The Nigerian government-financed public relations project – [tag]Heart of Africa[/tag] – is an initiative meant to “clean-up” the negative image of the nation in a manner that would encourage foreign investors do business with the country. According to Frank Nweke, the information minister: “The project was conceived to reconstruct perception of our country and position Nigeria as the destination of choice not just for tourism but for investors and indeed for adventure seekers.”
Nigeria has a lot of potentials, and greatly blessed by nature, but investing in millions of dollars to propagate this in foreign media is redundant because those that have the desire to do business in Nigeria can easily pull this information from the Internet and their various embassies.
The formal launching of the project in London was disrupted by some activists protesting instances of human-rights violations in the eastern region of the country:
The men, led by a white man and claiming to be members of the Movement for the Actualisation of Biafra (MASSOB), threw the venue into confusion… Brandishing posters bearing gory photographs of mutilated bodies they claimed to be “Biafrans” killed by the Nigerian authorities, the men said the only way forward for the country was for Nigeria to “be divided into North, East and West.”
While I do not subscribe to the ideology of this group or MASSOB, my posture on the project still remains as stated in an earlier post- Heartbeat of Africa: An Ad Gone Bad!: It’s an unnecessary and poorly-conceived idea.
The information minister on VOA blatantly concluded that Nigerian image issue is that of perception, I wonder whatelse one can say about the nation that is positive beside its impressive social and ethnic diversity, and abundant natural and human resources.
Why would the government invest in an image laundry scheme, and present a make-believe impression when it can easily showcase what the government has done in the last eight years in empowering the Nigerian people, both within and outside the country?
On Nigerian human resources: It is a fact that Nigeria used to be a haven of vast human resources, and its still is; however, a disproportionate chunk of this intellectual property is securely locked up in the Diaspora. While there have been several policy statements issued by the government indicating the need to reverse the diverstment of Nigerian human resources, the reality on ground suggests otherwise.
For instance, there is virtually no government apparatus available to assist small business owners and the several Nigerians that have gone back home to initiate business ventures. The SMEEIS – a government-created, bank-funded small and medium sized business loan scheme is crippled by bureaucratic bottleneck and has been rendered almost inaccessible.
A friend that applied for the loan in 2004 made this observation: “There is need for small business assistance for the SMEEIS application process…the banks themselves don’t have qualified staff to objectively review applicants’ business plans. Some banks put their funds in VC firms that have been set up to manage the investments but some of these VC firms also have their own issues, such as the belief that local technology firms must partner with foreign firms…” What the latter part of the statement means is that a business stands a better chance of getting funded if some Caucasians are involved in the project and remain visible to the banks!
The first port of entry for travellers coming to Nigeria is often Lagos, the sixth most populous city in the world and the economic power-house of the nation. A city that is gradually disintegrating into a crime-infested mega slum: Is this a perception problem?
How would the “Heart of Africa” project have any relevance without white-washing the image of Lagos? The November 13th edition of the New Yorker has an article on Lagos, here is an excerpt, via Slate Magazine:
“Most of its residents have come to seek opportunity but hover at the edge of survival, living in slums and working irregular jobs in its massive informal economy: extortion, prostitution, picking garbage, hawking goods at the side of the road. Most other cities with huge slum populations exhibit some planning and have downtown business districts firmly under the rule of law. Not so, Lagos: ‘The whole city suffers from misuse’.”
There is no ambiguity in this statement; it’s the cold truth!
Not only has the city suffered neglect by the relocation of the federal capital to Abuja, the state administrator – a member of the opposition party – has been locked in a politically motivated battle with the federal government since the 1999. Starved of federal funds and grossly mismanaged it doesn’t take much imagination to discern how quickly the city has deteriorated in the last eight years.
Nigerians are uniquely resilient, and will go to any length to survive, and it appears the government of the land is deceived by this. Rather than identifying and finding workable solutions to the problems in the land, the government chose to send emissaries all over the world telling stories of what is not.
What will make Nigeria the heartbeat of Africa, beyond its strategic and natural sociopolitical and geographical importance?
The simple answer is the creation of an enabling environment for commerce and justice. Human lives must be accorded the respect it deserves in Nigeria. The government – via workable and sustainable partnerships with private and foreign institutions – must bring dignity back to the Nigerian people. It is unaceptable that the socioeconomic gap has grown wider since the nation went back to democracy in 1999.
In fact, it is an anomaly of democracy to have millions of Nigerian youths disenfranched and languishingly lost in the cities as “area boys” or street orchins. Just as it’s immoral to fly ill government officials overseas for treatment but fail to provide basic and decent healthcare services to the less fortunate in the society; they are Nigerians too.
The Nigerian government should focus on the people that voted it into power -and not some shadows in the foreign lands. And if it must show the world why Nigeria is so great, the government should start by telling the story of how it has empowered the peoplesince the beginging of new democratic government in 1999. And by this I mean real stories and instances, not some obtuse economics statistics as the government is fond of doing.
[...] Where was Adam Ash, a self-proclaimed anti-Nigerian racist, when Nigerian was at the fore-front of the Anti-Apartheid movement? Well, I don’t think this matters much to Adam, since he calms to be an ex-citizen of South Africa…I guess he renounced his citizenship himself when the Apartheid regime died. Despite my objections to the Heart of Africa project; if there is one area the image laundering project needs to address is ‘perceptions’ such as Adam Ash’s. if Nweke, the Nigerian Information Minister, and his crew can do this successfully, he is worthy of a national award. [...]
November 27, 2006 at 2:11 pm