Abuja: The Quintessential Apartheid City

Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, is the quintessential apartheid city! It is the biggest achievement of the country's ruling elite and the biggest illustration of its folly. Eager to recreate the look of their favorite cities in Europe and America, they decided to build something of their own to mimic their masters. So they built Abuja, the apartheid city, from where the poor will be banished and the thieving oppressor won't be tormented by the sight of of the effect he wrought  - the hordes of the hungry thronging after their sleek cars, or shanties standing next to their mansions and detracting from their concrete beauty. That was the mistake of Lagos that won't be repeated in Abuja.

A view of Maitama, a favorite perch of Abuja's rich

So in Abuja, workers pour in every morning from the various satellite towns that ring the city, do their bit and troop out at dusk.  As they leave every evening, the wide, tree-lined streets of the central district look even more empty, lined by huge, silent buildings. It is estimated by an official, who seems to know, that more than 60 percent of the buildings in the city are vacant. The workers who take leave of the beautiful city at the end of everyday, make their way towards Mararaba, Nyanya, Keffi, Kubwa, Zuba, Suleja, Mpape, in crowded, rickety buses, taxis, motorbikes, covered in a cloud of exhaust fumes, all potential candidates for the daily carnage of accidents on the city roads.

Where the minority government in apartheid South Africa took the trouble to build relatively decent houses in the satellite towns, with covered drains, regular power supply and reliable transportation (often trains) to the cities where they worked, the Nigerian rulers have gone a step further. They've saved the money that should've gone into all that and put it into the cost of governance. That's money spent maintaining officials, their advisers, special assistants, assistants to special assistants, assistants to advisers, their secretaries, office assistants, and providing all these officials with officials cars, official housing, foreign travel  and other privileges of office. The result is that currently, 75 percent of the national budget (more than 80 percent of which comes from crude oil exports) is spent on maintaining the government and bureaucracy.
This has been the steady trend of these past several years of civilian-guided plunder of national resources.

Even where money is voted for capital projects, such as roads, or even investments in health, education and other basic social services, the bureaucracy has in recent years found a way to subvert them. Such projects are simply not implemented, and monies voted for them are simply shared among officials in the concerned ministries, agencies or departments. Or where it can't be shared, the money is returned to the treasury, or rather a show is made of returning the funds to the treasury, from where it is put back in the pipeline for the next budget process, until it's flow is diverted to irrigate private pockets, estates and libidos. Awash with cash, government officials have created Abuja's artificial economy, where prices have no bearing to the legitimate income of the participants in that market, but is propelled by its abundance in the pocket of government officials (their wives or concubines) who have lost their heads at the sheer amount of money within their reach.

Mpape, a satellite of Maitama.

So while Abuja's streets are among the cleanest, widest and most beautiful in the world,  while its hotels and nightclubs are brimming with revelers and prostitutes, there's no decent road connecting the city to any other part of Nigeria. Any visitor to Abuja will no doubt be impressed by the eight-lane highway running from the airport into the city. But it will take only a few kilometers drive beyond the airport on the way out, to realize that the main road linking the administrative capital to the country's entire south, including the economic capital of Lagos, is a snaky  two-lane highway, dotted  liberally with craters and potholes, bumps of warped tarmac and sandy portions where the tar was washed away by rain. Indeed there's no road built to link Nigeria's economic capital with its political capital. But why should the ruling elite care, when the very road that evacuates their massive imports of luxury goods from the ports of Lagos have failed completely in the past decade and have been abandoned in perverse neglect?

Franz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth that every generation must, out of relative obscurity, realize its mission, fulfill it or betray it. The Nigerian ruling elite, out of relative clarity, chose obscurantism, enthroned greed as a guiding principle and betrayed its mission to advance the liberation of the African continent from a 500-year-old grip of invaders and plunderers.  While the Afrikaners in South Africa, having seized political power and the commanding heights of the economy felt a dire need to justify it ,and invented apartheid, the ruling elite in Nigeria doesn't feel obliged to to think, except when applying cunning to thievery. They just show power,  and are keen to make it brutal to make the point.

In Nigeria, the ruling elite, bereft of any ideas, has been content to play the role of warrant chiefs, doing the bidding of their masters in London and Washington, hoping it would be enough to give them free rein to ride roughshod over their people. While Nigeria was under colonial rule, the British built  a railway and road network designed to aid the colonial enterprise. Two rail lines, one running from the northeast to the southeast, and another running from the northwest to the southeast, ensured that all goods meant for export got to their intended destination. Similarly, goods imported by the colonists used these  same transport arteries to reach their intended markets. However, under self-rule, little or no improvements have been made more than 50 years on.

