This is a very long article. But it shouldn't take you more than 7 minutes to read. I think it's worth it.
What are our people doing? What message do they pass across unknowingly to the outside world? We blame the government all the time yet we are the government. What is wrong with us all? Its so painful...Read On. This is the story of a man who only spent a short while on assignment in your 'great nation'.
The End of an Assignment in Nigeria by Tim Newman
Okay, so now I’ve got a post about Melbourne out of the way
it’s time for me to say a little something about Nigeria. With the exception of a week in October
when
I need to clear out my apartment, I’ve pretty much left Nigeria. My assignment there officially finished on
31st July, although I will have to return for business trips over the course of
the next 3 years because the project I am on in Melbourne is for Nigeria.
Somebody once said that there is much to write about Russia,
but when one tries you can never find the words to write the first line. Nigeria is much the same, and indeed there
are many similarities between the two countries. I have tried to describe Nigeria to people
who have never been there, and failed on most occasions. A colleague of mine stopped telling people
back home about the place because he was getting a reputation as somewhat of a
bullshitter, even though he didn’t exaggerate anything. I was at a seminar in Paris some time ago and
I was describing the working life in Nigeria to a group of Frenchmen. One of them quipped that I was exaggerating
and that “it couldn’t be that bad”, which prompted another Frenchman, sitting
beside me, to nudge me in the ribs and remark “wait until he does his Nigerian
assignment”. He was based in Port
Harcourt.
Nigeria has a reputation, and I knew about it before I
arrived. Most of what I’d heard proved
to be completely true. Almost all of it,
in fact. To get a general picture of
Nigeria, just read the news, and you’ll not be far wrong. It isn’t a place like Russia, the US, or
France which surprise visitors when they see the contrast between what they’ve
imagined (based on exposure to their tourists or foreign policy) and the
individuals they encounter. But beyond
the general picture, there are some subtleties worth mentioning.
It’s first important to understand that degree is as
important as form. Russians, faced with
criticism of corruption in their country, often retort that corruption is found
everywhere, even in the UK. Which is
true, but in many countries it does not infest every authority, office, and
institute like it does in Russia. It is
the degree, or extent, of corruption which makes Russia different from the UK,
not the form. Understanding this concept
is important in describing Nigeria.
There is no getting away from the fact that corruption in
Nigeria has infested almost every aspect of life, work, and society. I can’t think of a single area where I didn’t
encounter a scam of some sort. Some of
them were pretty normal – policemen hassling motorists for bribes, for example
– with others being less common elsewhere.
Filling brand named alcohol bottles with local hooch was widespread
practice. Not so bad in itself, but
these were being sold through supposedly legitimate suppliers and turning up in
established bars. Others were unique to
Nigeria. I knew a guy in charge of oil
shipments for a foreign oil company who received a call from somebody in the
authorities saying he was not going to release the multi-million dollar cargo
until somebody had bought his cousin $10 worth of phone credit. My acquaintance found himself going to the
shop, buying a phone card, and handing it over to some scruffy bloke who showed
up at his office in order to allow his crude oil out of the country.
The corruption, theft, and graft can take many forms:
falsifying a CV (I don’t mean enhancing, I mean pretending you’re a Lead Piping
Engineer of 12 years experience when actually, until yesterday, you were a
fisherman); selling positions in a company; stealing diesel from the storage
tanks you’re paid to protect; issuance of false material certificates;
impersonating an immigration officer to access an office, from which you then
tap up the people within to fund your latest venture; selling land which isn’t
yours; deliberately running down the country’s refining capacity in order to
partake in the lucrative import of fuels; falsifying delivery notes of said
refined fuels in order to receive greater government subsidies; deliberately
restricting the country’s power generation capacity in order to benefit from
the importation of generators (which must be run on imported fuel); theft of
half-eaten sandwiches and opened drink containers from the office fridge;
tinkering with fuel gauges at petrol stations to sell customers short;
conspiring with company drivers to issue false receipts indicating more fuel
was supplied than actually was; supplying counterfeit safety equipment;
falsifying certificates related to professional competence (e.g. rope access
work); paying employees less than stipulated in their contract (or not at all);
cloning satellite TV cards, meaning the legitimate user gets their service cut
off when the other card is in use (the cards are cloned by the same people who
issue the genuine cards); the list is literally endless. There is no beginning or end to corruption in
Nigeria, it is a permanent fixture.
