A burgeoning wealthy class is settling
into one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities, attracting designers,
world-class architects and a growing creative community that seeks to
preserve its culture through art and fashion.
Courtesy of Janice Robinson
The Land Cruisers and Range Rovers began lining up on a steamy Sunday
afternoon outside Tafawa Balewa Square long before sunset. The banking
tycoon Otunba Subomi Balogun was hosting his 80th birthday party and
nobody wanted to be late, and there was also the matter of inching past
the press of beggars living in the square’s arcade. Once through a
security line, women in gold headdresses and men in white robes
disembarked. Balogun lives in a mansion modeled on the White House,
furnished entirely in white and gold, and the invitation had asked
guests to wear his favorite colors.
Guests sashayed through the tent doors into a scene of surreal
opulence. At the far end of the tent, engulfed by servants, courtiers,
national politicians and guards with wires in their ears, the celebrant
perched beside his wife on a throne covered with white faux fur, his
every move broadcast on flat-screens arrayed around the tent walls. From
the throne, the founder of the First City Monument Bank (F.C.M.B.)
could survey his 1,000 guests, acres of floral arrangements and goldfish
ponds brought in for the occasion, and the legion of waiters ferrying
Taittinger and Veuve Clicquot and steaming trays of traditional Nigerian
stews and rice. Bands and dancers performed in succession, a
professional actress emceed and business and blood royalty mingled with
state governors and the archbishop of Lagos. Massive cakes, one a
replica of Balogun’s columned white house, and one designed to match his
white Rolls-Royce, were stationed in front of the head table.
Governors began their speeches by acknowledging “the celebrant” and
other honored guests whom they referred to as “your royal majesties.”
The archbishop gave a benediction calling on God’s blessings. Another
elderly gentleman, a childhood friend of Balogun, croaked out a
rendition of “Happy Birthday.” In their formality and vocabulary, the
speeches came from another era, Victorian perhaps. If a speaker could
find a three-syllable word to replace a one-syllable word, he chose it.
But nobody paid any attention at all. The younger guests were too busy
networking, exchanging business cards and tapping numbers into their
phones. Nigerians, I was told, often look like they are partying, but
they never stop doing business.
Lakin OgunbanwoThe Nigerian banking tycoon Otunba Subomi Balogun designed his house to resemble the White House.
The world may still associate Nigeria with the legendary Afrobeat
musician Fela Kuti and online credit card scams, but the nation is now
home to one of the wealthiest microcommunities in the world. These
global super-elites educate their young in Swiss boarding schools and at
Oxford or Princeton, pay cash for luxury homes and cars, and hold major
London and New York real estate parcels in their portfolios.
As of last year, Nigeria was the 11th largest oil-producing nation in
the world. Otunba Balogun and the men of his generation amassed giant
fortunes because they were in the right place and knew the right people
when Nigeria began nationalizing its oil in 1971. Home to great
petro-fortunes, Lagos is Dallas minus the glittery malls and pedicured
blondes – although the shops are starting to come in. It is a city of
mind-boggling extremes. The average life expectancy in Nigeria is about
53 years, and citizens rich and poor struggle with hourly power outages
and obtain their own potable water, which the poor often carry home on
their heads. A small elite live in walled enclaves where palms and
bougainvillea shield Porsche collections, new palaces and swimming
pools. According to a recent study by New World Wealth, the number of
Nigerian millionaires is expected to reach 23,000 by 2017. As in
oil-rush Texas, crazy rags to riches stories abound. More than two
decades ago, the oil billionaire Folorunsho Alakija, reputedly the
second-richest woman in Africa, was a fashion designer with a high-end
clientele that included the then-president’s wife, Maryam Babangida. The
story goes that her connection to Babangida led her to be “dashed,” or
“gifted” in Nigerian pidgin English, with a license to explore a deep
offshore oil block, which was then thought to be too expensive to drill.
Today it spews up to 250,000 barrels daily.
The four generations of guests at Balogun’s 80th were all as tied to
London as to Lagos, but the younger generations have almost no links to
the provincial and traditional Nigeria of Balogun’s generation. While
the “chiefs” – as some of the rich old guys are known, based on Yoruba
tradition – still speak Yoruba or one of the many other tribal
languages, their kids and grandkids have childhood memories involving
blancmange or Yorkshire pudding, not dried plantains. The old chiefs
sent their children abroad to be schooled and educated. Now those
children are adults and are coming home, lured by business returns and
fortunes beyond Wall Street’s wildest dreams. The returnees, as they are
known, are familiar with the comforts of Western cities, but don’t mind
generating their own electricity and paying for private water for their
homes. They have a toughness their softer counterparts in the global 1
percent lack. One of the returnees who showed up at Balogun’s party,
Kene Mkparu, 47, earned two advanced degrees in London before coming to
Lagos with his wife and small children a few years ago. He co-founded
Filmhouse Cinemas,
which plans to build 25 theaters in Nigeria in the next six years. His
kids don’t even notice when the lights flick off. “They just keep on
playing,” he said. “It’s frustrating here, because there isn’t a lot of
logical thinking. But we are kind of like the Europeans who came here
hundreds of years ago. They didn’t let the mosquitoes bother them
because they were focused on the gold.”
