Good advice from Nigeria 

Guilty as charged

My first real exposure to Africa came last January, when I spent two weeks in Uganda doing research. I flew into the capital, Kampala, and managed to find a comfortable $20/night hotel, a great coffee shop and good local food within a day. It felt safe to walk around, and the city center was green and peaceful. Even now, while I think Nairobi is a much better place to live, coming to Kampala feels like a mini-vacation, a break from Nairobi's crime and congestion.

 

On my current trip to Uganda, however, I'm starting to think that my love is unrequited. Being brown-skinned in Uganda, you take on a complicated history - Indians were expelled by the dictator Idi Amin in the 1970s, but they've returned with a vengeance and now control a greater share of the country's economy than they do in Kenya or Tanzania. Not everyone is happy about this.

 

On Sunday, to do some reporting, we attended an evangelical Christian church service in which the 25-year-old prayer minister railed for about 45 minutes against the "foreign" businessmen who had dedicated Ugandans to "elephant gods" and to "burning incense in grocery stores." This, he yelled over and over again, as young worshippers chanted and danced in agreement, was "sin, wickedness, abomination!" I could not have been more conspicuous in the third row of seats, standing up with my notepad out and my skin especially brown from spending the previous few days in the blazing sun of northern Uganda.

 

This continued a theme for the trip that had begun last Tuesday, when Evelyn and I landed in Uganda. We asked for the hotel car to take us into Kampala, but the hotel driver, a pleasant seeming Ugandan woman, said she would put us in a taxi instead, which was faster but would cost $20. Ever the good corporate citizen, I protested - we weren't in a rush, and would rather not pay if the hotel car was free. The driver said sorry, but the hotel car also charges $10 per person. New policy, she said - then added, "You know, Asian owners." By which she meant Indian.

 

Evelyn's face went white. She looked at me. Then the driver looked at me. I didn't say anything, but she felt the need to keep talking. "I'm not accusing you," she said, "but you know who you are." I had nothing to say to that, so I bust out laughing. Even now, a week later, if Evelyn and I are discussing something and she wants to shut me up, she only has to say, "You know who you are." And I do.

This is getting weird

So I went to Turkey over New Year's, and in the first week of the new year they found bird flu there. A day after I left Nigeria this month, H5N1 turned up, and now militants are staging more attacks on oil companies. Last month Evelyn and I went to Djibouti to see the U.S. military, and this past weekend two military helicopters crash into each other off the Djiboutian coast, killing 10.

 

This could be really weird - or it could just be Africa. Thoughts?

Dinner party conversation

Nairobi has its share of good bars and clubs, but if you go out with any regularity you've probably exhausted the supply within a few weeks. That, coupled with the general sense of danger that many feel in venturing out at night in their shiny SUVs, means the social scene for expats generally revolves around throwing and attending dinner parties. And the talk at these dinner parties invariably revolves around crime - who's been hit, who's heard what, the latest trends.

 

In Hollywood you might discuss the Oscars; in Washington, grand juries; in Kansas City, the Chiefs. In Nairobbery you talk about crime. The U.N. puts out a regular crime report that gets read and dissected like Greenspan testimony. There's always some newsworthy wrinkle. Last night, at a party thrown by a friend in the NGO world, I heard from some U.N. types that The New New Thing for carjackers is to put a piece of paper on a back windshield - the idea being that a driver gets in his car, sticks in the key and checks the rear-view, noticing the paper. When he steps out to remove it, maybe he leaves his key in the ignition, and that's when the guys jump into the driver's seat and take off.

 

I met a couple who recently hit their one-year mark in Nairobi and were getting worried because they hadn't been the victims of a major crime yet. They figured they were due. The woman was trying to be positive. A few weeks ago, when she was stuck in traffic on a major highway through town, a teenager ran up to her passenger side, gave her side mirror three sharp tugs, dislodged it and ran off. It happened so quickly she didn't even have time to sound the horn. Maybe that constituted her hit, she hoped - her quota filled.

 

The next day they went to the police station to report the theft. When they were finished the officer brought out a box full of recovered side windows and said they could take one.

 

My friend who was hosting the party lives in a beautiful part of town called Spring Valley, where the homes are large and the guard dogs larger. There's always some new break-in in Spring Valley, but it's impossible to find a place there. The threat of robbery is a fact of life in Nairobi, and people deal with it. Living in an apartment complex with electrical fences and a staff of guards, I might face less of a threat than most. Then again, the next time I'm stuck in traffic, I could lose a bumper.

Super snooze

In one of my lesser moments, I slept through Super Bowl XL. I meant to stay up - I specifically asked the hotel manager to make sure ESPN was on in the rooms for the 12:38 am kickoff - but by midnight I couldn't keep my eyes open. There's something about the humidity in Nigeria - it sucks the life out of you, and all the unacclimated want to do is sleep and drink. When I woke up, I briefly panicked that I'd missed some triple-OT classic. Fortunately, it turns out I merely missed one of the sloppier Super Bowls in recent memory. Phew.

