'The super-rich don't vote in Nigeria': election in the land of rising inequality

Angel was nine months old when she fell off the edge and drowned. Filthy, 6ft-deep water surrounds her family home and is visible through gaps in its crooked floorboards, which bend precariously underfoot. About 30 grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, teenagers and young children are crammed into two flimsy wooden rooms perched above a lagoon.

“There was a lot of sadness that day,” said Teodor Afia, 55, recalling his granddaughter’s death three months ago. “She was playing with her two-year-old brother, Samuel, and just went over the edge while nobody was at home. Everything that happens is God’s will.”

 This is Makoko, a slum partly built on stilts above the murky canals of the Nigerian mega-city, Lagos, and a tribute to resilience and innovation among Africa’s have-nots. Now its ramshackle houses, bars, barber shops and churches are coated with colourful posters as politicians clamour for votes. On Saturday, many of this fishing community’s 250,000 residents will pile into wooden canoes and head to the mainland where, just for a day, they will have as much say as anyone else.

No one expects a smooth ride when the president, Goodluck Jonathan, takes onchallenger Muhammadu Buhari in the most hotly contested election since civilian rule was restored in the country 16 years ago.

There are fears of logistical chaos, sabotage by the Islamist group Boko Haram and a violent backlash from whichever side loses. The previous ballot in 2011, when Jonathan defeated Buhari hands down, was widely hailed as a success yet still led to riots and more than 800 deaths in the north.

Nigeria’s election is the most important political event of the year in an Africa of constant advances and setbacks, where every gain is fragile and every defeat reversible. Home to one in six Africans, the nation is the continent’s biggest democracy, biggest oil producer and biggest economy, accounting for more than a third of sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP.

The saying “as Nigeria goes, so goes Africa” has never been more resonant.

While countries such as Ghana, Malawi, Mauritius, Senegal and Zambia have seen peaceful transfers of power, the likes of Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sudan and Zimbabwe invariably fall short of “free and fair”. Nigeria, which with 170 million people dwarfs them all, is under pressure from the international community to demonstrate that the arc of Africa bends towards democracy.

 In a letter to Jonathan this week, the British prime minister, David Cameron, warned that the poll would send a “signal to the rest of Africa”. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said last month: “This election will be a bellwether for the entire continent. The world is watching, the continent is watching, Nigeria’s neighbours are watching this election.”

It is a view shared by Adekeye Adebajo, a Nigerian political author and former UN official now based in South Africa. “It’s extremely huge for Africa,” he said. “We have a saying that when Nigeria sneezes, west Africa catches a cold. Nigeria is a microcosm of Africa: a federalist experiment with a population roughly twice the size of the second biggest country, Ethiopia. The whole ‘Africa rising’ narrative is countries like Nigeria that have been growing at 5% a year, so it matters enormously.”

Since gaining independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria has never had a change of government via the ballot box, so victory for Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) over Jonathan’s incumbent Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) would be a defining moment for African politics.

Adebajo, executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, added: “Ghana, Senegal and others have gone through a transition where a ruling party has ceded power to another. That’s never happened in Nigeria and that’s why the stakes are so high.”

Although the country has grown wealthier from oil despite the recent drop in price, “it’s been growth without development”, Adebajo added. “The country’s getting richer but the people don’t feel it. Neither party in this election seems to be tackling this in a really substantive way to reduce these inequalities that are structural.”

In this, Nigeria again embodies an African paradox. For more than a decade the continent has enjoyed record headline growth – few investment conferences fail to champion the mantra “Africa rising” – yet millions of people have been left behind.

 Wealth largely generated by minerals or oil has created a tiny super-rich elite, an African 1%, but nearly half the continent’s population continues to live on less than $1.25 a day. Corruption remains a powerful brake on progress.

Helen Clark, administrator of the UN development programme, said: “The GDP growth has of course been quite good this century, but Africa isn’t getting as much poverty reduction as Asia did at a similar stage of development. These things don’t happen by accident. You have to have policies which will actually produce some kind of more equitable outcome. The challenge on the continent is to get the human development dividend from the economic growth.”

In Nigeria’s case, growth has stood at a healthy 6.8% over the past decade and the number of millionaires has soared by 44% to nearly 16,000 over six years. Yet absolute poverty has risen from 55% in 2004 to 61% in 2014. While much has been said about divisions between Christians and Muslims ahead of the polls, Nigeria’s status as one of the most unequal societies in Africa is fundamental.

Max Siollun, a historian and writer, said: “Inequality is at the root of the biggest election issues: security and corruption. Both the Boko Haram insurgency in the north, and the Niger Delta insurgency in the south, have their roots in regional disparities in development and economic entitlement. Whatever short-term gains the military makes, these problems will not be resolved unless and until the underlying causes of socioeconomic inclusion and exclusion are resolved.”

Lagos alone has a bigger GDP than Kenya, but residents of Makoko face a daily struggle for food, electricity, education and healthcare. Canoes – some with paddles, others with poles – bustle back and forth on waterways littered with bottles, jerrycans, wrappers and other detritus, some carrying only children. Others are floating market stalls, with women selling everything from clothes to baby products to buckets full of snacks and soft drinks. Around them smoke rises from cooking pots while men build boats, weave fishing nets or feed corn and peppers through grinding machines powered by generators.

