Yet nobody who has lived in Lagos for long can feel astonished at last week’s tragedy, which may have killed 1,000 people. As I end my three-year tour of duty, I can remember what stirred in my gut on that first trip through the grinding traffic, past giddying crowds and the menace of beggars brandishing wounded body parts like weapons: the feeling that in Lagos you lose all control of your destiny. As molten metal rained down from the blast, several fears raced through Lagosians’ minds. Was it a military coup, to end the country’s latest experiment with civilian rule? Had America mistakenly picked the city as the next target in its war on terror? Or was it a natural disaster like the volcano in Goma, Congo? The earth was opening to swallow the city.
Relief that it was none of the above has given way to even greater cynicism over the caliber of Nigeria’s leaders. Business, industry and tin-roof slums have crowded in on the Army’s main arsenal, at the Ikeja barracks. The commanders could have prevented catastrophe simply by storing their weapons well away from such a mass of humanity. The response also was revelatory. Amid bloody confusion, the government could offer little help.
September 11 may have given George W. Bush a chance to show his mettle. Jan. 27 will remind Nigerians of how callous and careless their leaders can be. They ask themselves if the leaders, too, have lost the ability to shape the nation.
When I arrived in Nigeria, hope was surging. Gen. Sani Abacha, the most brutal and avaricious of the country’s military rulers, had just died suddenly of a heart attack. Nigerians called it God’s work–a coup from heaven. Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo emerged from the baking-hot cell where Abacha kept him to embody an old African adage: the path to the presidency leads through prison. After hastily arranged elections installed him in the statehouse, Aso Rock, he promised to clean house.
Already Nigeria needs another miracle. Unleashed from military rule, politicians have done what they do best in Nigeria–stir trouble and line their pockets. Instead of uniting, the country’s divided ethnic groups have more often confirmed their own worst suspicions about each other. The Yorubas of Lagos and the southwest have proved as quarrelsome as ever; their infighting last month killed Attorney General Bola Ige. By unilaterally imposing Islamic law, Sharia, in the north, the Muslim Hausa-Fulanis opened up the deep religious split at the heart of the country. In the oil delta, demands for control of revenues fed violent jockeying for the spoils of a settlement.
Obasanjo is mired in the middle. He has fought the fires more in the style of the military ruler he once was in the ’70s than as a reformed civilian. When Bill Clinton visited Nigeria in 2000, he showed what was possible. In his address, Clinton both flattered the new Parliament and reminded members of their responsibilities, cajoling them to his side. But Obasanjo has alienated the house by riding roughshod over egos and, some claimed, the Constitution. As the 2003 elections near, the institutions that make for a stable democracy are still to be born. Political parties remain the vehicles of personal ambition. The electoral commission has barely begun work aimed at ensuring its independence. It seems money again will rule. That’s dangerous: in 1965 and 1983 chaotic elections ended in military coups. Economic uncertainty is equally rife, despite a windfall in oil earnings. Poverty, crumbling infrastructure and violence compete for resources. The government has often given in to the temptation to spend rather than reform. The $94 million space program, NASRDA, springs to mind.
So why feel a tug leaving Lagos? No sane person would lament being released from the calvary of simply surviving a day in this mega-city. Nigeria is Africa’s greatest contradiction. It remains at once the continent’s greatest hope and its biggest danger. Someone, somewhere, sometime, must harness those energies that make it big and brash and often dynamic. I have at once the feeling of leaving a sinking ship, and of jumping off before the party really rolls.
