Creativity and chaos in Nigeria, the world’s new powerhouse
Harry and Meghan are visiting Africa’s most populous country at a fascinating time. It’s dangerous and povertystricken, yet the potential is electrifying, writes Richard Assheton.
At the start of his impressive recent jaunt around Nigeria for Britain’s Channel 5, an already dizzylooking Sir Michael Palin turns to the camera and says: “I am fascinated by just how it ... works.”
In my two years as a correspondent in Lagos, that is the question I kept coming back to: how on earth does this place actually work? Nigerian presidents don’t fully know.
Africa’s most populous country is home to about 200 million people, speaking more than 500 languages, alongside English as the lingua franca. It would take several Palins several lifetimes to really understand Nigeria.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, which is why we should give kudos to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for making their trip there at the weekend.
Meghan and Prince Harry were invited by the chief of the country’s defence staff after Harry apparently got chatting with him at last year’s Invictus Games. Nigeria was the first African nation to send a team.
But the trip was also framed as a homecoming of sorts for Meghan, a chance to connect with her roots. They are – according to a recent and perhaps not entirely scientific genealogy test – 43% Nigerian. Meghan has even been given a Nigerian name by the country’s Invictus Games team, after a historic warrior princess named Amina.
The duchess will need all of her warrior’s strength, for Nigeria can be a joy and a maddening challenge in equal measure.
Arriving on Friday, Harry and Meghan visited the Light House, a school, and met wounded veterans, of whom there is no shortage in a country racked by conflict on several fronts.
On Saturday, the duke fielded his own team during a seated volleyball match with Nigeria’s Invictus team, while Meghan co-hosted a women’s leadership event with Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organisation. Yesterday,
they attended a polo fundraiser and a basketball session with Giants of Africa, a youth programme.
This is an opportune moment to visit Nigeria. Surfing a demographic wave that the United Nations says will make it the third-most populous nation by 2050, with 400 million people, it has turned itself into a cultural powerhouse in the past decade, epitomised by the emergence of global pop stars like Burna Boy, Rema and Wizkid.
Beyonce and Michelle Obama wear the clothes of Nigerian designers such as Kenneth Ize and Andrea Iyamah. The Half of a Yellow Sun author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie leads a generation of writers, many of them women, whose hardbacks are hyped around the world.
Nigeria’s prolific film industry, Nollywood, is beginning to benefit from access to the streaming giants. Nigeria’s largest city but not its capital, Lagos, was once a backwater known only for crime and corruption. Now footballers and DJs fly in to visit its glittering nightclubs.
Part of Nigeria’s momentum is driven by raw numbers. Lagos alone may have 80 million people by the end of the century, demographers say. More than 60% of Nigerians are aged under 25, with 40% of those under 15.
So many Nigerians lead their fields that it feels excessive to point them all out, but there is the deputy secretary-general of the UN, British-Nigerian Amina J Mohammed, and Kemi Badenoch, the British business secretary. In Britain, where there are about 300,000 Nigerian-born residents, they are the immigrant group with the highest proportion of graduates: two-thirds, as in the United States.
“Nigerians are extremely hard-working, they are extremely creative,” says Bassim Haidar, a Nigerian telecoms tycoon. “What has happened is the generation of the ’80s and ’90s that actually grew up and studied abroad have come back home, and started some pretty amazing businesses.”
But it’s sometimes said that for everything that is true of Africa, the opposite is also accurate.
Nigeria has the most children out of school of any country in the world, about 18 million. About one in five of the world's deaths from pregnancy happen in Nigeria, according to the World Health Organisation, roughly 80,000 in 2020. Some 90 million Nigerians live in extreme poverty. Tellingly, if wincingly, researchers found in 2021 that a quarter of Nigerians defecated in the open, the highest rate in the world.
The country's currency, the naira, has gone into freefall, with annual inflation passing 31% in February, the highest in three decades. On the black market, the British pound is worth about 1800 naira. Two years ago, it was a third of that. A chronic shortage of foreign currency in a country reliant on imports strands foreign firms, unable to take money out.
Nigeria’s reputation for violence is well-founded. Some far-flung regions, home to groups like Boko Haram, are war zones, but you can be kidnapped on the road from Lagos to Ibadan, where Amazon films are made. As the author Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani recently wrote for The Sunday Times, nearly everyone has a friend or relative who has been kidnapped.
Nigeria is truly lawless because almost anyone has a price – police or pauper. To live there is to find sanctuary in a bed of snakes. At any one time, about a quarter of the police are not protecting the population but their rich customers, as protection officers. Vigilante groups abound. “I could literally kill someone tonight and I would get away with it,” a friend once told me darkly over a drink.
In the mostly Christian south, pastors of Pentecostal churches, the fastest-growing religion in the world, wield unthinkable power. In the mostly Muslim north, preachers apply sharia at their discretion, resulting in occasional stonings.
Some commentators have described Nigeria as a failed state, missing how well the system works for its many victors.
It perpetuates itself, because there is so much to gain from a giant web of connections across family, village, ethnicity, language, religion and region, built on a wellspring of oil. Annual petroleum exports are about US$50 billion (NZ$83b).
Only money makes the wheel turn. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, “the godfather of Lagos”, is widely considered to have paid his way to the presidency, and during his election campaign he was accused of hiring mechanics and yam sellers to dress up as bishops to create the impression that he was popular with Christians. I would be wary of the sight of cheering crowds greeting Harry and Meghan. “Never assume,” some expatriates are fond of saying.
That a country whose people individually achieve so much can be beset by so many problems is baffling. But clearly, there is a connection.
Some believe the problems force Nigerians to be creative. Others say the chaos forges strong people. Some even suggest Nigerians are born rulebreakers, and use their powers for good or bad.
But somehow, throughout this muddled, overpopulated, confounding country, there is a frantic energy that cannot be explained. Even in a few days spent in suites and presidential jets, Harry and Meghan will see it.
– The Sunday Times