Growth Continues, With or Without a Plan

part 1 of my 5-part series for Slate

LAGOS, Nigeria—Bar Beach wakes up later than the rest of Lagos. The prostitutes, touts, and religious devotees who live here on the breakwaters of the Atlantic Ocean emerge from their small shacks or from underneath tarps after the rest of the city has already begun its daily hustle. They had a late night.

Jutting up against the shoreline is a long concrete sea wall, similar in color, shape, and seeming disdain for aesthetics to Chicago’s south side Promontory Point revetment, with hundreds of tractor-tire-sized X-blocks meant to protect the nearby high-priced real estate. On a recent morning, I walked down the sea wall as men, women, and children appeared from behind the X-blocks, taking pulls from small brown bottles, smoking joints, or picking at their teeth with bits of plastic.

A few city employees were bent over, sweeping the causeway of dirt. Beside them was a sign that read, “Eko o ni baje!” Yoruba for “Don’t spoil Lagos.” The signs are posted all over the city. Few heed them, from the state minister driving by in his Bentley to the tattered guy next to me drinking his breakfast.

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LAGOS, Nigeria — This country is trying to remake its international image. Again.

The oil-rich but shaky West African government this week launched a $1 million public-relations blitz to lure tourists and foreign investors and combat what officials say is an outdated depiction of Nigeria and its citizens as hopelessly corrupt.

It’s a tough sell. Africa’s most populous nation has become synonymous with government graft, email scams and drug smuggling. By some estimates, nearly $400 billion in oil revenues was stolen between 1960 and 1999. Former military ruler Sani Abacha alone stole roughly $4 billion over the span of his brutal five-year reign in the 1990s.

Recently, Nigeria has come to be associated with the international drug trade — both as a transit point and as a source of traffickers. On Wednesday, officials in Beijing arrested a Nigerian man they said was carrying nearly 200 pounds of marijuana in his luggage, China Daily reported.

With that sort of publicity to deal with, Information Minister Dora Akunyili unveiled Nigeria’s newest PR counterattack: “Nigeria: Good People, Great Nation.”

“We must shed this toga that says we are untrustworthy, unreliable and ungovernable,” Ms. Akunyili told reporters in the capital, Abuja. Previous efforts to repair the country’s reputation have been largely unsuccessful. The most recent international campaign, “Nigeria: Heart of Africa,” featuring a bikini-clad model, was scrapped last year after officials spent $7 million.

This week’s campaign didn’t get off to an auspicious start. At the news conference announcing the new campaign, one of the members of the re-branding committee, Isawa Elaigwa, told reporters he’d just been pick-pocketed. The thieves got his cellphone.

see the story at the Wall Street Journal online here

Feature of mine in today’s Wall Street Journal:

LAGOS, Nigeria – In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and biggest oil producer, low crude prices are dragging down growth expectations, foreshadowing a dramatic slowdown in an economy that was teetering even in the good years.

Nigeria has long struggled with a fractious federal system, endemic corruption and ramshackle infrastructure — all factors that kept the commodities boom from lifting living standards significantly for most of the country’s 148 million people.

Now, falling oil prices and a struggling banking sector have forced the government to tap into a reserve account tied to excess crude-oil revenues that had bulked up during last year’s commodity boom. Nigeria depends on oil for more than 90% of its export earnings and 80% of its revenue.

…read the full article

See the full story online here.

LAGOS, Nigeria — The President of the tiny West African nation Guinea-Bissau was killed by soldiers early Monday morning in what appeared to be a revenge attack, after the country’s army chief of staff, a rival of the president, was killed in a bomb blast hours earlier.

It wasn’t clear who was in charge of the country after the government confirmed President Joao Bernardo “Nino” Vieira was killed. Local press reports quoted army officials saying they were in control and would respect the country’s constitution. The military denied a coup attempt.