What began as a chaotic floating human settlement now has basic services including a nursery and primary school. Named Whanyinna, the school has 239 children aged five to 12 along with nine teachers. Its director, Noah Shemede, says he founded it in 2008 because, as the youngest of 22 siblings and the only one to go to school, he wanted all local children to receive an education. Whanyinna, which has foundations running 11ft deep, depends on voluntary donations for its survival, including teacher’s salaries of 10,000 naira (£34) per month.

Shemede intends to vote for Buhari, a former military dictator turned reformed democrat. “The people feel angry towards the government,” he said, speaking in a small wooden office as he marked pupils’ report books and a school bell clanged outside. “We feel neglected. There are no basic amenities: no government school, hospital or borehole for water. In politics, everything is corruption. They will make promises and they won’t fulfil them.”

Dozens of people were left homeless in 2012 after Lagos authorities swooped and demolished houses and other illegal structures. As residents protested and tensions grew, a local chief was allegedly shot dead. Shemede, who is general secretary for the chiefs of Makoko, linked the demolitions to an official drive for urban development in Lagos including a multibillion dollar project dubbed “the Dubai of Africa”.

Work on Eko Atlantic began seven years ago when millions of tonnes of sand were dragged from the bottom of the Atlantic ocean to create a 3.86sq mile (10sq km) city within a city on the upmarket Victoria island. Today, at the entrance to Africa’s biggest building site, banners offer a vision akin to the tip of Manhattan with accompanying slogans such as “Safe haven”, “Spa and restaurant” and “Dedicated power station and water treatment plant”. The first skyscrapers, including the Eko Pearl tower, are gradually rising from the vast sandy expanse along with roads, bridges, functioning street lights and palm trees amid the cranes, diggers, giant pipes and reels of cable.

A glossy promotional brochure describes Eko Atlantic as “Africa’s 21st-century city” that will make Lagos the new financial capital of the continent. By the time it is completed in 15-20 years’ time, the business district will feature “a spectacular central boulevard, similar in size to the Champs-Élysées in Paris or Fifth Avenue in New York”. Tellingly, it will have its own private hospital, international school, power supply, water and sewage treatment system, telecommunications, security, roads, canals, parks and sports facilities, operated separately from state-managed public services.

In short, Eko Atlantic will be a self-contained bubble where the affluent can escape the rest of Nigeria with its power cuts, decaying infrastructure and failing public services. Like Makoko, it will be home to around 250,000 people and self-sufficient, but the similarities end there. Shemede said: “They are building Eko for the rich man, not the poor man. Only the rich can afford the homes they will build there. The government is making money from that. Why can’t they use it to develop this community on water?”

He continued: “The gap between rich and poor in Nigeria is very wide. The students here have to paddle boats to school and their parents give them an allowance of 30 naira (10p) a day. Rich people pay 3m naira (£10,146) per term, which would pay for a whole school in Makoko. The classroom is full of air conditioning, while we have a few fans people donated to us. Rich people take their kids to school and bring them back home in an air conditioned car. For people in Makoko, their car is their canoe.”

Over at the Porsche Centre Lagos, opened in 2012, the latest Panamera 4S has just sold to a businessman for 45m naira (£152,187), while a pair of designer sunglasses goes for 39,000 naira (£132). Fatima Okorie, a sales consultant, said the dealership sells four cars per month on average, rising to 10 or 11 at peak times. “People want to drive something different from what everyone else is driving. They are used to Mercedes or BMW so to stand out they would prefer to drive the Porsche.”

This is also the country which, researchers found, has the second fastest growing rate of champagne consumption in the world after France.

 The rich tend to shun Nigeria’s public hospitals and schools, often preferring to spend on private services abroad. Damian Ugwu, a leading human rights researcher, said: “There is a serious disconnect between the rich and the governance of Nigeria.”

This will even be apparent on election day, he argued. “The super-rich do not vote in Nigeria. At polling stations you will see poor people who stand for hours in the heat, but they don’t have the super-security that the rich are used to. The rich have a stake – they fund candidates – but when it comes to voting, they often fly out at election time. They hardly bother holding the leaders accountable.”

Among this elite in Lagos, south-west Nigeria, the insurgency by Boko Haram in the north-east feels distant, as if in another country.

Its victims are overwhelmingly poor and vulnerable. Habeeb Fasinro, a former MP and a Christian married to a Muslim, said: “Sometimes it’s quite uncanny. When you sit down and have after-dinner conversations, you talk about Boko Haram in the distance. How is the government going to handle it? We’re not going to run into it in the streets. We know the challenge but we don’t see it on our doorsteps.”

Fasinro, 51, used to introduce himself in parliament as representing “arguably the richest constituency in Nigeria”. He is now president of the 111-year-old Lagos Polo Club, which has around 300 members including 80 active players, and recently organised Africa’s first beach polo tournament at Eko Atlantic. “Tackling inequality doesn’t mean we should all live in the same rich area,” he said, overlooking a new playing field with horses, stables and scoreboard in the distance. “We should tackle poverty but what is the American dream? It’s equality of opportunity to be unequal. Everybody aspires and that’s what drives them.”

As for Saturday’s election, Fasinro added, Nigeria has a chance to shine. “We’ve always been the whipping boy of not being able to do things right. Now people will be able to say, ‘At least they’ve got things right’. And if we don’t, small nations will think they can get away with anything.”