Younger Nigerians see uncharted marketing territory and opportunities
to link Africa to the West and vice versa. The publicist Ngozi Omambala
moved to Lagos in 2007 after working in the music industry in London.
Clients she has worked with include the rapper Ice Prince, who won the
2013 BET Award for Best International Act: Africa, and the Nollywood and
Hollywood movie star Hakeem Kae-Kazim. The energy and openness of the
Nigerian music scene drew her home after years in London. “I kept coming
back here on vacations,” she said. “And I would go home to London, and
began to feel that the music lacked a certain vitality. I found that
here. One day I just realized that this is where I belong.”
Chinedu Okeke, 29, was born in London and started British boarding
school at age 7 (his Nigerian father is a legal advisor for the British
government in Abuja). Okeke earned a British law degree and worked in
New York, Beijing and Shanghai before moving to Lagos and starting his
own branding and production company.
Lakin OgunbanwoThe artist Nike Davies Okundaye took village indigo batik symbols global.
Young producers like Okeke and Omambala have joined the artist and
gallery owner Nike Davies Okundaye as part of a small but growing group
promoting Nigerian culture within Nigeria. Okundaye, who goes by her
first name, Nike, was one of the wives of a polygamous villager when she
was discovered by a curator from the American Museum of Natural History
for her indigo-batik skills. She eventually left her husband, and has
traveled to the United States many times over the years. In 2009, she
opened the Nike Centre for Art and Culture on the edge of Lagos, near
the sea. Nigerian art covers four stories of walls in the space. She
says returnee Nigerians are more likely to collect, filling their
offices with indigenous works. “Most Nigerians won’t buy art,” she said.
“They’d rather have a religious icon in their home.”
That inclination against art and culture and toward tradition and
religion challenges the young, Western-educated returnees, but doesn’t
deter them all.
“I spent most of my life outside and it’s not the best place to live,
for many reasons, but it’s never going to change if you are not willing
to do your own part to create change,” Okeke said. “I don’t think
politics is my thing but I’d rather be involved than complain and be
part of the problem.” He conceded that the way business is done in
Lagos, especially the closed circle of wealth and the official
corruption, is discouraging.
Lakin OgunbanwoThe Nike Art Gallery is a four-story showcase of Nigerian art.
Some of the more spectacular incidents of apparent corruption include
the late military President Sani Abacha’s embezzlement, to the tune of
more than $3 billion. He died in 1998, but only in March the United
States froze more than $458 million in accounts linked to him. Earlier
this year, the Nigerian government said it would audit its petroleum
agency after the head of the central bank, who has since been fired,
claimed that as much as $20 billion could be missing.
“It’s not as easy to come back as people think it is, and it’s not
for everybody. I have had friends come back who haven’t been able to
stick it out, there’s lots of stress and things don’t work the way they
should,” Okeke said. He recently traveled around Europe and the United
States trying to sell a documentary about a Nigerian music festival he
produced. For him and some of the younger returnee generation, the
lavish spectacles of the old guard are starting to chafe. “The power in
Nigeria has remained within the same generation for 40 years. It’s not
trickling down. Anybody younger who seems to have power is only there
because a chief or a general, one of the set, is behind them. We need a
lot of development in Nigeria, infrastructure. Nigeria should be feeding
itself. But all the technical know-how and the funding needed is
international. And those within the continent that have the money don’t
understand how to develop it.”
Still, there are plenty of young people who guiltlessly enjoy the
wealth. The chiefs and their wives and children are icons of conspicuous
consumption. Nigerian peasants bend on one knee before them. Lagos’s
billionaires and multimillionaires spend up to $50 million on long-range
jets, and Nigeria has one of the fastest-growing markets for private
aircraft in the world.
Their children’s wild pool parties, drinking binges and $250,000
weekend parties in London are local legend. Precious few from this set
would think of walking the streets of Lagos; they cruise through in
air-conditioned, locked luxury S.U.V.s, sometimes driven by officers
wearing the elephant and red eagle insignia of the national police, who
divert traffic if necessary to speed their bosses through snarled
traffic. And if Lagos gets too hot, or they can’t find a store carrying
the Prada bag they want, they fly to Dubai or Cape Town for the weekend.
Lakin OgunbanwoThe
luxury concept store Temple Muse sells African fashion alongside brands
like Givenchy and Saint Laurent, food and fashion coffee table books
published by Assouline — and Champagne.
