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For some really crazy reason Homer’s Spider Pig song has been playing in my head, and I can’t seem to get rid of it…. No, I haven’t even seen the Simpsons movie, but I am thinking of doing so. Maybe by doing so I can get rid of the Spider Worm in my head. And no, there is nothing to this post than what it is: a post on Spider Pig….
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrT0IOt-Mes]

Spider Pig, Spider Pig,
Does whatever a Spider Pig Does
Can he swing from a web
No he can’t, he’s a pig
Look out, he is a spider pig.

I just joined a Facebook group and I found the question ” Nigeria’s Movie Industry (Nollywood), Quality or Quantity?” on the discussion board of the group. I decided to contribute to the discussion. The contribution ran some lenght so I thought, Why not make a post out of it? So, here is it as a post. Please leave comments.

“I think it is difficult to answer that question. You have to remember that the actors don’t get paid too much per movie - the audience is not as large as Hollywoods, even if the movies are now colonising other African countries’ markets - so they have to make many movies a year to make reasonable money. And as for quality, the audience seem to enjoy what they watch, so I don’t blame the industry if it has refused to improve on the quality of the movies. Also, think about what it costs to finance a good movie, with a good storyline, good props, costumes, lower frequency of output etc, not just in financial terms but also in the amount of risk involved. Many producers find it easier to go for time tested and trusted strategies: make the same movie as the last producer who made a successful movie did and you are sure to succeed. Challenging stories are not so trusted because of the unpredictability of the reception by the market.

And when one thinks of originality and creativity, one would have to ask how much of the movies produced by the two larger industries - Hollywood and Bollywood - are original and creative. Till today, Bollywood still has the oddly-placed music sessions in the movies, and it churns out movies that are as cheesy as the Dharmendra movies I watched growing up in Nigeria in the 80s. Or think about type-casting. Who has ever seen the expression on Hugh Grant’s face change? At least the other bad actors - Nicholas Cage and John Travolta, for instance - have a certain level of diversity in the roles they play, but does Grant? But producers keep featuring him because people like him. I think we should think in the same terms about Nigerian movies. It is easy to see the shortcomings of Nollywood - oh how I gnash my teeth each time I hear that name - but one finds a lot more similarity than one is ready to accept between it and the two larger movie industries if one looks closer. I think that the industry will self-regulate, but of course, with the help of the audience.

I think I should add this, although I laud the industry, I cannot bear the pains of sitting through a Nigerian home video.”

The Nigerian Central Bank Governor, Professor Soludo, really meant it when he said he wanted the Nigerian naira to become the legal tender in West Africa. I recently blogged about Nigeria as a black superpower; I think Soludo too believes that. He has outlined plans to revalue the naira by cutting off two zeros from it, or as he calls, by shifting the decimal two places to the left. This would mean that the note currently called 1,000 naira – the highest naira note – would become 10 naira, while a new 20 naira, which would be the highest naira note, would be introduced. There is nothing bad at all in that, as he rightly pointed out, so many other countries have done the same, although his list did not include Zimbabwe. What one wonders about are the reasons he gives for the restructuring. I am not an economist but I will try a discussion of some of the points he gave.

To prepare the way for making the naira internationally convertible. I have no idea how cutting off two zeros from the currency would make it internationally convertible. What underlines international convertibility is normally the performance of the economy, not the amount – how large or how small it sounds – at which it stands against another currency. For instance, the Yen trades at over a hundred dollars, but it doesn’t change its status as an internationally convertible currency. The same goes for the West African CFA, although for a different reason (the CFA is tied to the Euro, and so directly convertible to it, through the assurance of the French treasury).

To strengthen public confidence in the naira. If what the people need is false confidence then this might be nice. But one should remember that false confidence is soon eroded if inflation is not stemmed. It is not about the absolute value of the money you hold, but how much it can buy in the market.