Meanwhile, business will come to a standstill here in Nigeria in a few hours, when the national soccer team - the Super Eagles - takes on Cameroon in the African Cup semifinals. (Yes, it's a horrible nickname, but with the Mighty Ducks, Gamecocks and two dozen variations on Indian tribes, who are we to laugh?) Yesterday afternoon I walked through the Kuramo neighborhood of Lagos - a slum that sits right on the Atlantic Ocean, a sprawling maze of plywood shacks - and saw a half-dozen signs advertising satellite broadcasts of this afternoon's match.















There's no running water or power grid in Kuramo, but the few entrepreneurs who have generator-powered TVs and satellite dishes will probably make a killing on the match. I'll be watching from the lobby of my hotel, a few hundred yards away. Let's hope these Eagles don't choke in big games.

Down (and out) in the delta

The patch of southern Nigeria known as the Niger delta (where the Niger River splits into tributaries before dumping into the Gulf of Guinea) has some of the most productive oil fields in the world. But it's the tragedy of Nigeria - and of so much of the rest of Africa - that the wealth has been squandered with world-class efficiency. You only have to drive down the main road from the airport to see this - the road has been in progress for about five years, and within a few kilometers it disintegrates into dirt and mud, interrupted every so often by police officers - maybe - trying to extort small bribes of about 25 U.S. cents.

 

This is not to say no one's getting rich off of oil. Besides officeholders, there are militants, who have been causing havoc in the delta for years. On the pretense of agitating for more equitable distribution of oil wealth, the well-armed militants are in fact making a killing by stealing oil directly from pipelines - a practice known as "bunkering" - and selling it on the black market. Owning your own oil barrel is almost a necessity for an up-and-coming militant.

 

My fixer arranged an interview at the home of one of these guys, and I was astonished to see he had more and newer electronics in his living room than I in my entire house, plus one of those Motorola Razor cellphones. (I was also astonished, if that's the word, to hear him threaten that the militants might try to kidnap Bush to get the world's attention. He said this while jabbing a thick finger in my face, so I listened sympathetically.)

 

Going around the delta talking to people, I had the feeling of dropping in on a story that is in some ways similar (I imagine) to reporting on an ongoing story like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By which I mean that the problems in the delta are decades old, millions of words have been spent writing about them, and little has improved. The violence is slowly getting worse in the delta, but that seems largely the product of a few pissed-off people. The majority of people seem resigned to the fact that things are not going to change for the better in their lifetimes. They are used to talking to journalists, but they are equally used to the fact that we can't do anything for them.

 

"We are suffering and smiling," the Bush-hating militant told me. For all their problems, Nigerians were recently found to be the most optimistic people in the world, and everyone I've met here has been welcoming - not the thugs I'd been warned to be wary of. Maybe it's because I've been here at a pretty cool time for the country - the national soccer team has reached the semis of the African Cup of Nations, and I've somehow gotten really into this team. I missed my flight out of the delta on Saturday and had to wait at the tiny, steaming airport for three hours - but it worked out great because I got to watch Nigeria's quarterfinal match with Tunisia, the defending champs.

 

After raising a mock-fuss with the Virgin Nigeria ticket agent (it was really my fault I'd been late) they whisked me up - despite my general unshaven, American-backpacker appearance - to the airport's "executive lounge," where I had the comfort of paying $7 for a cup of tepid instant coffee. But the lounge did have A/C and TVs, so for the next two hours I sat among my fellow executives watching Nigeria and Tunisia battle to a 1-1 tie, then a series of dramatic penalty kicks. When Nigeria squeezed it out, I was already on my way down to check in for the flight, and I found myself going crazy along with the rest of the airport terminal. Some big smelly guy asked if I was from Tunisia, and when I said no, he hugged me. I never felt so at home.

Changes afoot

Been traveling the past week in Nigeria, and have only now got around to updating the site. As you can see, I've been fiddling with the layout and HTML; bear with me. I'll have more actual words soon, but in the meantime here are a few pictures from the trip and a link to my story Friday about new trouble in Nigeria's oil-producing region:

• Unrest in Nigeria's delta region could fuel rise in oil prices (2/3/06)

A farmer working in the Niger River Delta. That murky brown patch in the center-right of the photo is an oil spill, where this woman's farm used to sit. 

Children playing in a lake outside Port Harcourt where -- although you can't see it in this picture -- crude oil floats at the top of the water. 

We met this woman in K-Deroe, a farming village east of Port Harcourt, where an oil spill two years ago has yet to clean up. Part of the spill ruined this woman's farm. 

A gas flare outside Port Harcourt. Nigeria is reponsible 25 percent of the world's gas flaring -- the fires are supposedly visible from space.