A miserable country
Richard West
When told that Ethiopia had no oil, Albert Schweitzer exclaimed to a visitor from that country: 'Wonderful. Congratulations. You might be left in peace for a little while yet.' The doctor philosopher, who had spent most of his long life in the African bush, remained hostile to modern technology. He detested the motor car and was jubilant when he heard that the only two specimens in the neighbourhood of his hospital had been wrecked in a head-on collision.
The wisdom of Schweitzer came back to me after seeing a grim but enthralling BBC film called Nigeria: A Squandering of Riches. Nigeria was almost uniquely bless- ed, or cursed, by oil from the estuary of the Niger River which might, if sensibly spent, have turned an 'underdeveloped' country into one of the richest in the world. Instead, oil has wrecked Nigeria, as was shown in a film about Africa almost unique in its honesty and its lack of modish political humbug.
We saw a few of those politicians and businessmen who have made immense per- sonal fortunes, keep two private jets, and two Rolls-Royces. We learned how anyone with the right political friends could build a house in a rich suburb of Lagos and, even before it was finished, get enough in ad- vance rent to pay the cost, and start on another house, using the profit to buy a place in Knightsbridge for personal use. London, rather than Zurich, is now the place to stash one's illicit oil money.
Most of the oil profits have gone to the politicians and businessmen of northern Nigeria, hundreds of miles upstream from the wells. The actual producing region is beggared. Pollution has killed the fish in the rivers. Huge motorways and other building projects have destroyed fields and groves of palm, even ripped up ancestral graveyards. Scarcely any of the wealth comes back to give clean water, health cen- tres or schools. So much money is used to import food that Nigeria's agriculture has collapsed and could not support the people if oil revenues stopped. The documentary showed us a heartrending interview with an old man in western Nigeria, who now is one of the few people left in what was once a thriving village. His four sons have left, like most of the young men, for Lagos.
While the politicians and businessmen wax fat on discreet corruption, the army of lower officials steal from the population. The TV film showed the harassment of passengers at Lagos airport; the secondary pillage at roadblocks on the way into town; and shots of armed customs men beating some wretched people found smuggling ap- ples. Jobs in the customs department are sold at a premium, mostly to greedy univer- sity graduates. (When this point was made at a preview, the Nigerians in the audience roared their approval.)
Much of the wealth of oil has been spent on motor cars, so that Lagos now has the highest accident rate in the world and the longest traffic jams. Traders bargain with motorists as they wait; one head of state was caught and killed in a traffic jam dur- ing a coup d'etat. The cars written off in smashes or simply for lack of spare parts are dumped at the roadside along with the other fetid rubbish. Refuse collection, like the supply of electricity, clean water and public health, grows steadily less efficient. In this once rich agriculture land, with its billions from oil, malnutrition is now widespread.
Why was Nigeria: A Squandering of the Riches so much superior to most of the sententious guff we see about Africa? Part- ly because the English director Richard Taylor knows Nigeria and is one of the few good people left in the BBC. Still more because somebody at the BBC, or their Lagos co-producers, had the inspired idea of filming Nigeria through the eyes of a local TV journalist and singer called Onyeka Onwenu, who quite simply knocks our British 'personalities' into a cocked hat. Lucid, intelligent, sometimes angry and ever quick to spot the pompous and the absurd, Miss Onwenu dashed round the country cross-questioning crooks and The Spectator 18 February l984 charlatans, chatting with peasants and market women, going home to her relatives (since her father is dead, she has inherited his wives and mockingly threatens to sack them), and every now and then breaking off, to sing one of her lovely songs. Although serious and reflective, Miss Onwenu does not bother with such irrelevant Western creeds as socialism or, still worse for Africa, feminism. She abruptly dismisses the theory that all the faults of modern Nigeria are attributable to the old colonial past. Nigerians are themselves to blame, she says, and this troubles her. Yet she loves the country and its people, so that the film Was almost as often joyful as sad.
Onyeka Onwenu, like Chinua Achebe,
the eminent novelist who appears in her film, is an Ibo who stayed in Biafra during its three-and-a-half-year war to secede from, Nigeria. As a girl she tended the sick and the dying victims of starvation, and we were shown some photographs to recall that disgraceful episode. She observed that the aftermath of the war was made easier, thanks to the generous conduct of Govion' the federal leader. Nigeria: A Squandering of Riches was not by any means an explicit plea for reviving Biafra; but it allowed Chinua Achebe to speak the important truth about Nigeria: 'We are great hypocrites — we have camouflaged 1111/'i rivalries.' The message came across that Nigeria is a state, but it is not a nati°Ari capable of commanding the patriotism an altruism of its people. Most Nigerians feela duty towards their family; perhaps to their village or even their clan, but few have a sense of duty towards Nigeria, which was the name invented by a journalist on the Times to describe the region drawn by tain upon the map of Africa. In Biafra, at the grimmest period of the war, one felt that here was a genuine e nation, commanding the loyalty and th love of most of the people. Officials did not demand bribes, even though they and thel1, children were hungry. The courts still gave impartial justice. The hospitals, 101 equipment, were clean. The airport, ma," from a stretch of road in the forest and Ire; quently bombed by federal planes, wasth model of efficiency when compared gii,/,d Lagos airport today. Before Biafra, I reap viable; seen an African state that was Iv_' viable; and I have not seen one since. p Biafra was destroyed because Shells D' and the British government hoped to tall their oil supplies by backing a feci,e,,ir Nigeria. They explained through t"'",0 public relations men that any attempt id divide this huge, heterogenous state w°11 result in 'Balkanisation'. In fact some, °l the largest countries in Africa, like 7 (l,.ialre, ile are the most catastrophic, while some ' e smallest, like Senegal, prosper. Some of ..cr most successful are those with the 1":
resources in oil and minerals. The riches" the Ivory Coast, gets by on bananas. ter
Although the British were much better colonialists, the French are much bet„ neo-colonialists, largely because theY 'fle not ashamed to be called this. The former French colony that has oil in large quantities is, oddly enough, the Gabon, where Schweitzer had his hospital. Before I went there I was told that Schweitzer's .hospital had been made redundant by a new institution, paid for by oil. At Lambarene itself I found that the new hospital was
almost deserted, its fancy equipment rusting from lack of use. The Gabonese for miles around still came to Schweitzer's old hospital where the relatives of the sick were encouraged to camp, to cook the food and provide the family comforts. I hope the hospital still goes on.
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