"Your coming is a blessing," Kunle* says to me. We are standing in front of the Badgary slave port, one of the last to be shut down in the late 19th century.
I am positive it must be the first time an African has said this to an Oyinbo (a white person) while standing in this spot. Where there were once boats with deep underbellies ready to be stacked with Africans to sell in European and American markets, now there are malnourished children selling soda and crackers alongside hungry hogs digging for their lunches in the mounds of trash.
We walk up the street to a one-room slave relic museum where the chains that the slaves wore are hanging from the walls. A man working there puts the chains around his legs to demonstrate how they were worn. He puts the metal lip bit over his two lips, which puff over the edges like a muffin oozing out of its baking mold, showing us how the slaves were prevented from speaking. He walks over to a large rusty bin and tells us, as he stands over it, craning his head into it, that the Africans were made to drink from this bin, like animals.
Leaving the slave port, our host Dr. Onitiri, a University of Lagos staff member, tells us that in spite of the end of slavery and colonialism, the Nigerian population is still enslaved. It is simply a different form of slavery.
Less than a decade after independence from Britain, Nigeria suffered a brutal 30-month civil war, which ended in 1970. The Library of Congress estimates that one to three million people died because of war-related causes and at least three million people became refugees. Even during this horrifying period of the country's history, Nigeria was still able to economically support its population. Nigeria was a net food exporter in the years leading up to the war, and during the war output increased and the country met much of its domestic industrial demand for raw materials.
When the war was over and the oil boom began in the 1970s, Nigeria should have been in a sweet spot, given the fact that violence had largely ended and oil was providing a huge source of wealth. Instead, Nigeria became sick with the Dutch Disease, corruption and political instability.
The Dutch Disease is an economic sickness in which the increased inflow of foreign money makes the value of the local money increase, making the country's other exports, agricultural products and, to a lesser extent, manufactured goods, less competitive in world markets.
Labor and capital shifted out of agriculture and industry, sectors which had once employed a majority of the workforce. Unemployment and inflation rapidly increased. "[O]il prices soared and oil exports rose at the expense of the agricultural and manufacturing sectors," an IMF staffer explained in their Finance and Development Quarterly.
Increases in political instability and corruption were not disconnected from Nigeria's shift to having a natural resource-based economy. According to many studies and to some of the experts we met with in Lagos, in a natural-resource based economy, particularly in an oil-based economy, the government becomes less accountable to people, because the largest source of government revenue is not from taxes levied on the people but from oil exports.
As accountability decreases, corruption increases, and political instability becomes perpetual. This an accurate depiction of Nigeria's history. A series of coups and military governments marked the period after the Civil War, with only a brief period of civilian rule and peaceful transition of power. General Abacha, who came to power in 1993 was perhaps Nigeria's most brutal dictator and also one of the most corrupt, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars in oil revenue that he deposited in Swiss bank accounts.
Today, Nigeria is estimated to have received $600 billion in oil revenue since 1960, yet about 70 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, according to an African Development Bank working paper. The West's ideas have failed too: In spite of foreign aid and the adoption of the IMF's structural adjustment program in the 1980s, Nigeria is still one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world. It ranks towards the bottom of nearly every governance and human development index.
Nigeria transitioned to democracy in 1999, under President Obasanjo, though most democracy ranking indexes do not consider the country to be a full democracy. In fact, the Economist Intelligence Unit's Index of Democracy ranks Nigeria as an "Authoritarian Regime" and included the country on its Negative Watch List for 2007.
Late one night, after Kunle describes life during Abacha's reign, recounting watching people in churches pray for Abacha's death, I tell him, "You should run for political office one day!" He is a friend whom I deeply admire, one of the best students at the University of Lagos, thoughtful, deeply compassionate and decisive.
"But I don't want to be killed," he tells me. "And if I am good leader, as I'd want to be, I'd surely be killed. If I were not, I wouldn't be serving my country anyway. Nigeria has big problems, but they are divided up amongst 130 million people, and I just get a little slice." He moves his fingers to his chest, tracing the shape of a slice. "So, it's not too bad," he says. We are both quiet. "Well, maybe I will one day," he whispers slowly. For now, he is thinking about how to get out of Nigeria for graduate school.
*Some names used in this piece were changed to ensure confidentiality.
Rachel Bergenfield is a sophomore majoring in international relations. She traveled to Lagos, Nigeria this winter break as a Synaptic Scholar of Tufts Institute for Global Leadership. She was hosted by the University of Lagos while conducting investigative research along with other Tufts students.
