Nigeria follows you wherever you go. There is the Nigeria in your head; the identification inherent in your passport and the one you see in similarly situated failing states.
We arrived at the Indira Gandhi International Airport on 15 December 2016 and joined a queue for immigration procedures. The Indian immigration officer examined my passport and asked for a “yellow fever certificate.” Taken completely unawares, I asked, “What does that mean?” Of course, I knew what yellow fever was but it was something I had not heard of in over a decade. The officer realized the question did not make sense to me and asked where I was coming from. I told him. He immediately stamped my passport and said, “welcome to India.”
India is a land of contrasts. Grand wealth sits uncomfortably with crushing poverty everywhere you go. I was no stranger to that. I quickly developed a formula for navigating my way. I was from Nigeria wherever I felt unsafe and Canada wherever I felt safe. My Nigerian citizenship attenuated my risk level in an indirect way. Being from Nigeria meant that no potential kidnapper would expect any ransom from my government: All glory to the past and present Nigerian governments!
I took time off from the World Congress of Criminology to see some historical monuments. An Italian colleague and I decided to visit the Taj Mahal in Agra. It was at least four hours away from the Jindal Global University, the venue of the conference. The trip was an exposé on Italian politics. It also convinced me that Nigeria has a lot in common with other countries performing poorly. My colleague stated that academia in Italy was ridden with corruption and appointments were influenced by “who you know rather than what you know.” He argued that legislators in Italy received salaries that were higher than their counterparts in any other part of the world. “Why does that sound familiar?” I asked. He was particularly infuriated at how they received bribes such as cars and houses while also managing to arrange for themselves a cafeteria where meals were subsidized and thus cheaper than those available on university campuses. He stated that anything was possible in Italy as long as you had the money and power. I found myself almost enjoying the complaints from my new Italian friend. Nigerians have no monopoly on corrupt bureaucracies and inept politicians.
The town of Agra also had something spectacular apart from the Taj Mahal — stray cows. Cows are revered in India but in Agra they seem to be lord. They saunter all over the town. I was familiar with stray dogs, but giant stray cows? Oh, my! I couldn’t help but think of suya.
The trip to the Taj Mahal reminded me of a Polish hotel manager I met near the University of Oxford in January 2016. I had gone to Oxford to present a paper at a workshop on terrorism. The manager was hoping to migrate to Canada. She talked about the problems in Poland and why she left. “We are not one of the lucky ones. Our country is not like those in Western Europe,” she assured me. It appeared the Polish woman and the Italian man opened up about the woes of their countries partly because of my Nigerian identity. It seemed they felt I would understand the agony of being from a dysfunctional country.
Nigeria is now routinely used as a metaphor for bad geographies. As far back as 2002, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, reportedly referred to Russia as “Nigeria with snow.” The comment was not meant as a compliment. One egghead totally disagreed and demonstrated that Nigeria and Russia were at different levels of development. However, there was an important similarity — corruption. In 2014, Nigeria tied with Russia at 136th position out of 174 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.
The methodologies for not doing well as a country are almost universal. As I travel the world, I realize that each country contains the seeds of its development and underdevelopment. These include birth rate, level of official corruption, women’s rights, level of bureaucratic efficiency, religious zealotry, and timeliness, among others. The degree of citizens’ tolerance for leadership nonsense is one of the many extra-theoretical factors.
Of all the countries I have visited, the prize for structural equivalence and bureaucratic inertia akin to Nigeria has to go to Venezuela. I was struck by how similar Venezuela was to Nigeria during a visit to Caracas, the capital, in August 2016. Everything had a price tag in Venezuela; nothing was impossible — literally. There was a major food crisis, political instability, gargantuan levels of official corruption and pervasive poverty. They had major economic problems as the president Nicolas Maduro evidently had little clues about how to run a 21st Century economy. My host and I went to restaurants with Bolivars (the Venezuelan currency) in a shoebox for meals worth roughly $20 or less!
A Nigerian newspaper caught my attention in Caracas. Professor Pat Utomi granted an interview to “The Punch” and argued that “our model is exactly like that of Venezuela.” Utomi stated that Venezuela had always been in crisis and Nigeria had been “imitating Venezuela continuously.” He narrated his visit to the home of Professor Mohammed Sadli, a former minister in Indonesia. The former minister’s home was a modest bungalow and had no air-conditioning despite hot temperatures. Utomi wondered how people would talk about Sadli were he from Nigeria. Given the pilgrimage to James Ibori in London, would we forgive someone like Sadli for not stealing public money? Utomi’s 1997 visit to Indonesia offers another sobering fact: Indonesia was once asked “Can’t you be like Nigeria?” He argues, “Nigeria is now being asked, ‘Can’t you be like Indonesia?’”
Perhaps we should be like Japan. Japan is a compelling case on how to organize a country. Japan was in ruins after World War II. Rapid change followed, although up to 20 percent of donor funds were being embezzled during its reconstruction. International partners looked the other way as projects were still being executed. That is not to endorse corruption; I have only stated that to indicate that the leaders were committed to their country’s development despite the nefarious activities of some.
I noticed during a July 2014 visit that almost every other home had solar panels from the view on the Narita Express as we traveled to Yokohama. Solar ought to be a major source of electricity in Nigeria given that we are not running out of sunshine anytime soon. Fields of rice were also clearly visible in Japan. It is surprising that we are still importing rice in a country where elections are now “battles of the rices.” I was mesmerized by the Japanese. The level of social organization was incredible yet attainable. Japan’s case demonstrates that it is no longer sufficient to analyze “how Europe underdeveloped Africa”.
We stray from the path of development when states that are struggling to pay salaries of civil servants donate vehicles worth millions of Naira to traditional rulers. We go astray in a period of severe recession when huge sums of money are budgeted to provide cars for former presidents and their deputies. We languish in underdevelopment when pastors accept gifts from politicians in a country where there is no demarcation between state treasury and private pockets of state executives. This is the path to being a stray cow in the comity of nations.
‘Tope Oriola is professor of criminology at the University of Alberta, Canada. Follow him on Twitter: @topeoriola.
Tope Oriola
BY TOPE ORIOLA
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