When Daniel Bwala, one of Bola Tinubu’s many presidential “special advisers”, likened the jobs that Nigerians based in the United Kingdom do to “modern-day slavery”, I could not help but find his choice of metaphor ironic. Rehashing the old tale of over-educated Nigerians working jobs beneath their credentialed worth is ironic precisely because Bwala himself is the quintessence of an under-employed Nigerian. A trained lawyer frittering professional skills away in the service of mediocre politicians is a sadder spectacle than Nigerian émigrés working factory or care jobs. If I need to know what a modern-day slave looks like, I find a far better example in Bwala himself—a former virulent critic of the APC who earns his living defending politicians he probably detests privately. One must acknowledge, though, that Bwala’s contrived story of his friends with advanced degrees working under an undereducated supervisor in a British factory is an improvement over the old denigrations of Nigerians in the UK that were more popular until some years ago. Then, it was that they earned a living washing corpses. Today, it is that they professionally care for the sick and the feeble (like they do in other parts of the world).
If there is an enterprise that more Nigerians should—and would—create, if they have the means and the market, it is actually “care jobs”. In Nigeria, the duty to care for the aged, the sick, the dying, and the disabled often falls on family members who collapse under the strain. We like to think that our communal African culture can always support those who need care, but the reality can be otherwise, too. Many of the aged people often accused of witchcraft (and subsequently lynched) are part of the stresses of lacking a formal economy of care for the invalid. Outsourcing it to professionals is one of the ways advanced societies ensure that those who need care receive it under conditions that preserve their self-worth. Has it ever occurred to Bwala that a day might come when he will be old, enfeebled, and vulnerable, and need the services of a professional caregiver himself? People who will take it as a duty to wipe his butt, not those who will be frustrated with the unpaid labour of caring and take it out on him in his most vulnerable state. When it reaches his turn, he should outsource his dignity to house helpers or even family members who will leave him to wallow in his own bodily waste.
Ideally, someone like Bwala should be ignored as another atúrótà retailing falsehoods in the employment of a government that has more “special advisers” than it has an economic team, but I also think it is a mistake not to pay attention to these clowns. Listening to them justify and deflect from the many shortcomings of their government has shown me far more about how this administration thinks than any gazetted policies. What the government officially claims to be doing in terms of economic programmes is not quite as telling as the sort of arguments their messengers put forward to justify poverty and deprivation. One is a carefully curated message targeting the next election, while the other is a spontaneous expression of the administrative mindset.
The latter tells you what they really talk about when they are not speaking officialese. For instance, when their so-called economist tells you that Nigerians do not need more than a N1,500 plate of rice per day to survive, it is quite revealing of how they truly think people should fare. No administration with a vision of national prosperity will indulge in the injudicious conversation of comparing a N60,000 income (less than the official minimum wage) to a £2,800 income. The discussion is not comparing earning power but justifying poverty. A government spokesperson who has no shame in arguing that N60,000 is not a bad income if you supplement it with begging family and friends for alms is telling you they will rather teach you techniques of managing poverty (even if it turns you into a parasitic nuisance) than come up with a plan for how to generate economic abundance.
Even more striking is how entirely out of touch Bwala—and by extension, his paymasters—are regarding the Nigerian reality. He says UK Nigerians who earn an average of £2,600 to 2,800 monthly spend about 2,450 on “power, internet, TV, and rent”. How is that not also true of Nigeria? Is there any place in the world where people earn an income but have no expenses? The fraction of income that Nigerians spend on private power generation on average probably exceeds what other countries spend on rent. It is also funny that Bwala says many Nigerians in the UK are forced to take two to three jobs. Again, I find it amusing when some Nigerians make this kind of argument, because it suggests they have not taken enough time to observe their immediate environment. Do most Nigerians also not do multiple jobs? The reason it seems less obvious is that they mostly operate in an informal economy that does not provide sufficient visibility into the amount of labour they must exert to survive. Most Nigerians engage in several “side hustles” to make ends meet. Nigerian resourcefulness is legendary, yet when the likes of Bwala talk about people who must work extra hard to survive, they look straight toward places like the UK. He has no clue how people actually live under the crushing economic circumstances that the government he defends has created. So detached is he from Nigerian reality that he announces that someone earning less than the minimum wage can take a loan from the bank.
What Bwala does not know—because he has not thought about it well enough—is that political apologists like him are probably alive today thanks to the Nigerians in the UK who work hard to sustain the country. Does it ever occur to people like Bwala that even though they squeeze Nigerians so hard, people just never seem angry enough to storm the streets in a revolt? Yes, that is because some Nigerians somewhere ameliorate the hardship. Since he does not know, I can tell him for free that diaspora remittances from places like the UK, where people do care jobs, are the reason Nigeria manages to stand on its two feet. Nigerians in the UK have frequently emerged as the top source of foreign remittances into Nigeria. They alone are responsible for an average annual injection of $12bn into Nigeria, almost 60 per cent of the $21bn Nigerians abroad remit into the economy annually.
If Bwala sits down and calculates, he will find that diaspora remittances are almost as high as the $23bn Nigeria generates annually and are the single most dependable source of “foreign aid” for the country. It is the circulation of that money that keeps the engine of the economy running. If he adds the remittances to the national income, he will see that the same people he denigrates as “modern-day slaves” are responsible for about a whopping 25 per cent of Nigeria’s revenue. That means that even though the major source of economic support for Nigeria comes from diaspora Nigerians, the same UK Nigerians that Bwala looks down on are the major source of national income. Without their money, political apologists like Bwala would have been victims of the masses’ revolt. If—despite everything their government has taken Nigerians through—APC propagandists like Bwala have not yet been strangled with their own entrails, it is because of Nigerians in places like the UK. If he is the type of person who thinks about things, Bwala should wake up every day to thank God for Nigerians in the UK, thank them profusely, and shut up.
