The West wanted to believe in a boom but now the world has been forced to see Nigeria’s misery, says Adrienne Klasa. It is late at night in August, and the talk has turned to politics around our table at the 1970s-era Sheraton Hotel complex in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.
My companion is a former intelligence officer from the insurgency-ridden north. We are discussing Nigeria’s exponential economic growth over the past decade – how suddenly the West sees the country as a “frontier market”, an “emerging powerhouse”, the vanguard of Africa’s rise.
“Make no mistake, the illusion will crumble,” the officer warns. “This is Nigeria, this is the game: the ultimate 419.”
A 419 infamously refers to the section of Nigeria’s criminal code that covers the prosecution of fraud and scammers. Colloquially, it refers to anything illusory or deceitful. In this overwhelmingly populous, under-regulated and under-serviced country, the term gets thrown around a lot.
Eight months after our conversation, the jig may finally be up. Just a few weeks after what was supposed to be Nigeria’s crowning moment – when new statistics showed it to be the largest economy in Africa – the Islamist Boko Haram insurgency erupted into the international community’s consciousness as the security threat du jour. Now, instead of plaudits, there is fresh news of bombings and attacks every few days. The death toll of a recent attack, on May 20, has climbed to more than 100.
Nigeria’s hosting of the World Economic Forum on Africa in Abuja early this month was supposed to serve as the country’s coming-out party as a global economic force. Instead, it only focused international attention on the escalating violence and the government’s apparent inability or unwillingness to effectively counter it.
Western pundits had been keen to dub Nigeria part of the Mint (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey) – the countries that are supposed to be the next generation of rising economies, after Brics. As recently as January, economist Jim O’Neill, who coined the term Bric, argued that Nigeria should join the Group of 20.
Nigeria’s finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, was feted during a trip to Washington last month. She courted investors and financial institutions following the debut of Nigeria’s new gross domestic product (GDP) numbers, which were revised in a long-overdue rebasing exercise, boosting the size of the economy by 89 percent to $510 billion (R5.3 trillion).
But the events of the past two months – the bombings, the Chibok schoolgirls’ kidnapping, the government’s embarrassing, dissembling response and the arrival of US, French and Israeli military advisers to attempt a belated rescue – have all served to expose the hollowness of Nigeria’s prosperity. Scratch the surface and look beyond the boldfaced numbers, and it quickly becomes evident that long before these horrific recent developments, Nigeria was grappling with poor governance and failing institutions.
In reality, the growth story was never so simple. Inequality has long been part of the subtext. The majority of Nigerians have actually grown poorer as their country has thrived, exacerbating tensions between the newly rich and those who haven’t seen any benefits from the boom…
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