Loomnie

From a WSJ review of Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy:

Mr. Neuwirth introduces us to a woman named Jandira who for a decade has peddled coffee and homemade cakes to the unlicensed vendors at São Paulo’s early-morning wholesale market for pirated movies. Her street-corner business, she proudly tells him, has enabled her to buy two cars and a house and to pay her children’s fees at private school. Another of Mr. Neuwirth’s sources, Chinese handbag designer Ethan Zhang, prefers to stay illegal. For him it’s a matter of costs and benefits: “If I want to get a license, then I will need a bank account and an office in an office building.” These are not people who lack the skills to survive through legal employment; they just see no good reason to join the legal economy.

System D is full of surprises. From Linda Chen, who trades counterfeit auto parts, we learn that China has a hierarchy of fake merchandise: The manufacturers of high-quality fakes offer guarantees and take back defective products, but with low-quality fakes it’s caveat emptor. Ogun Dairo buys woodchips from a sawmill and uses them to smoke fish, for sale by street vendors; her unlicensed grill is in an illegal squatter settlement in Lagos, but she buys fish that have been imported from Europe. At the euphemistically named Guangzhou Dashatou Second Hand Trade Center, where Arthur Okafor obtains the pirated mobile phones that he later smuggles into Nigeria, the cash turnover is so high that almost every (unlicensed) kiosk has a battery-powered currency counter.

The review reminds me of a chapter in my dissertation, in which I follow a container of secondhand clothing from the Cotonou port to the used clothes market in the Beninese city, and from the market to the Seme border and then into Nigeria. I show the different regulatory regimes under which batches of the imported used clothing fall – when taxes get paid on them and when not, and how the final retailer in Lagos sometimes actually pay some form of tax on the goods he has in his small stall on Lagos Island – even when secondhand clothing is not legally supposed to be imported or sold in the country (there is a ban on the importation of secondhand clothing into Nigeria). It also reminds me of the importance of ethnography for understanding microeconomic interactions that eventually feed into macroeconomic figures of a country. (Try understanding why Benin would always have a balance of trade deficit without knowing that almost all consumer goods it imports ends up being smuggled into Nigeria.) Of course, the whole idea of the informal economy itself arose from Keith Hart’s ethnographic study of urban slums in Ghana in the 1960s.

Read the review here. H/T to Bunmi Oloruntoba on Twitter.

1. Unsere Frauen bleiben frei! – On Islamophobia in Berlin

2. Threat to bomb 3rd Mainland Bridge in Lagos? Yes, it has something to do with Boko Haram.

3. Why Nigeria recognised Libya transition council – Minister for foreign affairs explains

4. On Libyan revolutionaries and racism. See also Jina Moore on the same topic

5. On the failure of African Union to help the continent’s starving people

At the end of a CFR article that tries to deal with the political mess that is Nigeria, Richard Joseph, who knows Nigeria pretty well, ends on a somewhat positive note. His answer to anybody who asks him what he would like to do during the next elections:

The response I advocate is to bolster the forces, institutions, and practices that can shift this complex nation onto a benign trajectory. Many acts of assertion and resistance can coalesce into a truly transformative movement. Here are two suggestions for international donors seeking unique ways to increase the slender prospects for democratic progress in Nigeria in 2011. The first would be to fund the purchase of thousands of copies of Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson’s recent book, Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World, for distribution throughout Nigeria. The second would be to give robust support for the creation of a pan-Nigerian movement of civic and other organizations to work for free, fair, and credible elections, a recommendation I made in a jubilee lecture in Abuja and Lagos in early October.

It should not be underestimated how many Nigerians, at home and abroad, are willing to take unusual action to challenge the brinkmanship that passes for statesmanship in their beleaguered nation. We should begin by arming them with the requisite tools, such as small video cameras, to capture nefarious electoral practices in their communities for screening on websites and televisions. And the technology should be made available for tabulating and displaying votes cast in each polling station that are transmitted by cell phones to collating sites. The 2011 election can have a dual character: an officially administered one by INEC, and a citizens’ movement to get out the vote that includes a comprehensive parallel vote count. The 2011 elections provide an opportunity for Nigerians to reclaim their democracy through neutralizing the efforts of politicians to distort and disrupt the voting process. From manipulated subjects, they can become active and alert citizens. They can be empowered to give birth to a new electoral democracy and demand greater performance and accountability of office-holders by a vigilant citizenry. This dream at independence has turned into a nightmare, especially during recent elections. The time has come to make good on a fifty-year promise, and the elections of 2011 is the moment to start.

I leave it at that and save the cynicism for another day.

Thanks to Kiran for the link.

Image via Wikipedia

Nigeria’s 50th independence anniversary is on October 1, 2010. To celebrate it, we are running a series titled Nigeria@50 at the groupblog NigeriansTalk. The first in the series, titled One Nigeria: Nigerian Unity 50 years Post-independence, was written by Kola of KTravula. The second is titled Nigeria at 50: Academic Medicine, and was written by Seye of Square One. There will be at least an article a day till October 1.