Nepotism is rife: family members are employed and promoted
before anyone else. Outright theft is
rife: from a pen lying on a desk, to billions from the state coffers.
Dishonesty is rife: from the state governors to the street urchin, lying to
enrich yourself is the norm. You name
the scam, it is being done in Nigeria.
Eventually, nothing surprises you.
As I said before, you’ll find such practices everywhere, but
to nowhere near the extent found in Nigeria.
Apparently it wasn’t always like this. There was a time, probably from around the
1970s to 1990s, when Nigeria had a reasonably diverse economy. Besides the oil and gas, they had
agriculture, manufacturing and assembly (Peugeot set up an assembly plant in
Nigeria in the mid-1970s), brewing (there is a both a Guinness and a Heineken
brewery), refining, construction, and pharmaceuticals. Some of these survive today. There were decent universities, and students
wishing to graduate had to apply themselves.
Security wasn’t much of a concern to the average citizen.
I don’t know the details, but at some point in the 1990s one
of the military dictators decided to flood the place with oil money in order to
buy support. This had the effect of
drowning every other form of enterprise and ensuring that oil and gas was the
only game in town. This is bad in
itself, but by no means unique to Nigeria.
What was worse is that this quickly instilled a mentality across Nigeria
that there was a lot of money up for grabs, and getting your hands on it wasn’t
in any way related to honest efforts or applying yourself to something
constructive. Nigeria became a place
where if you’re not getting your hands on some of the oil money, either
directly or indirectly, then you’re going nowhere. With oil money washing over the whole country
like a tidal wave, soon everyone was trying to secure their own piece of the
action, using fair means or foul.
Imagine throwing a huge box of sweets into a playgroup shouting “Grab
what you can!”, and the chaos that ensues will be similar to what happened to
Nigeria on a national scale.
At least, this is what I gather happened – I may be wrong –
but for sure, the current situation reflects what I’ve described. The economy is funded almost exclusively from
oil and gas revenues, and everything else is merely feeding off that. The new hotels in Lagos, the growth of capital
city of Abuja, the importation of luxury goods, the Audi and Porsche dealerships,
the sky-rocketting real estate prices, the money earmarked for infrastructure
projects, the increase in flight passengers, all of it is directly or
indirectly linked to the oil money.
Okay, maybe there is some hyperbole in there. Agriculture still makes up the lion’s share
of GDP, and the services sector is booming.
Advertising is a big industry in Lagos, although the most common thing
you see advertised is advertising space.
But nobody is going to get anywhere herding cattle, picking pineapples,
or working in a sawmill. Even the owners
won’t be earning that much, not if that’s their only income. There is very little opportunity to get rich,
or even advance, unless you are somehow connected to the supply of oil money.
One of the results of this national free-for-all is the
formation of groups, societies, associations, and unions whose raison d’être is
to obtain as much money and benefits for their members as possible. This isn’t much different from Europe in
respect of trade unions, but groups and subgroups form at micro-levels with
sometimes comical precision. The Lagos
Association of Road Maintenance Engineers, Roundabout and Lay-by Division, 4th
Department. The Nigerian Association of
Water Truck Drivers, Lagos Chapter.
Membership of one or more of these associations is both essential and
compulsory: essential because an individual would get trampled very quickly in
the general melee of Nigeria, and compulsory in the sense that you have almost
no chance of being allowed to quietly ply your trade without paying dues to
some group or other. It’s not clear what
the legal standing of a lot of these groups is, but it’s often hard to tell how
they differ from a standard extortion racket.
One of the most powerful unions in Lagos, the transport union, used to
shake down any okada (motorcycle taxi) driver passing through their
checkpoints, claiming the money was used “to protect them from the
police”. I doubt the money was used in
such a manner, but people do need protection from the police in Lagos. Not that the okada drivers had any say in the
matter: membership was automatic, and the union muscle would beat any
non-compliant driver or confiscate his vehicle.
The power of the oil and gas workers unions is legendary, ensuring their
members enjoy pay and benefits which are the highest of any local staff in the
world, and often outstrip those of the expatriates.
This in itself might not be so damaging, but ubiquitous to
all competing factions is a rapacity the likes of which I doubt can be found
anywhere else on such a scale. There is
a culture so prevalent that it is a defining characteristic of Nigeria whereby
no amount is ever enough, and no sum too small to be pilfered. There comes a point in the career of most
people who have gotten rich, either legitimately or otherwise, where they stop
chasing the small stuff and are only interested in adding to their pile if the
increase will be substantial. The police
chief of a sizeable Thai resort town has his fingers in many pies, but he’s not
interested in shaking down street vendors.
