profusion of crammed yellow buses, its cacophony of Afrobeat and generators, its defiantly sharp-suited slum dwellers.
For Akerele’s generation there is something deeply poignant about what Nigeria has become. He was right – Nigeria has everything: fertile land, great natural wealth, universities that in the years after independence were the envy of Africa, an abundance of intelligence and ingenuity reflected in the ease with which Nigerian expatriates make headway abroad, Nobel Prize-winning novelists, and savvy businessmen. But oil has sickened Nigeria’s heart. Akerele, who worked for a while with Tiny Rowland of Lonrho, one of Africa’s most successful and contentious mining tycoons, knows better than most what the resources industry had done to his country and his continent.
One evening, when he and I were the last two still going at 3 A.M. after a merry evening attempting to skewer Nigeria’s ills, I asked Akerele what he foresaw for Africa. His expression, usually jovial, fell. ‘Africa will be a mine,’ he said, ‘and Africans will be the drones of the world.’
The electronics market at Alaba proclaims itself to be Africa’s biggest. It is a sprawling bazaar located close to the clogged road – known, improbably, as the expressway – that arcs through mainland Lagos where most of the city’s 20 million inhabitants live. On sale here are the trappings of a middle-class life: refrigerators and telephones, stereos and televisions. The traders are proud that they have brought the means for a comfortable existence within reach for more of their compatriots, not just the elite who used to be the market’s sole customers before Chinese-manufactured cheaper goods arrived. But, just as in the textile markets of the North, the omnipresence of foreign-made wares testifies to Nigeria’s near-total failure to develop a strong manufacturing sector of its own.
As I wandered through the stacks of white goods, one of the traders drew me aside. Okolie was fifty-nine. He had spent thirty years selling radios and working out how Nigeria’s petro-politics shapes the dynamics of supply and demand.
Business was slow just then, Okolie told me. It was May 2010: Greece was on the brink of defaulting on its debts, and I presumed the reason for the slowdown at Alaba was another symptom of the global economy’s travails. I was wrong. ‘Money is down,’ Okolie explained, ‘since the president is sick.’
Umaru Yar’Adua’s health had been weak since well before his elevation to the highest office. The state of the presidential kidneys was a favourite topic of conversation among taxi drivers and in the hotel bars where businessmen and politicians gathered. In the final weeks of 2009 Yar’Adua’s heart began to fail. He was rushed to Saudi Arabia for treatment, triggering political paralysis.
Alaba market was struggling because the patronage system had ground to a halt. It was a perfect illustration of what Noo Saro-Wiwa, the daughter of the executed Niger Delta activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, has called Nigeria’s ‘contractocracy’.18 The beneficiaries of the government contracts that spew Nigeria’s oil rent into the patronage system, both the favoured contractors and the officials and politicians they cut in on the deals, would, under normal circumstances, spend some of their dubious earnings in places like Alaba market. But Yar’Adua’s long illness and the ensuing power struggle meant that contracts were not getting signed. The outflow of the looting machine had been temporarily blocked. But Okolie was not overly concerned. Soon the contractocracy would resume normal service. The public goods the contracts were supposed to deliver would not materialize – the subsidized fuel would be siphoned off, the potholes would go unfilled, the lights would stay off – but at least the shadow economy would be moving again. ‘If the government gives money to the contractors, money will reach us,’ Okolie said.
Okolie had grasped a central truth about how resource states work. Demanding their rights from their British colonial rulers, the American revolutionaries declared that there would be no taxation without representation. The inverse is also true: without taxation, there is no representation. Not being funded by the people, the rulers of resource states are not beholden to them.
Taking Africa as a whole, for every six dollars that governments bring in from direct taxation – taxes on personal income and company profits – they bring in ten dollars from taxes on the extraction and export of resources.19 In Mali gold and other minerals account for 20 per cent of government income; in Chad, an oil producer, resource revenues are more than half the total. In Nigeria the sale of crude oil and natural gas generates about 70 per cent of government revenue; in newborn South Sudan the figure is 98 per cent. Taxes, customs receipts and revenues from the sale of state assets – the things on which industrialized nations rely to fund the state and that require the acquiescence of the population – matter far less than keeping the resource money flowing. Nigeria’s GDP recalculation in 2014 showed that, once taxes from the oil industry were stripped out, the government relied on the people for just 4 per cent of its income.20
The ability of the rulers of Africa’s resource states to govern without recourse to popular consent goes to the heart of the resource curse. The resource business ruptures the social contract between rulers and ruled – the idea, shaped by political philosophers such as Rousseau and Locke, that a government draws its legitimacy from the consensual sacrifice of certain freedoms by the people in exchange for those vested with authority upholding the common interest. Instead of calling their rulers to account, the citizens of resource states are reduced to angling for a share of the loot. This creates an ideal fiscal system for supporting autocrats, from the Saudi royal family to the strongmen of the Caspian states. And data collected by Paul Collier, a professor at Oxford University who has spent his career studying the causes of African poverty, suggest a still more insidious effect. ‘The heart of the resource curse,’ Collier writes, ‘is that it makes democracy malfunction.’21
Collier estimated that once natural resource rents exceed about 8 per cent of GDP, the economy of a country that stages competitive elections typically grows 3 percentage points more slowly than an equivalent autocracy’s economy. Collier’s research suggests that, in countries where a significant share of national income comes from natural resource industries, the purpose of elections is subverted. Normally electoral competition is healthy, ensuring some accountability for elected officials. Political parties can be turfed out of office. In the resource states that go through the motions of democracy, however, the rules governing both how power is won and how it is used are turned on their head. Greater ethnic diversity makes things worse, generating greater demands on the patronage system. ‘Where patronage politics is not feasible, the people attracted to politics are more likely to be interested in issues of public service provision,’ Collier writes. ‘Of course, for societies where patronage is feasible, this works in reverse: democratic politics then tends to attract crooks rather than altruists.’ Collier has a name for this law of resource-state politics: ‘the survival of the fattest’.
Maintaining power through patronage is expensive. But self-enrichment is part of the prize. And all that stolen money has to go somewhere. Some of it is used to pay off patronage networks. Some of it buys elections. Much of it goes overseas: according to a US Senate report, kleptocrats from African resource states have used banks, including HSBC, Citibank and Riggs, to squirrel away millions of plundered dollars in the United States alone, often concealing the origin of their wealth by shifting funds through secretive offshore tax havens.22 But some of it needs to be laundered at home.
An hour or two through Lagos’s suffocated thoroughfares from the electronics market at Alaba, on a leafy avenue close to the financial district, Bismarck Rewane oversees an office full of phenomenally bright young Nigerians trying to fathom the mysteries of the world’s twenty-sixth-largest economy. Slick-haired and loudly pinstriped, Rewane is one of Nigeria’s shrewdest financiers and a trenchant critic of the misrule that has turned a country of immense potential into the sorry mess that it is. Some of the distortions that trouble him are glaring: the effects of oil on inflation, the exchange rate and the financial system. But one of the biggest is almost undetectable: the effect of stolen money being injected back into the economy.
‘Money
