Incubators Of Poverty -By Sadiq Tanko Jasper

Weapons and unwilling human traffic cross Nigeria’s northern border covertly. But the flow of counterfeit Chinese-made textiles has grown so voluminous that it would be impossible to keep it secret even if secrecy were required to ensure its safe passage. All the same, most of the shipments go through under cover of darkness. Those who control the trade engage in highly organized “settling,” or bribing, of the border officials, smoothing the textiles’ transit.Their contents seemed harmless enough: many contained textiles and clothing bound for the markets of Kano and Kaduna, northern Nigeria’s two main cities.

The Nigerian stretch is just the final leg of a 6,200-mile journey. It begins in Chinese factories, churning out imitations of the textiles that Nigerians previously produced for themselves, with their signature prime colors and waxiness to the touch. By the boatload they arrive in west Africa’s ports, chiefly Cotonou, the capital of Benin, a tiny country beside Nigeria that has, like Montenegro in Europe or Paraguay in South America, become a state whose major economic activity is the transshipment of contraband.

At the ports the counterfeit consignments are loaded onto trucks and either driven straight over the land border between Benin and western Nigeria or up through Niger and round to the border post with its taciturn chief. The trade is estimated to be worth about $2 billion a year.

Smuggling is a long-established profession here. Before colonial cartographers imposed the frontier, today’s smuggling routes were the byways of legitimate commerce. The border marks a delineation of what used to be British and French territory in west Africa, but no natural division of language or ethnicity exists. People on both sides speak Hausa, a tongue in which the word for smuggling, sumoga, strikes a less pejorative note than its English equivalent. The textile smuggling bosses are the oligarchs of the northern borderlands. For those in their pay, they can be generous benefactors.

Nigeria a country of 170 million people, home to one in six Africans, four main ethnic groups subdivided into hundreds more speaking five hundred languages and bolted together on the whim of British colonial administrators; split between a north that largely follows Allah and a south more partial to the Christian God and animist deities; hollowed out by corruption that has fattened a ruling class of stupendous wealth while most of the rest lack the means to fill their stomachs, treat their ailments, or educate their children; humiliated by a reputation for contributing little to human endeavor but venal politicians and ingenious scams Nigeria has paid quite a price for the dubious honor of being the continent’s biggest oil producer.

Nigeria may be the largest source of African energy exports, but it generates only enough electricity to power one toaster for every forty four of its own people. Billions of dollars assigned to fix the rundown power stations and the dilapidated grid have been squandered or pilfered. A privatization drive in recent years has raised some tentative
hope of improvement, but for now Nigeria produces only half as much electricity as North Korea. Even those lucky enough to be connected to a functioning cable face the maddening task of negotiating with what used to be called the National Electric Power Authority, or NEPA (but known as Never Expect Power Anytime). It was rebranded as the Power Holding Company of Nigeria, or PHCN (Please Have Candles Nearby or, simply, Problem Has Changed Name). Most must make do with spluttering diesel generators. In a country where 62 percent of people live on less than $1.25 a day, running a generator costs about twice as much as the average Briton pays for electricity. The crippling cost of electricity makes Nigerian textiles expensive to produce. Marketers sell trousers made from Chinese fabric at two-thirds the price of those made from Nigerian fabric and still turn a profit.

In the mid-1980s Nigeria had 175 textile mills. Over the quarter-century that followed, all but 25 shut down. Many of those that have struggled on do so only at a fraction of their capacity. Of the 350,000 people the industry employed in its heyday, making it comfortably Nigeria’s most important manufacturing sector, all but 25,000 have lost their jobs.Imports comprise 85 percent of the market, despite the fact that importing textiles is illegal. The World Bank has estimated that textiles smuggled into Nigeria through Benin are worth $2.2 billion a year, compared with local Nigerian production that has shriveled to $40 million annually. A team of experts working for the United Nations concluded in 2009.

The disease enters a country through its currency. The dollars that pay for exported hydrocarbons, minerals, ores, and gems push up the value of the local currency. Imports become cheaper relative to locally made products, undercutting homegrown enterprises. Arable land lies fallow as local farmers find that imported fare has displaced their produce. For countries that have started to industrialize, the process goes into reverse; those that aspire to industrialize are stymied. Processing natural commodities can multiply their value four hundredfold, but lacking industrial capacity, Africa’s resource states watch their oil and minerals sail away in raw form for that value to accrue elsewhere.

Maintaining power through patronage is expensive. But self-enrichment is part of the prize. And all that stolen money has to go somewhere. Some of it is used to pay off patronage networks. Some of it buys elections. Where legitimate business cannot thrive, crime flourishes. Mafias from other countries work by creating scarcity and controlling supply. Northern Nigeria’s Mafiosi are no different. Dahiru Mangal might not have been responsible for the collapse of the electricity network and the crumbling roads that crippled the Nigerian textile industry.
Neither is he the sole corrupter of the Nigerian customs serviceShell has admitted paying bungs worth $2 million between 2004 and 2006 to Nigerian customs officials to smooth the importation of materials for Bonga, its giant offshore oilfield, part of a wider scheme in which the Swiss group Panalpina showered bribes on Nigerian officials, some on behalf of Shell, booking them as “evacuations,” or “special handling,” and “prereleases.” But Mangal has scavenged the terrain laid waste by Dutch Disease, further weakening northern Nigeria’s chances of recovery.

As a political economy took hold that was based on embezzlement and manipulating public office for private gain, government contracts for the upkeep of public goods that support industrialization, a functioning electricity system chief among them were diverted to the cronies of the rulers of the day. The deterioration of northern Nigeria’s textile industry created new demand for imported clothes and fabrics, strengthening Mangal’s stranglehold on the market and throttling the indigenous industry’s chances of resuscitation.

The economic distortions of resource dependency create the conditions in which repressive regimes and their allies can thrive. They fuse private interests with public office; they operate in the underbelly of globalization, where criminal enterprises and international trade overlap; and they depend on the power of the oil and mining industries to create narrow economies in which access to wealth is concentrated in the hands of small, repressive ruling classes and those who bribe their way to favor. Some of these networks date back decades, others have formed more recently.