaloja moderating, with translators for the Hausa or Igbo presidential candidate.

I’m not saying that that would have helped much either. We as Nigerians are so used to our leaders being unavailable that it may even backfire. What kind of “Big Man” the logic goes, would sit with his servants? And Nigeria has always had a twisted relationship with leaders, these leaders that we have had for so long that never serve. But I wanted something, anything, to show that people in that room, the organizers of that debate, understood. Because something, however, misguided, would have shown that they realized that people like us aren’t the ones that matter. Or that people like us are not the only ones that matter. Not by a long shot.

And the fact that we so often don’t see it, and very often only give it lip service speaks louder than anything else of why we get the politicians that we do, that acknowledge only one slice of Nigeria in their daily business. That is what we do, too, is it not? And don’t our leaders come from us? this society? these people? This society that we have crafted with our bare hands, brick-by-brick, almost adoringly. We will not blow this brick house down if we do not turn the lights away from ourselves, and on to the people who will really change this country, those who need convincing that this change is possible, and those who need convincing that there is actually a way to make it happen. We – diaspora kids, Enough is Enough kids, full-bellied kids, going to Arise Fashion Week in Muson kids, going to art galleries and Silverbird Galleria kids – are not the ones that need convincing. They are.

The secret of our dignity that makes us so hard to buy is our ability to dream. But it doesn’t matter if we have stars in our eyes. It matters that they don’t. It doesn’t matter if we have dreams of a shining city on the hill. It matters that they don’t. Because our country will not live off of our dreams. Our revolution wouldn’t happen until those people who were not in that room during the debate starve, because they choose to ignore the stretch of that arm offering money for their vote, and dream, too.

In a statement sent to the Actors Guild of Nigeria [AGN] Board of Trustees, the Ghananian said, henceforth, any Nigerian actor participating in any of their productions will be compelled to pay $1, 000 (One Thousand dollars) or risk losing the job. This development, according to the Ghanaians, is to give ample opportunities to their local actors, and as a result, develop their movie industry to an enviable height.They are of the opinion that their Nigerian counterparts seem to be dictating the pace in the Ghanaian movie scene, and they want to address the issue before it gets out of hand.

But their counterparts in the Nigerian movie industry see this as a ploy to stop Nigerians from working in Ghana. They may be right because Ghanaian artistes and artisans have insisted on no longer being called Nollywood practitioners and have even gone as far as coining their own name Gollywood. This is being seen as a move that threatens to wipe out the gains of Nollywood.

Many in Nollywood feel that the Ghananias are ingrates that have no sense of gratitude.

The feeling of any average Nollywood practitioner was voiced by the Chairman, Board of Trustees of the Actors’ Guild of Nigeria, Prince Ifeanyi Dike, who informed that he and his executives are already addressing the issue.

He expressed shock on receiving the news because he never believed that devilish decision could come from their next door neighbours.
“I never believed such decision could come from the Ghanaians. Nollywood has done a lot to improve their movie industry and what they have done now is a clear indication that they are ingrates. How could the Ghanaians insist that Nigerian actors must be paying $1, 000 before participating in their productions? A lot of our popular artistes have been calling me on this issue and I have assured them that we are going to make the necessary moves. It was Nollywood that made Ghanaian actors like Van Vicker, so it is absurd for them to be creating hurdles for our own actors now.”

Ghanaian movie marketers, in a bid to save their industry’s skin, are apparently making it difficult for Nigerian films to be marketed in Ghana if a Ghanaian actor isn’t involved in the production. Jealousy? I suppose it could be that. Or maybe a mixed Nigerian-Ghanaian cast of characters makes the movie more profitable:

Reacting to this development, Nollywood marketers who also double as financiers, have once expressed the view that while sale of movies had declined in recent times, the need to recoup their investments prompted the use of Ghanaian faces in our films.

According to them, high sales of movies occurs whenever Ghanaians acted alongside Nollywood actors. Recently, the swing in the production pendulum from the Nigerian marketers to their Ghanaian counterparts has also been given as one of the reasons for the invasion. Marketers in Gollywood (Ghana’s movie industry) were said to have insisted that for Nollywood movies to be marketed in Ghana, such movies must feature their own stars, definitely not roles relegating them to the background but those that would put the spotlight on them.

Besides, the N1 million ‘upfront market orders’ bait by the Ghanaian marketers, dangling temptingly before their Nigerian counterparts to be used by Nollywood producers prior to the shooting of the movies (if Gollywood actors are used) have been eagerly swallowed by the Nigerian marketers.