What's more, a succession of military rulers starting from the military regime of Ibrahim Babangida in 1985, sabotaged the country's skeletal rail system in order to create road haulage contracts for friends and cronies. Sheer creativity, that is! Within a few years, all the goods and passengers that previously relied on the railways, now had to be transported by the roads. Trunk roads built around the country in the first oil boom years of the 1970s, rapidly failed, as everything including fuel, goods arriving the ports, farm produce moving from the countryside into the cities, now had to be hauled by road. At the same time the regimes in  power didn't care about investing in either maintaining the very roads now carrying the burden of the country's transportation or about building news ones.

The same fate befell the countries refineries. Four refineries with a capacity to process 445,000 barrels of crude oil daily had been completed during the first rush of oil money in the '70s and '80s. For many years they provided enough fuel for domestic use until the mid-80s under Babangida, when balance of payment difficulties (essentially importing more than you had foreign currency to pay for) resulted in the enforced devaluation of the naira under World Bank and International Monetary Fund economic prescriptions, essentially designed to retard Africa's development and reduce value of its people's labor value. Of course, being the top warrant chief of the time, Babangida heartily fed the nation the ugly, ineffective medicine. Then began the logic of petroleum subsidy, whereby fuel prices were raised periodically either to bring them in line with international prices or to discourage smuggling to neighboring countries where the prices were higher. By the time Sani Abacha took over  the plundering contraption called government in Nigeria, in the late '90s, all refineries in the country had stopped working, interminable amounts were being spent fixing the refineries without success, while fuel was being imported from refineries owned by top officials of the same government, including Abacha himself and his national security adviser, Ismaila Gwarzo, from neighboring West African countries including Sierra Leone.

What was true for the railways, roads and refineries, was also true for power supply. The country's last power stations were built in the early '80s. No new additions were made and the people lost hope when they saw that the government itself now depended on generators to run. Then everybody went for generators, thanks to Chinese manufacturers who built cheaper alternatives that became available to a wider number of people. Now the country is not only the greatest importer of power generators worldwide, but also own the highest number per capita, spurning its riches of natural gas, coal, biomass, wind and solar powering the rest of the world.

Unfazed by its monumental failings, the ruling elite, like an unrepentant prodigal, is ever seeking new ways to create the money to feed its rapacious greed, usually with the advice of their masters in London and Washington. The latest top warrant chief, Goodluck Jonathan, is now touting the failures of several administrations, including his own, as a basis to increase fuel prices. Having spent hundreds of billions every year to pay the difference between the international price of crude oil and the local cost of fuel, the government now wants to stop the payment in order to use the difference to build the country's infrastructure, officials say.

No mention is made of any plan to cut the bloated bureaucracy and government, with legislators that earn the highest pay among their peers in the world. There is no talk of rebuilding the refineries to ensure domestic processing of fuel and tackling the cartel the government admitted was controlling fuel importation and taking most of the fees paid as subsidy. There is no plan to rebuild the railways, to shift the burden of transportation from the roads and guarantee cheaper movement of goods and people, before thinking of increasing fuel prices. Even the government's plan to revive the power sector is now dependent on foreign investors, as if foreign investors built the functioning power infrastructure of the rest of the world. Roads and railways are now to be built through public-private partnerships, which means that the contract will be sold to companies in which they have interests. The only thing they won't seed the private sector and foreign investors are the armed forces and the police. They need armed protection to maintain their plunder. That's the game plan of the apartheid regime in Abuja.

The jealous God is an imperialist

One of the concepts that have come in handy for the imperial subjugators of African and black people is the concept of a jealous God. It has been applied to devastating effect on Africans by Arab and European predators that for long coveted Africa and its riches, using Islam and Christianity. Incidentally both are Abrahamic religions, which along with its third leg, Judaism have been deployed for violent purposes over time. Their pretention has often been that their aim was to enthrone monotheism, but in reality nothing was further from the truth. The true aim was to conquer and and enslave African people and take the riches found in their land.



