Moses Ochonu
17 November 2008
opinion
Rich Nigerians recently reached a new height in their struggle to stay above the poverty and chaos that plague their country and besiege their homes and workplaces. The new fad for the country's superrich is to commute around Lagos in helicopters. Faced with a daily grind of crippling traffic jams, rich Nigerians did what the rich always do: they bought their way around the problem. We are told that helipads now adorn the roofs of high rise buildings that house the work spaces of Nigeria's growing class of super-wealthy businessmen and women.
Regardless of geographical location, the rich almost always find a way to stay above the quotidian struggles of their societies. They are adept at not letting the minor irritants of daily life get in the way of their business and pleasure. There is nothing wrong with a man of means deploying his means to avoid the unsavory but avoidable experiences of life.
The problem is that the Nigerian superrich are not merely caught up in the imperative of insulating themselves from the pesky banalities of life in a challenging social milieu. They thrive on perpetually extending and policing the social boundaries that mark wealth from poverty, and separate the world of the rich from that of the poor. The Nigerian money class is obsessed with obliterating the few levelers that remain in the Nigerian society.
It used to be that, whatever your income level or the size of your bank account, there was a set of comforting social equalizers that everyone had to navigate. One of those reminders of our common humanity and shared limitations was the traffic experience, unpalatable and humiliating as it always is.
Not a few Nigerians have gloated in self-comforting humor at seeing the convoy of Mike Adenuga or Aliko Dangote trapped in traffic alongside their molue or rickety private automobile. Most Nigerians will deny ever taking such perversely vengeful delight in seeing the rich "sweat" it out in traffic along with the rest of us. But it is true that when the superrich are occasionally compelled by traffic to endure some of the unpalatable sights and sounds of the Nigerian street, they draw many welcome-to-my-world stares from regular folks. Though cooled by the oozing cold air from the refrigerated orifices of their luxury cars, the rich complain, fidget, and fume through the traffic experience like the rest of us. Their experience is even more harrowing, given that they are used to plowing through life with ease and alacrity. Being unschooled in the dirty art of surviving the familiar struggles of the urban jungle, and not being used to encountering situations they cannot control or defeat, the rich are made miserable and forced into a fleeting fraternity of suffering and grumbling people.
To watch these moneyed commuters order their drivers, orderlies, and aides to clear the road to no avail is a delightful lesson in the limitations of money and power, a reminder of our common humanity. It is, above all, an invitation to contemplate the humanness of those who sometimes carry an air of immortality. Those are moments of pure existential joy, moments in which rich and poor join the chorus of anti-government critique, forming a fragile solidarity of citizens mad at their government for failing to devise a way out of a perennial public transportation problem. The impotence and paralysis of the rich in the face of Lagos traffic serve to console the poor, rekindle his sense of contentment, and reaffirm the folly of correlating wealth with happiness or quality of life.
The traffic was one effective leveler in Nigerian society. For the superrich, it was humbling and humanizing. Traffic jams forced them to behold the images of poverty that they would otherwise avoid by breezing around in their tint-windowed automobiles. For the poor, the traffic was a fortuitous rendezvous for beholding the momentary social impotence of poor and rich alike, and to laugh at the rich man's discomfort at being introduced to the inconveniences that mark the poor man's daily life. More importantly, it was an opportunity in adversity to compel the rich to contend with the poor, with the odd chance that, in this small spatial and temporal context, the poor man's brawl and anger might overcome or match the rich man's money and privileges. Having a setting of common predicament in which the rich man's money and privilege didn't make a difference had a socially soothing and calming effect on the polity.
That was then.
The superrich have now removed this residual social equalizer. Short on innovative business and technological practices, the Nigerian financial and industrial aristocracy excels in the art of getting around the incompetence of government and the dearth of social infrastructure. They have already brought such perverse resourcefulness to bear on several domains. Like the traffic situation, the dearth or decay of key public infrastructure and services-pipe-borne water, electricity, education, and healthcare-unleashed self-preservationist creativity in the Nigerian class of the superrich. They mounted monstrous electricity generators that doubled as noisemaking machines. They dug sophisticated boreholes in their expansive residencies and installed small water treatment and pumping facilities to help bring water to every corner of their homes. To get around the decay in the health sector, they carry foreign health insurance cards and routinely fly abroad to be treated for the slightest of infirmities. To wean themselves of dependence on Nigeria's decaying educational system, the rich looked abroad and to Nigeria's emerging but offensively expensive private educational sector.
The Nigerian superrich can afford all of these escapes from government's incompetence and infrastructural failures. But they have not merely escaped; they have also rubbed it in and stuck it to the poor man who used to mock them in the days when they, like everyone else, depended on and suffered through Nigeria's poor infrastructure. The helicopter gambit is the last demonstration of the determination of the superrich to protect themselves from the daily injuries that a failing state inflicts on its citizens; to reassert their social status; and to stick it to the jealous, angry masses.
What is happening is a fundamental fragmentation of the Nigerian citizenry along a new fissure: those who depend on and are subjected to the daily trauma of depending on Nigeria's decaying infrastructure and those who have exited this dependence. Its implications are potentially profound.
What the Nigerian superrich is doing amounts to surrendering to governmental incompetence and failure. It is depleting the vestigial emotional investment that Nigerians have in their government. When the rich remove themselves from the state system and craft an alternative domain of existence and comfortable living, one funded by private resources, some may celebrate it as a triumph of free enterprise and freedom. That may be partly true, although the prohibitive exclusivity of this class of people makes such capitalist triumphalism overblown. The truth is that for all its ideological merits, such behavior by the Nigerian superrich emboldens the incompetents who superintend the Nigerian state and its resources, and threatens to trigger a cynicism that will inspire our youth not to seek to change the system or to reverse the infrastructural rot but to seek escape from the egregious effects of the failures.
If every urban-dwelling, credentialed and entrepreneurial Nigerian is merely seeking to join the boastful ranks of those who delight in having completed their exit from Nigerian society as we know it, who will hold the government accountable for the mass of voiceless, illiterate, and rural-dwelling Nigerians who will always depend on some form of government infrastructure?
If we all desire to live in this parallel or alternative Nigerian society of helicopters and privately funded infrastructure, what is the incentive for preventing a failing state from sinking into irredeemable calamity?
The solution to state failure, incompetence, and the collapse of social infrastructure is not the utopian advancement of a world without government or of a society of privately empowered, self-sufficient, and independent citizens-as idealistically seductive as that may be. The solution is for the rich to use their influence and resources to push for change and for a more accountable and responsible government that provides infrastructure and social services for everyone.
The question is: are we going to build a Nigeria that upholds and promotes the common good or are we seeking to build little enclaves-little Nigerians-where we can hide from the harsh realities of life in the country?
Ochonu teaches history at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
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