Follow and join the discussion at NigeriansTalk.org.

President Goodluck Jonathan says Nigeria’s power industry can only grow through liberalisation:

The government will sell 11 distribution companies created out of Power Holding Co. of Nigeria, the state-owned utility, and allow private companies to set up power plants using natural gas, hydro-electric dams and coal-powered stations, Jonathan said in a speech in Lagos, the commercial capital, broadcast on state television today [yesterday].

Listen to excerpts of the speech. Also, check out Saratu’s analysis.

The scheduling has done this documentary series no favours. Welcome to Lagos has coincided each Thursday night with an event, the TV debate between the three party leaders, which has not only turned this election on its head, but which may have changed politics in this country forever. If you can ignore history being made on the other side, a treat awaits you on BBC2. The producer Will Anderson has spent four months in the least salubrious spots of Lagos, one of Africa’s mega-cities – the main dump Olusosun, Makoko a floating slum, and the beach which is home to squatters. Thankfully, he was not on a quest for yet another extreme environment. Nor was he out to produce another derivative of Slumdog Millionaire. The stars of this world do not wallow in self-revelation, but are ordinary, resourceful people who get by. Meet Joseph, who burns the PVC coating off copper wire by night and proclaims that his business is just like the stock market. The price of metals he sells fluctuates with the price of the dollar. In fact, he goes on, the only difference between him and city slickers are suits, ties and fine shoes. One can think of a few others, as he leads you back to his one room apartment, but there is no cause for hand-wringing. No hearts bleed in this series, except those of the cattle slaughtered in the market. Nor is anyone pretending that life in the dump or the floating slum is another other than it is. If you can see it on iplayer, do. Otherwise this series is worth, dare one say it , a repeat.

Here.

Yahoo! news:

ABUJA (AFP) – Nigeria on Monday signed a deal worth almost a billion dollars with a state-owned Chinese engineering firm to resuscitate part of its dilapidated railway system, the transport minister said.

The 875-million-dollar (588-million-euro) contract was signed by Transport Minister Ibrahim Isa Bio and the managing director of the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC), Zhou Tianxiang, in Abuja.
The deal constitutes the first phase of the country’s railway modernisation plans.

As part of it, a railway track will be rebuilt between the administrative capital Abuja and the northern city of Kaduna — a distance of roughly 200 kilometres (125 miles) — over the next three years.

The Chinese government has granted Nigeria a concessionary loan of 500 million dollars for the project.
There are also plans to reconstruct a 1,315-kilometre track between Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub in the southwest and the northern city of Kano.

Once the pride of the nation, Nigeria’s railways have, like much of the rest of the country’s infrastructure, crumbled over the years.

Nigeria has a network of thousands of kilometres (miles) of narrow-gauge single track lines, covering nine of the country’s 36 states. Most of its locomotives broke down long ago.

The only passenger service still operating in the country takes two hours to link central Lagos with Ijoko, a small commuter town less than 30 kilometres (20 miles) away.

Really good initiative reported by Next:

The Lagos State council of tradesmen and artisans have embraced the use of the Internet as a means of attracting a wider audience and bringing their services closer to the public.

At a formal introduction to the council members by Advert Africa, an Internet advert service provider, yesterday in Lagos, the chairman of the tradesmen and artisans, Bola Sanusi, applauded the initiative and encouraged members to embrace the trend in the business world by adopting the use of the Internet facility to promote their services.

Advert Africa website is here.

Remember this story about the Nigerian central bank taking over five Nigerian banks? Well, it seems that a result of that has been a sort of credit crunch in the country. From the BBC:

Lagos-based manufacturing firm, supplying cables to Nigeria’s fledgling national grid.
With more than 500 skilled staff, it is exactly the kind of business that trade experts say Nigeria needs if it is to diversify away from oil production and create a more mixed economy.
Using borrowed cash, the firm moved to bigger premises in August, but just three weeks later received some devastating news from its two banks about its loan facility.
“The bank just told us pretty much, ‘Look, we have to put a hold on this at least till next month, or the month after or until things die down,’” says David Onefowoken, director of Coleman Wires and Cables.
“The second one might slash [the loan] by half.
“A lot of these banks that were stopping these loans had actually helped us out before, to get up and running.”
The reason?
A banking crisis entirely divorced from the global credit crunch. Continue reading.

A news story on crossing from Benin to Nigeria, through the Seme border:

“At every half kilometre, you encounter checkpoints manned by all sorts of agencies. This is a real problem to the sub-region,” he said. “On a bad day, from the Seme border down to Lagos, you meet over 70 checkpoints and they all ask the same thing, ‘what do you have for us’. They are all unlawful.

Although the report mentions the list of prohibited items, it does not say that the real reason that the border is that policed is because of that list itself. I have written somewhere else that the Nigerian state should consider other measures apart from outright prohibition. As long as the list of prohibited items is long, that border, as well as the road that runs from the border to Lagos, is going to remain as policed – either legally or illegally – as it is at the current moment.

I spent most of last year travelling the road.