His minions might in order to supplement their salaries, but generally
once the boss has his cut of most of the action, he’s not interested in
sweeping up every last baht. As a
result, commerce can continue relatively unmolested. The same is roughly true amongst the Sheikhs
of the Middle East. Bung the Crown
Prince a few million for the contract, and he’ll allow the project activities
to go ahead pretty freely. He’s not
interested in making an extra $10k by insisting you hire his brother’s lorry
fleet to transport the gravel. Such
restraint may also be practical: the dodgy official in the UK isn’t going to be
interested taking pennies if he risks getting fired or going to jail, he’ll
have a minimum price he’ll work for.
But Nigeria has the same problem I saw in Russia: an almost
pathological insistence of securing for yourself 100% of everything that is
available, and not a kopek or kobo less.
I have observed before that Russians would rather have 100% of nothing
than 50% of something, and the same is true – but on a far greater scale – in
Nigeria. The inequality in Nigeria is
horrific. The middle-classes are tiny,
those who are neither stinking rich nor mired in poverty. As it happens, most of the Nigerians I worked
with fell into this category: lucky enough to have well-paying jobs, but not
ordering Porsche Cayennes for each family member. Statistically, almost all Nigerians are dirt
poor. A very few are stinking rich. Again, a manageable problem in itself, but
the rich haven’t finished yet. Indeed,
they’re only just getting started. I
spoke to a couple of Angolans in a seminar once, and they said that although
their ruling classes had enriched themselves immeasurably, they were at least
spending some money on the country, and improvements were noticeable. The reason the Russians accept with a shrug
the siloviki helping themselves to millions is because they (rightly) feel this
is inevitable and – more importantly – life is actually improving in Russia and
has been doing so since they came to power.
Sure, it’s a slow improvement and life is still hard, but they are at least
moving in the right direction (for how long is a discussion for another
post). There have been improvements in
infrastructure in Russia, the new Sheremetovo airport to name one example.
By contrast – and I challenge any Nigerian reading this to
disagree – there have been no discernible improvements in Nigeria in the past
decade (outside of Abuja, where all the politicians happen to live). The infrastructure is crumbling, electricity
shortages abound, Lagos airport is a national disgrace, project after project
gets sanctioned but rarely started, never mind completed, before the funds
disappear, and unemployment is rocketing.
I heard somewhere that 2m people are added to the workforce every year
in Nigeria. To do what, exactly? There are no jobs. One source of employment for young men was to
drive okadas, until they abruptly got banned in Lagos last year. The roads are now much better, but you now
have tens of thousands of young men with no source of income and no hope for a
job. Since the ban came into effect,
crime – robberies, car-jackings, burglaries – have increased by an order of
magnitude, even in the rich neighbourhoods of Lagos previously thought to be
safe. It’s not difficult to see why.
Meanwhile, Nigerian senators – of whom there are 109 – enjoy
an official package worth $1.5m per year, which they recently requested to be
increased to $2.2m per year. By
contrast, the US President gets an annual salary of $400k. Given the unofficial incomes of a Nigerian
senator through graft and backhanders is probably 3-5 times that, we can
probably estimate most of these guys are taking home something in the order of
$4-5m each year. Yet they put in for a
46% increase, in a country where 45% of the population lives beneath the
poverty line. This is hardly surprising
for a group of politicians, and far from unique to Nigeria. The problem is, this behaviour is repeated
through every strata of society from the very top of the government to the
lowest street urchin: whatever is there, I want all of it; and I want
more. I saw wealthy middle-class
Nigerians move to ensure drivers did not enjoy a fringe benefit worth about $10
per week. If you threatened to report a
low-level official for corruption, he would usually tremble with fear of his
boss finding out: not because his boss shuns corruption, but because he will
want to know why the proceeds of this particular scam haven’t been coming to
him. We already had the example of a
multi-million dollar oil cargo being held up until somebody’s relative received
a kick-back worth $10. If any amount of
new money arrives in the economy – due to a new oil project, for example –
those who are already wealthy, via their societies, organisations, unions, and
political connections will ensure 100% of that new money will go to them. Insofar as sharing and dividing the spoils
goes, it is between groups who are already of the same wealth. If any trickles down to the next layer, it is
almost by accident, and to be corrected at the first opportunity.
