I was on board the defunct Air Nigeria Airline to the Gambia for the Conference for African Ministers, Fisheries and Aquaculture (CAMFA) in 2010 when I encountered another Nigerian (Ikechukwu), who was alighting in Sierra Leone. We both boarded the aircraft in Lagos and soon I began to chat to him about political developments in Nigeria. The young man told me he had lived in China for more than a decade and was involved in business. After regaling me with the wonders of Chinese infrastructural development, he narrowed it down to his own venture in Nigeria.
"I brought a Chinese construction firm to negotiate construction of railway line in my state, on a public-private partnership model but they rejected it," he told me. "The government officials who were in the driving seat said they preferred to award contracts, so that they can get their own cut of the deal."
Ikechukwu's account is not strange in Nigeria; it is almost a normative for government officials to want to profit from projects that are supposed to profit the masses. This is informed by the fact that the Nigerian elite are a creation of the state and are sustained by it.Read More
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