People would make of this what they will (‘Those jealous Ghanaians’ and all that) but a tax on foreign actors and paying some money upfront to sweeten the deal if movie makers use Ghanaian actors seems like business savvy to me. Ghanaian film marketers know that the demand for Nigerian films is very much there, and so they’re piggy-backing off the Nigerian film industry to garner more recognition for their stars. I ain’t mad at that. The free-market lover in me is decrying a tax in either direction, but Ghana seems to have struck a nice balance of carrots and sticks in this case. Especially since many Ghanaian actors have become stars in Nigeria, the demand for the Vickers and McBrowns is now there and it’s not clear to me that the Nigerian filmmakers can do much more about the situation.

(Cross-posted at my blog Method to the Madness)

Abena P.A. Busia has a speech at a forum on the representation of Nigerian women in the Nigerian film industry that’s worth a read. This, on the Nigerian film industry in general, caught my eye.

The Nollywood film industry, willingly or unwittingly, carries on its shoulders the hopes and expectations of a people. Perhaps the situation can be compared to the burdens placed on the shoulders of African-American writers in the middle of the twentieth century who had to grapple with the interface between artistic freedom and social expectations. Was Richard Wright justified in creating a monster like Bigger Thomas to prove his ideological point that desperate social circumstances beyond one’s control produce desperate people, or did he merely validate the negative stereotype that all young Black men are brutes and rapists? A generation later when Alice Walker gave us Celie in The Color Purple was she showing how no matter what the degradations, women’s sisterhood and solidarity could lead to personal emancipation, or was she, justly accused of merely adding further fuel to the fire engulfing the besieged masculinity of Black men.

It is not insignificant that the furor over the Color Purple blazed more furiously, leading to demonstrations against the actors and the picketing of the Oscars, when it was turned into a successful film by Steven Spielberg. It is not necessary to say, especially in a forum such as this, that in terms of contemporary entertainment, film is arguably the most popular art form of narrative communication around the world today. Something that causes a spark when published in print can turn into a forest fire when presented on the screen. Controversial as the novel The Last Temptation of Christ was when published in 1960 by Nikolas Kazantzakis, that uproar paled when compared to the fury unleashed when it was made into a film directed by Martin Scorsese which reached a much wider general audience in 1988. It can also work the other way; I am sure J.K. Rowling the writer of the Harry Potter series of children’s books today goes to the bank quite happy that she need never write another word in life if she doesn’t choose to!

Nollywood faces the same agonies and choices as all the other ‘woods’ have faced. The point I am emphasizing is that the question of the responsibility for images is not peculiar to Nigeria or to film-makers, but is the concern of all artists; however that responsibility becomes magnified when the medium is an influential and popular one, such as film is.

I almost spat out my mint tea when she started talking about Bigger Thomas in “Black Boy” and “The Color Purple”. However badly done, I think you can argue that Nigerian films do not ignore the social context in which they exist. Film after film talks about gold-digger wives, gold-digger families, single women who are sworn to never find a man until they cover up their boobs and find Jesus, university “Bigs Girls” with their rich husbands,etc. She’s obviously more concerned about the quality of the product than the content of the product itself. She is right that the quality of the work is a problem, but I’m not really sure that Nigerian film industry players understand their responsibilities as anything other than to entertain.

Industry players are business-minded, and business-minded people are inherently risk averse. When you’ve got something that works, why on earth would you branch out and try out a model that may or may not work? People like Usofia and the twins and the Iya Rainbow type characters. Give them what they want and you’ll continue to make money. And that’s the purpose, by the way. To make money.

Chris Abani once said that “If there’s nothing at stake, it cannot be called art”. He’s right. And there is nothing at stake here in Nigerian film, not because people just don’t care a damn, but because, well, the art doesn’t make money. Pouring tons of money into a production, taking care of it like a new-born child, ensuring the acting isn’t below par, tightening that cinematography, putting in excellent directors that bring out the best in their actors, putting in actors that may be unknown but are truly mind-blowing….. that’s investment in art. Investment that a risk-averse businessman would prefer to minimize so as to maximize profit. An investment a businessman need not make at this point in the film industry because, seriously, no one expects Nigerian movies to be as good as the best Indian or Italian or American movies. We have low standards for Nollywood, so they will continue to be met. And it’s just as well, too, so the businessman doesn’t have to raise the bar and he can laugh to the bank. The object of Nigeria’s film industry is not to create art, but to create a product that will sell.

And you know what? I don’t even knock the hustle. Just don’t expect me to go out of my way to watch.