The African people they claimed they were teaching about one God, had always known about the Creator. I am yet to find an indigenous African language that doesn't have a word for the Supreme Being, and proceeding on simple logic, it's not possible to name what you don't know. The name you give reflects the way you apprehend what you name, and while the African may pay obeisance to some natural objects or animals or other natural phenomena, he was aware that the Supreme Being manifested in everything in creation and appreciated the Creator in like manner. Indeed, Africa, as the home of mankind and civilization had given the concept of one God to humanity. From Ancient Egypt, Greeece learned and handed over to Rome,; and till date we remain captive to the Greco-Roman epoch..



Yet, the descendants of Rome and Mecca come running to Africa to teach the original source of the knowledge - one of the great ironies of life! But indeed the true aim was to conquer and dominate the African, dominate his mind and dominate his resourcesand keep him in perpetual servitude. Therefore, the Chrisitians say, the African must have no other God except the Christian God, as if there was any other God but God. In turn the Muslim insists that Allah is the only way, when he means cultural imperialism, a sharia that denudes the individual of all that makes him original and turns his gaze perpetually to the east.

And Africa is thorn, warped, twisted and befuddled by this so-called war between two civilizations, which is actually a war over who should control the booty that they saw Africa to be. A war with origins going back to some 500 years ago when Europe found a sea route down to West Africa and undermined the erstwhile middleman position which the Arabs occupied for centuries as traders of the treasures of Africa to Europe and the Far East. Most recently China has joined the scramble, but as with the longer-standing predators, the aim is also the same: to take what Africa has, and inevitably in the process, find a way to denigrate Africans as people who lack humanity and for that reason don't deserve the riches of the continent.

So what should be the best response from Africans in the face of the hypocritical but nonetheless grievious onslaught by the socalled Arab and European civilizations on their African forbear? Stand firm, don't doubt yourself because the life of God is already in you through creation. The fact of being alive justifies all existence and one owes the Creator a duty to live life fully. Don't be lazy, don't flee from work and most of all seek knowledge of that which is true. That will lead you to the knowledge that there is only one humanity and that Africa was the route humans walked as they came out of creation. With that knowledge at the back of your mind, please forge ahead to the promised land.

The onslaught on our African past

One of the biggest ironies of our time is that the very Europeans who denigrated Africa as the very heart of darkness, without a past, found possession of African art objects as evidence of high-minded civilization. In Western European homes, offices and establishments, having an African art object, especially an original dating hundreds and thousands of years back, is the height of cultural sophistication. It is a form of schizophrenia that I think hasn't been paid enough attention in current psychiatric scholarship.


It's other half, equally meriting psychoanalysis, is the fervour with which Africans are destroying their own cultural objects and other evidence of how their ancestors lived, perceived and celebrated their existence. With our governments busy with the plunder of our national treasuries, indifferent to the meaning of our past, various Christian denominations of the pentecostal bent have been on a spree of destruction cloaked with the hypocritical cloak that characterizes their evangelism, burning up and smashing up artefacts of African material culture that have not been stolen by thieves selling to Western buyers or that were spared the looting of the colonial phase of European passage through Africa.




As often happens with things African, Nigeria presents some of the worst examples of the ongoing despoilation.


Some two years ago, the authorities in in Lagos state suddenly decided that art traders selling modern copies of ancient African sculptures that are often mixed with originals trafficked from the interior where they were plundered by thieves, constituted squatters that needed to be removed in order to go on with the usual land rackets for which the Lekki Peninsula corridor has become famous. What did they do? The mobilized bulldozers to the scene while the art dealers were away, smashed up their shops and crushed the items on sale with the chain wheels and the metal excavators of the bulldozers. They couldn't be bothered whatever the historical significance of the works or even their commercial value to those who trade in them. Items damaged included artworks that had travelled from different parts of Africa through traders to come and meet their mostly Western buyers by the Lekki beach in Lagos, like slaves of old, enroute to Europe and the Americas.



A few years ago the Christian envangelist pastor Uma Ukpai boasted that he and his followers over a few weeks in one December were able to destroy scores of shrines across Igboland in southeast Nigeria. What did these places of traditional worship consist of? Usually made of mud houses, with walls decorated by Uli writings and paintings, they often contained naturalist carvings of African figures, featuring the cubist styles that became the inspiration of Pablo Picasso and modern Western art. These shrines, which exuded the deep, close, communing relationship between the African of old and his environment, that saw the unity of all things whether plant, animal or inanimate, were destroyed by triumphal philistines of African extraction in the name of evangelism.

