LAGOS — Night has not yet fallen on the sprawling city of Lagos, and the heat is still stifling on the islands of the lagoon. A cocktail party is underway at the villa of Herbert Wigwe, the former CEO of Access Bank and one of Nigeria’s richest men. A small group of expatriate executives from French companies arrive and freeze in awe; the villa is a 21st-century palace, in the spirit of those built by the Medici family in Renaissance Florence.
Here, all is order and beauty, luxury, calm and pleasure. The terrace is a veritable hanging garden, with ceilings 6 or 7 meters high. Wealth is everywhere, as it often is for those who have achieved material success in emerging countries. “I’d like you to look at this house as a museum,” Wigwe says. He’s not wrong: his collection of African art is magnificent.
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Everyone admires the paintings and sculptures, glass of champagne in hand, while the Franco-Nigerian Business Council meets in an adjoining room. Created by French President Emmanuel Macron and chaired by Wigwe, the committee brings together several of the country’s billionaires, as well as the heads of French companies with a local presence.
“These are very important links in the Nigerian economy,” explains French Foreign Trade Minister Delegate Olivier Becht, who toured the country in late November.
Tinubu’s reforms
After all, Nigeria is very much in the spotlight these days. The African giant is a promising market. The continent’s leading GDP, the country has a population of 220 million this year. And the United Nations forecasts a population of 400 million for 2055. By then, it will be more populous than the United States.
Nigeria has assets: oil and a young population.
But it also has its problems. Insecurity, smuggling and theft of hydrocarbons have reached such a level that oil revenues are tending to fall. Endemic poverty, terrorism and civil war with Boko Haram in the north are undermining the country. That is not to mention catastrophic economic policy in recent years.
Yet the new president, elected a year ago, Bola Tinubu, has launched two major reforms. The exchange rate for the national currency, the naira, has been liberalized, and fuel subsidies have been discontinued. In the long term, these may well be the right decisions. Foreign investors are delighted.
Stagnation ahead
In the words of Régis Tromeur, France’s foreign trade advisor in Nigeria, “the country needs to improve its competitiveness first and foremost by ensuring monetary stability, and Tinubu’s reforms are part of this. But it will be necessary to provide more guarantees to attract foreign investors back and ensure growth of 8% to 9% per year.”
For Becht, “these are courageous and necessary reforms to create a more business-friendly environment.”
Perhaps, but since then, the naira has lost two-thirds of its value against the dollar, the price of petrol has tripled in a country where a large proportion of electricity is produced by private generators, and inflation is galloping. GDP per capita in current dollars has stagnated for almost 10 years.
“We’ve got another 12 to 18 months of stagnation ahead of us,” one French entrepreneur says.
A resilient population
The resilience is striking among a population that is subjected to veritable predation by the ruling class and endure crisis after crisis. “Tomorrow will be better” is a phrase Nigerians regularly say — or used to say.
The popular revolt against the MSars, a Nigerian police unit that rackets, tortures and even kills local residents, in October 2020 left a lasting impression. Clashes led to police shootings, notably in Lagos, although it is not known exactly how many Nigerians were killed.
Nigerians no longer expect anything from the public authorities.
The banknote crisis, when former President Muhammadu Buhari asked the central bank to withdraw certain banknotes from circulation before the 2023 elections, also left its mark. People found themselves without cash.
“In many other countries, there would have been a revolution a long time ago,” says one expatriate.
But “Nigerians are very resilient. In an inflationary context, they are trying to meet their basic family needs. On the one hand, they no longer expect anything from the public authorities. But on the other, they have not succeeded in organizing themselves as a counter-power,” Tromeur says. It’s worth noting that the country is federal and divided along ethnic lines.
Anglo-Saxon style capitalism
Even though the economy is sluggish, sectors such as high-tech, are booming. The image of the “self-made man” is very important to Nigerians. Street slogans such as “no food for lazy men” are commonplace. Much of this “entrepreneurship” is explained by the need to survive. But that’s not all.