I came to the conclusion about 2 years into my assignment
that Nigeria is probably the only genuinely classless society I have seen. Class is very different from wealth. Upper class people can be dirt poor (bankrupt
dukes) and lower class people can be fabulously rich (Russian oligarchs). Class is about behaviour and attitudes, not
wealth (a point made very well in Kate Fox’s excellent book Watching the
English). And insofar as behaviour goes,
I didn’t see a shred of difference between the top politicians, down through
the officials in the national authorities, through the middle class
professionals, through the service providers, right down to the area boys. The behaviour was identical across all
strata: I want more money, and I will do absolutely anything to get it. If you were to replace the politicians –
let’s say our 109 senators from before – with 109 random people from the
Nigerian citizenry, you would get no change in behaviour. You could repeat the experiment a thousand
times, and you would get no change.
There is no ruling class in Nigeria, there is just a set of rulers. Where any change is expected to come from I
don’t know.
I believe one of the root causes is the bizarre situation
where being dishonest is not socially frowned upon. Not really, anyway. If somebody is caught with his hand in the
till, he is not shunned by his peers.
The whole situation is treated with utter indifference, and sometimes
admiration (if the scam is particularly imaginative). Societal pressure plays an enormous role in
shaping the behaviour of a population, probably more so than the brute force of
the law, and whilst all Nigerians complain about the crime and dishonesty so
prevalent in their country (it affects them far more than the expats), they
remain utterly silent when a perpetrator is identified from within their peer
group. At best, you’ll get a shrug and a
statement to the effect of “that’s just how it is”. If you’re a Nigerian caught running a scam
against your employer, your colleagues aren’t going to think any less of you.
In fact, the only behaviour I managed to identify which
would cause a Nigerian to be shunned by his peers and made an outcast, is if he
decided he wasn’t a believer and therefore wasn’t going to be showing up in
church (or mosque) any more. I don’t
think I met a single Nigerian who didn’t attend either church or mosque, and
religion plays an enormous – possibly the key – role in Nigerian society. I’m not going to go into this topic, mainly
because I’m not reflexively anti-religion, but I do suspect that a lot of
Nigerians justify unsavoury behaviour during the week by going to church on
Sunday and washing themselves of sin. In
this respect, the place is very similar to the Gulf States.
Now a reminder of what I said at the beginning of this
post. Degree matters. You will find every type of individual in
Nigeria, including the kind, funny, generous, honest, and everything else that
is good in a person. You’ll find lots of
them too. I had the pleasure of working
with some great individuals, who were genuinely skilled, could apply
themselves, held positions on merit, and were extremely well-mannered and
respectful. The team of Nigerians I
managed was one of the nicest bunch of people you’d ever hope to meet, and easy
to manage as well. (My theory is that
engineers are often like this: if you’re bone-idle and want to earn money
dishonestly, there are easier things to do than an engineering degree.) The problem these decent people have is that
they are vastly outnumbered by those who are not. For every Nigerian who is honest,
well-mannered, and diligent you’ll find a hundred whose only goal is to get
some money whilst expending the minimum amount of effort possible. If they can use personal connections, lies,
or trickery in lieu of learning a useful skill and applying it, they’ll take
that option every time. It’s a numbers
thing: if 50% of Nigerians were more like 10% of them, the country would be
okay. And that’s the fundamental problem
of Nigeria summed up in one sentence: way too many dickheads.
When I was bored in our morning meetings – which was on most
days – I would canvas my team’s opinion on certain things, often the state of
the country. They were by and large in
despair. Nigerians are famously
optimistic, but this is often through desperation. Nowhere was this better demonstrated than on
the occasion when a bank put a Christmas tree up on a roundabout with
“presents” at the bottom, and the next morning all the presents had been ripped
open. If somebody thinks a box under a
tree on a roundabout contains an X-Box, then you’ve gone way beyond optimism
and into desperation or delusion.
My lads were a happy enough bunch – as Nigerians usually are
– but had no hope of things getting better any time soon. I ventured the suggestion that a return to
military dictatorship might be on the cards, and I got no objection. One of them explained that during the times
of military dictatorship, it was only a handful of people at the top creaming
off money. Now, with democracy, it’s
tens of thousands. And during the
military dictatorship, crime was much lower, and few had concerns about
personal security. Democracy is all well
and good, but I’ve often said that it is a means to an end, not an end in
itself. I am sure the world will howl
with outrage and impose sanctions should Nigeria undergo another military coup,
but few can deny that democracy is failing to deliver peace, prosperity, and
basic services to Nigeria. I remain far
from convinced that many Nigerians would not welcome such an event.