This particularly corrosive form of evangelism has bred individual variants of the "prayer-warrior" - note the belligerent tone of the name - who wouldn't brook any sight of any of the items that formed part of the spirituality of his ancestors, whether personal or communal. Among the Igbos of southeastern Nigeria, where a thwarted variety of Christianity harking back to puritn inquisition has taken hold, individual prayer-warriors regularly invite pastors of similar ilk to make bonfires of cultural and spiritual artefacts they inherited from their forebears. Frequently they also form savage bands that steal out in the middle of the night, especially during the Christmas season, to burn and destroy communally owned artefacts.

One instance of this madness was played out in the town of Achina in Anambra State in December 2008. One morning the town woke up to find that the ikoro had been destroyed, butchered and burnt by a group of prayer-warriors. The ikoro was a giant wooden gong, reputed to be at least 400 years old, which sat in its own house at the edge of the Oye, the town's market. It was an instrument of mass communication for which a specialist player was appointed by the town in the olden days. It's sounds could be decoded by most people in the village. And whenever there was an emergency, the job of the ikoro player was to mount it and beat out messages which could be heard and intepreted by town people whereever they may be in distant farms or streams. It was a means of communication and mobilization and wasn't even as a religious object, apart from the fact that in the traditional concept of the people every aspect of life was infused with some spirituality.

Anyway, the ikoro of Achina was destroyed. It had survived previous murder attempts, when the prayer-warriors had attacked before and fortunately were seen by other town people who resisited them and stopped them. After one unsuccessful attempt, one of the age-grades in the town had contributed money to build a fence around the ikoro and put a lock on the gate into where it was housed. Then the prayer-warriors adopted stealth and came like a thief in the night to destroy the ikoro.

With an indifferent government concerned only with the plunder of national resoruces and doing the bidding of their masters in Western capitals, it's no wonder that the common good has gone to the dogs. Even officially designated government museums, where artefacts are supposed to be preserved for posterity, over the years became conduits for wholesale plunder of Nigerian art and cultural objects. The result is that there is a tripple onslaught by state officials, art thieves and evangelists against articles of Africa's past material culture that show who we are, what we were and where we're coming from. And as the reggae singer Ziggy Marley asked: "Tomorrow people, where is your past? ...If you don't know your past, you don't know your future."

Our leaders as modern day slavers

One thought that has often worried me about Africa's slavery experience, the biggest holocaust in human history, is the role Africans themselves played in the tragedy. I always found it difficult to understand how Africans could sell their fellow Africans to European slave traders. My reading of history tells me it was mostly the chiefs and kings that controlled the trade. Armed with guns they had received from Europeans on the coast, they launched raids on largely defenseless hinterland peoples to procure the valued human cargo that wast then shipped to the Americas. As they made more money, they became more powerful, more addicted to the trade and inflicted more terror on their hapless neighbors.

It wasn't long before the trade became the order of the day as powerful men built their own slave-raiding armies, attacking their neighbors, pillaging and plundering. It must have been a period of great insecurity, war and pestilence, ravaging a huge and healthy African population that had been built up during the preceding successful agricultural revolution that had brought stability to many African societies and propelled the flourishing of a great world culture.

Yes, it was hard to imagine how Africans could easily ruin their land by their own hands, until I compared them to Africa's present crop of leaders. Like the slave dealers of old, they're allied to Europe, essentially Western Europe, whose ordered prevailed then as now. The slaving chiefs were beneficiaries of the slave system, just in the same way our present leaders are beneficiaries of the present-day slave system. So the powerful, ruling minority collaborated with the West, just in the same way the tiny ruling minority of today are colloborating with the West and profiting from the suffering of the majority. By so doing the best interests of African people are negated and thwarted and people are forced into crushing poverty, permanently enslaved to disease, hunger and ignorance.

The more I think about the similarities, the more it occurs to me, with some sense of horror, that another 300-400 years down the line, our children are going to wonder how on earth our leaders allowed the criminanlity that has passed for governance in Africa since the end of the slave epoch. They're going to view us with utmost contempt as a generation, who failed,, despite the relative clarity (to put Fanon's famous phrase upside down), to realise our destiny and to pursue it. And they would condemn us, like we've condemned our forebears, not realising that a majority were mere victims of a plundering, unthinking elite so carreid away by the joys offered them by the toys that the West brought.