I think I’ve mentioned, I have three ways I choose places to visit. First, if I’ve got some reason to be there, like a larp or a convention (e.g., I’m heading to London right now for The Smoke). Second, if I’ve never been and I kind of point my finger at a map and say “What about here?” and that’s why I booked a flight to Bangkok next month.

But the third kind is in a lot of ways the most interesting. That’s when I travel someplace that wasn’t high on my list, that I wasn’t expecting to see. It’s how I ended up in Santa Fe last year, and Leirford. And it’s why I spent a week in Ouagadougou in 2018, and why I’ve just spent the last ten days in Lagos.

Typically, I’ll have a friend living somewhere who invites me, and I’ll try and angle my travel through there, timewise or locationwise. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. But sometimes it does.

This time it worked out. I have friends working for the United States consulate in Lagos, and their tour is ending in April. I was already scheduled through Christmas, and had plans from January through to April. But there was a window over New Year’s Eve, and despite some pricy tickets getting there and back and the difficulty of getting a quick visa¹ I had sorted it all out and was hopping a flight just after Christmas.

It’s hard for me not to compare Nigeria to Burkina Faso. Partially because they’re the only two places I’ve been in Africa, partially because they’re both West African countries with similar histories — colonialism leading to independence leading to a series of coups and political instability.

But I think the similarities are mostly superficial. The population of Burkina Faso is 19 million. The population of Nigeria is 190 million. That makes it the 7^th most populous country in the world, and its resources and vast oil wealth make it the 20^th largest economy in the world.

It also ranks 158^th out on the Human Development Index. Just under half of the country — almost 90 million people — live in extreme poverty, on less than $2/day. The main issue is corruption. There’s a term, prebendalism, for governments where political appointees feel entitled to enrich themselves and their supporters through the use of their office. It’s a hallmark in Nigeria,² and the scale of it causes problems at every level.

The energy shortages throughout the country are kind of emblematic of the issue.³ At least two or three times a day there’d be a <WHOMP> as the power cut out and the diesel generators cut on. It’s a huge embarrassment for a country with as much oil and gas as Nigeria has. Everyone blamed the government so the government privatized NEPA,⁴ the power company, which predictably didn’t help. So now everyone blames the government and the privatized power companies,⁵ along with customers who refuse to pay because the service is crap and rebels who keep cutting the oil pipelines because they’re angry at all the corruption and oil companies who ration the oil because of all the pipeline cuts, and illegal electricians who hook customers back up to the power grid after the power companies cut them off for nonpayment. All anyone seems to agree on is that politicians and businesspeople have been stealing billions from the system over generations, and that long-term massive underfunding means it’ll take at least another generation to fix it.

But Lagos also has dozens of nearly brand-new skyscrapers, with more being constructed. It supports a burgeoning jetset which hops between all the predictable hotspots: Dubai, Milan, London.⁶ There’s a Porsche dealership.⁷ In other words, it’s supporting a class of multimillionaires. And it’s certainly got another class of people just scraping by on that $2/day. It just doesn’t seem to have many people in the middle.

I was staying with friends in the consulate, which means I got to crash at their place near the top of a 14-story apartment building, with the attendant guards at the gate and the aforementioned diesel generators to prevent power outages. I didn’t get out to wander around the streets much, partially because it was brutally hot, partially because of the pollution and the dust,⁸ and partially because I wasn’t quite comfortable wandering around on my own.⁹

Which isn’t to say I didn’t get out. But I viewed it all as a consular official might, eating out to Americanized restaurants,¹⁰ visiting the Lekki Conservation Center and taking the canopy walk,¹¹ wandering through the Nike Art Gallery, and going to see a musical.¹² I even got to see a movie.¹³

I often feel like I should have spent more time getting into a country, falling into the rhythms of its culture, trying to understand the people. But I never have enough time or enough energy. I’m always consoling myself with the bits I did manage to find.

This time, I guess, I’ll always have standing on the balcony on New Year’s Eve, watching the fireworks going off all over downtown Lagos. As I finish this post I’ve landed in London and crashed for the night, relieved to be someplace I can breathe cool, fresh air. It seems unlikely I’ll ever make it back to Lagos. But I can’t deny I’m desperate to know how things turn out.

Next: Birmingham (BHX) to Stockholm (BMA)
Prev: New York City (JFK) to Lagos (LOS)

Footnotes

¹ I’ve discussed the difficulty of getting a second passport so I could turn it in in New York City for the Nigerian embassy to take their 3-5 weeks to process. At the end of the day, it didn’t really matter; they took less than a week to turn it around.

² Not exactly a holdover from colonial times, but not exactly not a holdover either.

³ There’s a great hour-long documentary on YouTube about it called Take Light.

⁴ The company had such a bad reputation they changed their name, but everyone still calls it NEPA. The joke is it stands for “Never Expect Power Always.”

⁵ All of whom swear they’re losing money hand over fist.

⁶ Another unbelievable documentary, Lagos to London, talks about the children of the Nigerian ultra-rich navigating the social scene of the United Kingdom. One of them threw herself a Louis XVI-themed party on her birthday for over 300 guests, and revealing either a stunted historical sensibility or an utter lack of irony dressed herself as Marie Antoinette.

She identified with Marie Antoinette because she feels they both had a lot of responsibility at a young age, plus they both like dogs.

⁷ As my friend pointed out, how anyone is expected to drive a sports car on the streets of Lagos, given the traffic and the road quality, is mystifying.

⁸ I was visiting during the harmattan, which is a dry and dusty wind that leaves a haze over the city for about a month over the winter.

⁹ Which is somewhat weird, because I was pretty comfortable walking around on my own in Ouagadougou. I think it’s just something about Nigerian culture, which has a kind of aggressive edge in interacting with you. People will constantly knock on your window looking to sell you water or gum or snacks or artwork or whatever else they happen to have. If you’re parking somewhere ungated there are frequently groups of young men just loitering around offering to find you a parking space and “protect” your car for a small renumeration. It’s a bit much.

¹⁰ There’s a surprising number of Tex Mex restaurants in Lagos — I mean, I went to two — and the food in both places was decent. There’s also a number of top-notch Indian places, and a weird mix of French bakeries and what I guess you’d call Nigerian fusion (suya-spiced onions rings, for example) and other places.

Of course, all this costs about what you’d expect it to cost in New York City. If you’re not eating the local food — and it’s largely meat-based and uses the water the consulate advises you not to drink — then you’re eating in places that have to ship a lot of their food in from elsewhere. And shipping to or from Nigeria is ridiculously expensive, because the port is ridiculously inefficient, probably to provide more opportunities to receive bribes expediting shipments.

¹¹ Longest canopy walk in Africa!

¹² Fela’s Republic and the Kalakuta Queens

¹³ Frozen 2. There were a lot of Nollywood movies playing, which meant there were comparatively fewer things that I was particularly interested in seeing.

It was fine, but it felt like it was retreading the first an awful lot. On the plus side, it’s kind of cool to be in a foreign movie theater and get to see a bunch of kids giggling at the same dumb Olaf jokes you’d see at home. Kids are kids, man.

Also, Nigeria serves this weird mixed popcorn, half sweet, half salty. It’s incredibly good.