To make naira the reference point in Africa. Well, I really wonder how restructuring the currency would do this. The economy, the economy… one needs to scream that a number of times.

To promote the usage of coins. This is ok, although I wonder if this is the only way to promote the use of coins.

One thing that nobody has mentioned is that it might make it easier for those lugging Ghana-must-gos around to carry much more money in smaller numbers of bags. I am talking about alleged bribery of National Assembly members.

This is my two-penny; I leave the debate to the economists around here.

If you were not to drive from Badagry into Lagos, and you were to take public transportation, or better still a bus, you would notice the high number of traders on that route. I often did this last year, during the time I lived in Badagry. I would get into the bus, sit, with my legs slightly raised. I normally sat directly at the back of the driver. Most of the buses have one row of seats too many, such that any tall person would have very little space for their legs. But the row directly behind the driver is right behind the engine covering of most buses, and as the engine covering reach up high, almost as high as the seats, you are able to place your feet on the engine cover. This does not go without its own disadvantages as it often means that your knees are drawn really close to the chest, and after a while your legs start aching because of poor circulation. But the trick is for you to get the seat directly behind the driver, for at this part, the engine covering is much lower than at the other parts so your feet are placed much closer to the ground than it would be if you sat a seat or two away from that spot. That is the spot I normally aimed to get.

There are other advantages to sitting at that spot. One is that, since the back door that passengers are allowed to use is at the other side, not at the side of the driver, you don’t have to disembark or move each time a new passenger comes in. The other advantage is that you are at a nice position from which to view what is happening at most parts of the bus. With your feet slightly raised, a turn of the head a little to the right makes it easy for you to observe the passengers as they come in, and a shift of the body a little to the right, still maintaining that slight turn of the head, gives you the advantage of seeing most of the persons in the bus. Now, at this spot, I was able to observe the other people in the bus, the actions of the police who stopped our bus almost every ten minutes, and I was also able to hear the wranglings of the driver as he tried to bargain his way into paying as little bribe as possible.

But that is not the story; the story is written on the faces and the bodies of the people who are normally my co-passengers when I took the bus. No, it is not the way the faces are set, or the ways they sit, although that – the way they sit – has a story all of its own. The story is in the way the expressions on their faces change each time we were stopped by the police or customs officers. Oh, I forgot to add that Badagry is close to the Nigeria-Benin border, and that only one main road leads from that side of the border into Lagos. The buses are normally packed with goods bought by the traders, who are most often women. Under the seat, in what remains of the trunk after extra rows of seats have been added to the bus, on the laps of the women or between their legs. Several consumer goods – rice, T-shirts, denim trousers, an occasional bag of vegetable oil – are normally some of the goods packed under the seats, or are hugged closely by the women. The women’s faces tell stories of hardship, of nights of going without sleep, or days without a shower. But those are the stories that are written on the faces even before they got in the buses. The stories their faces tell once they are in the bus are different. You see stories of apprehension, at seeing a customs officer who had never been seen on that road and so might be a hard person to bargain with; anger, at the odd driver who does not know how to deal with the police or the customs office; disbelief, at the crazy driver who is so greedy as to think that he could outsmart the customs officers or policemen at the checkpoints and thus provokes them to telling each and every passenger to disembark from the bus and declare – oh, that dreadful word – their goods; assumed expression of innocence, at the customs officer who asks them to explain how come they had this amount of this, and that amount of that; desperation, once the customs officer proceeds to seize the goods; and relief, once they are able to reach a bargain with the customs officer, and their goods are returned.

These stories make you ask: why? Why is it that they continue in the trade? Is it because they make a lot of profit from the trade that any inconveniences are compensated by the financial gains? Or is it simply because it is the only trade they know? Is it because of that promising child who would not have money for their school fees if she didn’t make that trip to earn some money? Or is it because the responsibility of fending for the family has fallen on her shoulders after her husband has been given the sack by his employer? You want to know, to understand.

