NOTES FROM THE. UNDERGROUND A
Tony Palmer
The organization of the West African is a pitiful spectacle. First, it engenders corruption on a giant scale. For example, in Nigeria at Lagos Airport you are not allowed to take out any Nigerian currency yet the one tiny bank refuses to change the now useless money into dollars or sterling — unless, that is, you care to offer the bank clerk there a percentage. Again, in Lagos itself a year ago the state government ordered over 100 new buses at a cost of three hundred thousand Nigerian pounds. The buses were to come from Sweden. Unfortunately, however, the Swedes sent a fleet of thirty-year-old buses which had been previously consigned to the scrap heap. The government has ordered an inquiry but it's reckoned locally that the culprit (or the Nigerian government official as he is known to be) who made off with the money will never be found.
In the second place, urbanization has engendered slums and poverty in truly horrific proportions. It's not that Lagos is any worse than any other similarly urban sprawl. But the indications are that the situation is getting rapidly out of control.
It is as expensive to live in Lagos as it is in London and unless you happen to be a member of the administration your wages cannot hope to compete with rising costs. The houseboy working for the Minister of Communications of Ibadan, for example, who cleaned his house, did all the washing and cooking, answered the telephone and generally acted as a personal valet, was paid £5 a month, which is just about enough to buy one reasonable meal plus wine in a Lagos restaurant.
With an unemployment rate estimated at 70 per cent (although no one really knows) and with a steadily increasing drift from the countryside to the towns, with a lack of adequate roads, sanitation or medical services, chaos cannot be very far away.
For example, it is almost impossible to make a telephone call across Lagos with any certainty of being connected. Telephonic or telegraphic communication with a neighbouring state in Nigeria is entirely a matter of luck. Again whole areas of cen tral Lagos which are now shanty towns — or markets, as they're officially called — are scheduled to be demolished and re placed with office blocks. However, there are no plans to rehouse those who live there.
Third, there is the administration itself. Everywhere there are soldiers, many carrying sub-machine guns at the ready even though the civil war is long since over. The military absorbs, it is thought, one quarter of the country's national income, although again no one really knows. Certainly, every single officer of any rank has his green Mercedes saloon and house and it's the easiest thing in the world to get arrested by a soldier. The police are also curiously militaristic —
their HQ is surrounded by barbed wire — and their favourite dodge is to arrest someone (particularly a car driver) and threaten to imprison him unless, that is, he cares to pay a tine in cash and on the spot whereupon no further questions will be asked.
Of course, the problems of dragging a primitive society into the twentieth century in what must feel like a week and a half are immense. But the problems are not being alleviated by the deliberate apeing of a Western culture which, for the most part, is unfathomable to the African mind. Thinking that to be European is to be chic, its restaurants (for example) serve up Consomme aux Croutons (Oxo with bread crumbs), Pork Shop (cow's leg) and Coup aux Chef (ice cream). And in a country that has two harvesting seasons and a superabundance of fresh fruit and vegetables, even the Pork Shop is tasteless.
General taxation, morever, is often as high as 40 per cent on the average family income, so one cannot really be surprised that administrative corruption is the norm, especially when it is the military in particular who contribute heavily to this sense of universal arse-licking.
I got the impression, accordingly, that the chances of returning to a genuine parliamentary democracy within the conceivable future are small. The facade is ever present, but so is Major-General Yakubu Gowon. His portrait hangs everywhere even in the smallest rest-house in the smallest village. Nationalism and belief in Gowon are official and fanatical and to slander the state is a criminal offence. The newspapers are appropriately jingoistic and cliché-ridden, describing Africans as indigenes and ascribing to any military personage his full rank, title and office of state every single time he is mentioned.
The British Empire left behind bingo and a ramshackle colonial administration that was evil not in the sense that it deliberately exploited the black man which, for the most part and despite Nigerian official propaganda to the contrary, it does not seem to have done (to watch a Nigerian treating his black servant is far more frightening than anything we may or may not have inflicted upon them), but in the sense of failing to warn or forewarn the local rulers that a Mercedes in your front drive and a method of government called democracy down the road are not in themselves admirable
things and certainly not in any way the guarantees of a civilized society. And the
grimmest thought of all is that the shambles and degree of hardship that has come to pass following the departure of the British Imperial presence in Nigeria is the strongest possible argument for apartheid. Black civilisation and culture is hardly advanced according to any accept able standard but at least it is coherent and relevant. What we have left behind and they have misused is not. Maybe enforced separate development is the only hope the West African has.
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