What is the connection between a riot by passengers of an Ethiopian Airlines flight at Bangkok airport and Aba, a town in south eastern Nigeria? That was a question I met on a trip from Bandung in Indonesia to Addis Ababa. We had waited for about six hours to be brought aboard the Ethiopian airline’s eight hours promise of a safe sitting in a night sky from Bangkok to Addis Ababa. I should have paid more attention to the strained smiles on airhostess as I turned to walk in search of a seat on my boarding pass. Likewise, I should have noticed sullen and ruffled looks on passengers who had been brought in from Guangzhou. An aviation secret sat waiting in a burdened silence.

A hot wave of putrid smell hit the faces of passengers joining in at Bangkok. The passengers on board had not been allowed to come out to the transit lounge. A seemingly calm situation was suddenly broken by a shout by a cacophony of voices about rain-water leaking through the roof of the aircraft. It was raining outside. Expert opinion from a passenger near a leak-drenched floor affirmed that the aircraft had developed a huge crack that made it unfit to fly to Addis Ababa. To ensure that it would not takeoff several women pulled out ‘hand baggage’ from overhead racks, placed them on their heads, tied wrappers around their waists and started what they hoped would be a mass exodus out of the aircraft, swearing that they would not allow Ethiopian Airlines officials to kill them in yet another place crash.

By way of drawing us into their flight boycott, a sketch was drawn out of a narrow escape from a near-crash at Guangzhou. The aircraft had swirled in what appeared like the pilot’s failure to keep control. Passengers had screamed and hollered in panic. A man and a woman each testified of thoughts screeching across their minds of hopes of commercial fortune through trade with China ending in a death in a strange land in a burnt body that no one would identify or record. The pilot had, miraculously, pulled it off at the last moment. All their yelled prayers to Jesus and Allah had been answered. But not before easy yields of all the anatomical secretions that now accounted for the stench inside the craft. Presumably the lack of rights to de-board the craft had stopped the Ethiopian crew from spraying the tormented bowel of this tortured air travel tool.

A casual census showed that Nigeria’s nationals were in the majority. It was clear that they traded in long distance aircraft movement of consumable commodities produced in China and conveyed for purchase in Nigeria. They were the killers of the historical promise of sites like Kano, Maiduguri and Aba; towns whose names had once become legendary sites of promises of Nigeria’s industrial genius. My mind flashed back to a tour of Kano City’s old market I was once treated to by a Dutch participant in Britain’s Volunteer Service Overseas, VSO, aid programme. The stalls her tour took me to were once rich in locally produced and processed crafts. Now they were virtually empty; holding items stained by dust, notably textiles, leather sandals and jewellery. Dye pits whose indigo had, in past centuries, made Kano’s textiles prized exports across the Sahara to markets from Marrakesh in Morocco to Cairo in Egypt, were dormant. Their attendant was a poverty-stricken old member of a disappearing breed of artisans who complained of lack of young apprentices since there was no money in the craft. Plastic footwear from oil chemistry had driven ornamental leather sandals from even the bare feet of the urban masses.

A memory of Aba in 2002 was of walking down a main tarmac road teeming with youths tensed up by a daily routine of walking to nowhere – no income, no jobs and non-existent flows of investment. Huge cement buildings that were once signs of growing prosperity were now posts of sterility as cement structures remained empty without productive manifestations of local genius inside them. Young men who in the 1980s transported hides from Sokoto, Katsina, Kano and Yola amid local cattle economies for a rich shoe industry (that coaxed customers by putting ‘made in Italy’ labels), were now here in middle age screaming in panic about a possible violent death inside a non-tribal air crash.

On the ground in Nigeria those who did not have rich family members to finance their air-cargo trade across Africa-Asia skies, had come up with a peculiar adaptation of former President Mwalimu Nyerere’s call for self-reliance. They had turned to kidnapping school children, wives, grandmothers, fathers of those among politicians, professionals, academics, and businessmen that their scouts had tagged as sitting on millions that could be moved to them as ransom fees. The ransomists have paralysed useful income distribution cultural practices like age-groups assembling at home over Christmas holidays to contribute part of their annual earnings for community welfare infrastructure such as clinics, school buildings, assembly halls. Those living in richer economies in the Americas or Asia were erecting structures or importing drugs for hospitals, bringing in foreign volunteers to conduct mass surgeries for eye-cataracts, hernia and bone deformities.

Others had turned to violent robberies. Television pictures invariably showed robbers wounded by police bullets as youths in their teens. In Maiduguri and Kano they had wrapped religious ideologies round their angry economic aspirations. Furious members of ‘Boko Haram’ (or rejectionists of education that does not lead to jobs and income), had turned to murders and burning down homes of prosperous upper and middle class folks who are deemed as profaners of religious injunctions that preach promoting community welfare (as opposed to their selfish care for only members of their families).

In speeches and utterances by Nigeria’s politicians and religious leaders and NGOs, there is, however, a glaring lack of linkage between the pandemic of kidnappings, murderous armed robberies of banks and private homes, and Boko Haram wrath, on the one hand, and the suffocation by imports – from China, India, Korea, Dubai, Holland, Italy, France and others – of local small scale industrial production in Nigeria. A suffocation which in the late 1970s and early 1980s, economic historians at Ahmadu Bello University first noted as a key part of British colonial antagonism to local textile, iron and copper industrial products at various sites of Nigeria, have now run amok in their rapacity in ruining local producers and industrialists. Lacking in nationalist ideology, Nigerian air-cargo traders were now the equivalent of local recruits who killed and burnt villages and cities in the service of imperial Britain.

This thought gap between educated classes and the human development of the people is shocking but not strange. Nyerere and Chinua Achebe had each called it a ‘problem of leadership’ – like Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo whose political visions were focused on becoming personally wealthy. Nyerere had said that ‘many leaders of the independence struggle were motivated ... by the belief that only with independence could they attain (their) ideal of individual wealth’. The panic-stricken air-cargo traders I met inside Ethiopian Airways plane at Bangkok airport shared this mind and soul disease. At no point did anyone in their irate and strident voices curse Nigeria’s politicians and bureaucrats and media and academic as accomplices to their new exposure to violent death from sky trade. I had been told in Bandung that Nigerians buy goods from Indonesia for sale in Nigeria. When I asked what they bring back from Nigeria, the reply was insolent: ‘Nothing but Nigeria’s oil money’. It is obviously time for new urgent thinking if the next 50 years will not be a road to mass African servitude to a patriotic and racist Orient following in the footsteps of colonial Occident.

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* Okello Oculi is executive director of the Africa Vision 525 Initiative.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.