Whatever you think, each time you disembark from the bus you leave with a renewed feeling of respect for the stories their faces tell, for their resilience, for taking charge, and for constituting a very important part of the economic life of Nigeria. Then you think, Maybe I should write a book about them.

Many people have described Sarkozy as a hyper-active (think of his near-attack on paparazzi in the USA last week) and power drunk politician, but not many have described him as racist. Well, we now add that to many of the adjectives that describe him. On July 26, 2007, on a university campus in Dakar, President Nicolas Sarkozy, as part of his speech said, ‘The African peasant only knows the eternal renewal of time, rhythmed by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words.”In this imaginary world where everything starts over and over again, there is no place for human adventure or for the idea of progress.’

Is he simply stupid? I think that whatever abuse one chooses to rain on him one should be seriously worried that the leader of a former colonial power in African would think like that. Achille Mbembe has quickly written a rejoinder.

Sarkozy’s article is here, the French version of Achille Mbembe’s reply is here, and the English version of the reply is here.

Discours raciste de sarko à dakar - 26 juillet 2007
Uploaded by henneji

Sorry, the video is only in French

The 3rd edition of the Beautiful Africa Blog Carnival is due on August 16. Please look at the Beautiful Africa homepage , then look through your blog to see what you can submit. You can submit your entry here. I will also be combing the blogosphere for articles. Hope to hear from you all soon!

The BA Team

I am supposed to be on vacation this week, and so I have tried to reduce my net activity to as little as possible. To help me relax I bought me an iPod, downloaded a lot of documentaries, got Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and decided that nothing was going to tempt me to go online. It worked for two days, but after I had listened to all the documentaries I had, and I finished the book, my fingers itched, my eyes kept straying to where the computer was, and I said, What the hell, it doesn’t matter, as long as I don’t work. Well, the problem is that there is only a thin line between working or simply playing online for me. Before I knew it I had checked my official email, found that someone had promised to send me some books I needed, did a reply, checked Nigerian Guardian Newspapers online, saw that the Nigerian Central Bank governor said something about the Nigerian Naira becoming the legal tender all over West Africa, thought, No way, and ended up looking for other things about the history of ECOWAS and a search for legal tender for the region…. Now, you get my drift.

Well, I am going into the city today to try and get some more books to read, I hope that will keep me off the computer for as long as possible.

It is well known that Nigeria has the largest population in Africa, and the largest economy in West Africa; it is fairly well known that Nigeria’s military has been intervening in hot spots in the region; it is perhaps even less known that Nigerian movies are now, all over Africa, what bollywood movies were in Nigeria when I was growing up in the 80s. Add all these together you get a Black Superpower. Or so says the BBC in this documentary. There is a podcast on the page. you can also listen to it online.

I was missing Nigeria today so I spent some time on Youtube…. One thing led to many others… and ended up with this. I really like the video. Enjoy.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZOUQAzQlpDI&feature=related

I don’t know if you guys know, but my research is on informal economy in West Africa…. This morning, I got a confirmation that I am on the right track. I saw George Ayittey’s Ted Talk presentation and it reinforced what I always thought: the real economy in most African countries is the informal economy. MacGaffey, who did a lot of research on the informal economy in Central Africa has already called it the real economy in one of her books, but I think this needs to be said more often. Think about this: most of Africans are rural dwellers… then wonder about how much government and the formal economy ever penetrated into rural Africa. People have been, and still are, involved in economic activities that are not captured by the official economic figures of the government. Even researchers into the informal economy in African countries, who have devoted much time to studying the informal sector in urban areas, have not paid sufficient attention to the livelihood of rural dwellers. I would not be as dramatic as to say that Africa’s ‘development’ - whatever that much abused word means in this context - is to be found in the informal economy; what I would say is that if we are interested in African economies, and in knowing more about how Africans make a living despite the dismal economic figures we know so well, we better take a look at the informal sector.

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