The psychology of poverty and material exhibitionism in Nigeria

A couple of years ago when I used to present a radio show, I used to show up at the studio on Milverton Road, Ikoyi, and silently gaze at the scene. Filmed from the heights of a drone shot, Milverton Road would have looked like your quintessential upper-class Nigerian neighbourhood dotted with sprawling houses priced in the 9-10 figure range. From my ground-level view, however, Milverton Road was nothing short of a disaster.

You could not drive 30 metres without having to swivel your steering wheel dramatically to avoid a pothole here, a bomb crater there, or an inter-dimensional black hole in the other place. The street was constantly flooded because the uncovered surface drainage channels were blocked with stinky green goo. The entire place constantly had a noticeably offensive smell, and if you ignored the 5-bedroom mansions with massive barbed-wire fences around, you could convince yourself that this was somewhere in Ikosi-Ketu – complete with the buka selling beans and pap to hungry labourers traipsing past.

At the junction of Milverton Road and Glover Road stood a stately mansion owned by a well-known banking family. Said mansion was located next to an empty lot, which doubled as a swamp. I used to wonder whether the air conditioners in the house ever got a break for the windows to open, with such a galaxy of mosquitoes next to it. Or did the occupants of the house spend vast sums of money on buying antimalarial drugs every week? I could never understand why an agglomeration of people of means were perfectly happy to plop their expensive McMansions into the middle of what looked to my eyes like a bombed-out street from Fallujah or Helmand Province. What was this phenomenon?

Watching last week’s garish spectacle of grown men competing to outdo each other in a series of infantile cash-disseminating activities – apparently, in honour of a corpse – the answer to my question from 2019 came to me. While I was confused back then because I expected that well-travelled and internationally exposed people of means should be dismayed that their home neighbourhood outside their gates looked like the impact scene of a depleted uranium warhead, one particular video from last week answered my query for me.

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This video depicted one of said individuals in Oba, Anambra State, chucking fistfuls of cash into the air behind him as he walked down the street with armed police escorts. As he chucked the crisp banknotes into the air and his escorts fired live bullet rounds into the air for some unspecified reason, he was followed by a sort of river made of human organic matter. Limbs, heads and torsos could be made out, scrambling desperately to pick up these naira notes. As the size of the scrambling crowd grew, so did the size of the smile on his face – and that was when the realisation hit me.

The entire point of plonking down garish displays of wealth and liquidity amidst an ocean of visible poverty was the poverty itself. Not to make a dent into it mind you, but merely to be observed and ogled by it. These cash-chucking men in Oba and their more reserved cousins in Ikoyi were in fact, intentional about taking part in this macabre ritual. The Nigerian idea of wealth does not exist without comparison to lack – so for one to showcase wealth in Nigeria, there must also be poverty in close quarters to validate said wealth.

Why would Adeola OldMoney in Lagos or Chukwuma NewMoney in Anambra be interested in using their money to make their neighbourhood resemble at least a working-class European neighbourhood? No! That money is better spent on making their individual island of wealth as garishly contrasting as possible to the ocean of “enu gbe” that surrounds it – that is the entire point! In other words, nothing is more important to the allegedly ‘rich’ Nigerian’s ego than the awe, admiration and adulation of the ‘poor’ Nigerian. The entire exhibitionist treatise is all about being seen and idolised by less fortunate people.

The way to properly enjoy the experience of driving a massive SUV is to have a flooding-and-pothole obstacle course on your street. When your shock absorbers are bouncing up and down and your power steering is being worked to its limits, that is when you know that “they” have seen and noticed you. When hundreds of people are risking asthma and bronchitis to jump into a melee on a dusty earth road to pick up the naira notes you could have handed them but decided to throw in the air instead, that is when you know that “they” have failed to bring you down.

The Nigerian dream, after all, is to do nothing more substantive than outwit one’s “village people” and be better than the next man. How droll.