So what did I think of my time in Nigeria? In truth, I didn’t like it, but not for the
reasons you might think. The worst
thing, by far, was not being able to go anywhere and do anything at the
weekends. The security situation did not
allow us to travel beyond a very restricted area of Lagos, and even if we could
there wasn’t much to do. I like walking
about with a camera, camping, exploring by going to a town and drinking lots,
skiing, driving around, visiting people, riding a bike, and hill walking. There was no scope to do any of that in
Lagos, for reasons usually related to security.
That meant for weekend after weekend after weekend there was nothing to
do but watch sport on TV, go to the gym, and lie by the pool. Those with families did whatever families do;
the single guys went to bars and clubs and picked up Nigerians girls; guys like
me – married, single status – didn’t do very much at all. I used the time well, learned French, read
countless books, improved on the guitar, and got fit. Nigeria has excellent weather, and even
better pineapples, but I would much rather have spent my time doing something
else in another place.
Those restrictions were by far the worst aspect of my
Nigerian assignment. Insofar as the
daily life in Lagos went, with all its challenges, that was manageable. You get used to anything eventually, and at
some point I was able to shrug off almost everything Nigeria had to throw at
me. I never quite got used to the
traffic, so used to plan my day to avoid the worst of it. Dealing with the Nigerians took some getting
used to, a process that was eased considerably when I figured out they weren’t
the most difficult factor to consider.
There’s rarely any point in getting upset about locals anywhere, because
they are the raw material you have to work with. If you go to Nigeria, you will have to work
with Nigerians, so deal with it. Some
aspects of it were frustrating no doubt, but what can I do? Nothing.
What infuriated me more was that some of the expats I
encountered were hopelessly unqualified and too inexperienced to be there. Nigeria is a difficult place to attract
talent to, and as such – like a lot of oil towns worldwide – those who end up
coming are usually way below the standard that should be demanded. Unbelievably, incompetence and stupidity seem
to be imported at great expense into Nigeria.
This annoyed me considerably, as it did when I encountered a similar
state of affairs in Sakhalin. If you are
going to come into somebody else’s country on the basis that you have skills
they don’t, you’d better make damned sure you have those skills and they are on
full view. If I had a quid for every
time I’ve seen somebody fail this basic test in the oil business, I could retire
and bump yachts in Monaco with Roman Abramovich. I’m pretty sure I upset a few people in
Nigeria, and maybe there were a few who didn’t want me there, but nobody could
accuse me of not adding value. Nobody
could point the finger at me and ask “Why, exactly, do we keep this guy?” If nobody else, the lads in my team didn’t
mind me. I gave them direction, support,
and cover and got somewhere close to the best out of them. What infuriated me more than anything was
coming across a Nigerian with a reputation for being useless, and on further
investigation learning that they’d never been given a job description, never
been given any meaningful direction, had no understanding of the context of
their job in the department or the department in the company, and had just been
plonked at a desk and expected to do something.
I came across this far more than I should have, and it pissed me
off. Fair enough, if somebody is useless
then call them useless; but first you have to give them every opportunity to
succeed, and only then can you call them useless if they don’t perform. Hey, you could even call this practice
management! There was a serious lack of
it in Nigeria. How many half-decent
Nigerians are shoved in the corner of an office and written off as useless in
this manner I don’t know, but I’ll bet it’s a lot, and it does the place a
serious disservice.
As final proof that I didn’t dislike the place that much, I
signed up to another 3 years of involvement when I had the opportunity to get
out away from Nigeria for good. I
learned some things during my assignment in Lagos, and that knowledge is
useful. I know Nigeria, and what it’s
like to work with Nigerian companies and Nigerian people on a Nigerian
project. A lot of people don’t. I’m used to it, it doesn’t hold any mystery
or reason for fear as it did when I first arrived almost 3 years ago.
I’ll be back there at various points in the future, but
honestly I hope I don’t have to live there permanently again for the reasons I
stated. I don’t consider it 3 years
wasted – far from it – and I didn’t hate it.
There were moments, plenty of them, where I positively enjoyed it. And as assignments to Nigeria go, that’s not
too bad.
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