“Nigerians have an American way of doing business,” says a Frenchman who arrived in Lagos a few years ago. “They’re pragmatic, hard-working and enterprising.”
“A tough, hyper-competitive, often carnivorous, Anglo-Saxon style of capitalism prevails in Lagos,” Tromeur says, adding that at the same time “we have to juggle with recurrent changes in regulations and complicated taxes.” That is not to mention the very high security costs to compensate for the absence of a functioning state.
Lagos, the city of extremes
“It’s an incredibly dynamic country,” says Karim Belkaïd, head of Nigeria operations for the parapetroleum company DBN. After 20 years in the country, Belkaïd still complains about the daily difficulties. Yet he only managed to last eight months in the Paris region when his employer wanted him to return to France a few years ago. France was too depressing, without energy. Everything was bland compared to Lagos, where the unexpected awaits you at every corner. So he went back.
Nigeria’s capital is a condensation of life. A city bursting with energy, it accounts for a quarter of Nigeria’s GDP — the economies of Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Mali combined. A city where the country’s richest men rub shoulders with a multitude of poor people living in shantytowns.
Potholed roads, no sidewalks and poor drainage during the rainy season all make the city that’s hardly conducive to strolling for the Western pedestrian. As a result, most expatriates move from one enclosed area — their house with a swimming pool — to another. They travel in a locked air-conditioned chauffeured cars and are never without their MOPOL, Nigerian mobile police officers. Amid insecurity, the temptation to barricade oneself in is strong.
Nigerian “Soft Power”
Art is one of the most dynamic fields that young people in search of a future are flocking to. There’s a real Nigerian “soft power” in this field. Artists, painters and musicians are starting out and hoping to make their mark. To visit a painter’s studio, you have to cross crowded markets, vibrant neighborhoods where crowds run to cross the highway, a city where people drive as much with the horn as with the steering wheel.
Some multinationals prohibit their Western executives from visiting this part of the city, which is considered too dangerous. Yet the driver assures us that we’re safe. We give it a try. The building where Abdulrahman lives is, like all middle-class buildings, surrounded by high walls, a gate and barbed wire.
Art is the only field where the government doesn’t intervene.
Shy but very nice, the young painter believes in his lucky star. His paintings are beautiful, sometimes as colorful and cheerful as Lagos can be, sometimes as dark and melancholy as the times in Nigeria.
“The fact that Nigerian culture has broken through is a source of great pride. Nigerian art is now celebrated around the world,” explains Umo, a children’s book author based in Ibadan, a large city 150 km north of Lagos, who has just organized an independent film festival there.
The reason for the Nigerian art scene’s effervescence is simple: “Art is the only field where the government doesn’t intervene, where you don’t need anyone’s permission to create,” explains the photographer Folu.
Disillusioned youth tempted to leave
“A few years ago, there was a wave of people like me, who came back to the country after their studies to try to change it through culture and art. It was a whole community, full of hope,” recalls Umo. “But it’s over now. Half my friends are gone. I don’t want to suffer the country’s decadence. I don’t want to desert, but we have to fight every day to get water, electricity an internet connection.”
“Life is getting harder and harder,” says Folu,. “There is a general feeling of defeat among Nigerian youth. We voted massively for Peter Obi of the Labour Party, but the ruling party hijacked the electoral process to its own advantage by installing Bola Tinubu as president.”
The country has a lot of very competent people, but they tend to leave as soon as they can.
Many young people have become disillusioned since the mid-2010s and the economic difficulties. Emigration is on the rise. Opeyimi, a thirty-something Access Bank executive, says that “Of the 70 students in my class at the University of Lagos, 60 wanted to go abroad, to Europe, Canada or the United States. And they did. In fact, we don’t believe in ourselves.”
“The country has a lot of very competent people, but they tend to leave as soon as they can,” Belkaïd says.
The wartime French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau is quoted as saying that “Brazil is a country of the future, and will remain so for a long time to come”. One expatriate says that “it’s quite possible that maxim also applies to Nigeria.”
It’s up to Nigerian youth and the country’s elites to prove him wrong.