Luxury companies like Ermenegildo Zegna, Hugo Boss and Porsche,
noticing this trend, have been opening up shop in Lagos. Since 2008, the
Nigerian luxury concept store Temple Muse has sold a variety of African
and foreign fashion, home and gift brands, including Givenchy, Emilio
Pucci, Saint Laurent, Baccarat and Assouline. The Nigerian designer Reni
Folawiyo is soon opening a concept store called Alara, designed by the
London-based architect David Adjaye, in a three-story red-pigmented
building that encloses a series of suspended platforms and staircases.
Alara will showcase Nigerian designers as well as European houses.
“Lagos has always been an important hub in Africa and the world – but
it is now emerging as one of the world’s foremost metropolitan cities,”
Adjaye wrote in an email. “The fact that it can sustain a project like
Alara, and others like it, is evidence of its growing wealth, recently
improved infrastructure and sense of confidence. We are very much
looking forward to the project completing and have been doing some
feasibility work on other sites in the city. My hope is that we will
continue to work there for years to come.” Indigenous fashion designers
are attracting the same crowd. The growing fashion sector, like
Nollywood, is indicative of a nation on the cusp of wider prosperity,
explains Omoyemi Akerele, the founder of Style House Files, which
organizes Lagos Fashion & Design Week. “Retail is key here,” she
said. “We need to create opportunities for people to shop. People have
nothing. People are returning here, because they see opportunities.”
Lakin OgunbanwoAt
her store on Victoria Island in Lagos, the fashion designer Deola Sagoe
infuses African fabrics with Japanese and Italian influences.
The designer
Deola Sagoe
has been working in Lagos for more than 20 years. Sagoe, dressed in a
royal blue silk wrap blouse and black velvet leggings with a giant
aquamarine on one hand, met me in her store, a two-story sleek glass
building located in bustling Victoria Island. Even though the district
is one of the wealthier areas, many of the streets are rutted and the
sidewalks cracked – if they are there at all. She consults with clients
in a room with French velvet-upholstered chairs, and then leads them
back into her studio, with walls of fabric she designs and has handmade
in Nigerian villages on 11th-century looms. The traditional fabrics
share wall space with newer pieces she designs, like deep blue
indigo-dyed silks, that she uses to create garments with an
Afro-Asian-Italian aesthetic.
Sagoe, the daughter of a major Nigerian industrialist, grew up
traveling frequently to Italy and Japan and went to college in the
United States. She took up fashion against the wishes of her father, who
– like all Nigerian parents, she said – wanted his children to go into
business and make money. Until quite recently, she noted, fashion was
looked down upon as a career in her set. Wealthy Nigerian women only
went to Nigerian designers for traditional gowns and headdresses needed
for formal affairs.
Sagoe – and other Nigerian designers who’ve come after her – are
changing that culture. “People used to go to Paris and buy, but not buy
it here,” Sagoe said. “If they did, they would haggle about the price,
because there wasn’t a tradition of fashion, but of tailors.” She
employs hand-weavers and dyers in remote villages, but she can’t produce
clothes on a larger scale inside Nigeria, because the substandard power
grid can’t support factories. Nonetheless, she brought her three
daughters into the business, and is expanding. “Africa is my
foundation,” she said. “Nigerians are expressive and proud. Looking good
is good business.”
Lakin OgunbanwoMaki
Oh incorporates traditional combinations of color, embellishments and
motifs that, in Africa, have profound meaning and have recently caught
the attention of the LVMH Young Fashion Designer Prize judges.
The designer Amaka Osakwe, 28, caught the attention of the judges of
the inaugural LVMH Young Fashion Designer Prize this year with her sleek
silhouettes that merge traditional symbols and craftsmanship with
modern looks. “Each piece has a meaning,” she wrote in an email about
her line, called
Maki Oh,
which placed in the competition’s semifinals. “Traditionally, the
colors, embellishments, motifs, etc. of garments were used to pass
messages. For example, a piece of Adire cloth with the traditional Adire
motif called ‘Mat’ (which features hand-drawn lines which to the
untrained eye may resemble a checkered pattern) was often presented as a
wedding gift.” The pattern, she continued, symbolized the hope “that
the couple may be blessed with children shortly after they lay on a
mat/bed in their home. This notion of passing messages through garments
is what we consider when we decide the length of a skirt, the motif, the
color of an embellishment. This is why research is key.”
Maki Oh, Deola Sagoe and Folake Folarin-Coker, the designer behind Nigeria’s thriving
Tiffany Amber
brand, exist to serve the wives, daughters and girlfriends of the
business titans and wealthy returnees like the 49-year-old television
talk-show host Mo Abudu, a former oil company human resources executive
now known as the “Oprah of Africa.” Abudu, who was born in London and
educated in Britain, moved to Lagos a few years after she got married.
She started her talk show in 2006, and has interviewed the likes of
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Christine Lagarde, the head of the
International Monetary Fund, but she’s chiefly an unabashed
Africa-promoter. She recently launched a pan-African television network,
EbonyLife TV.
Lakin OgunbanwoBefore
embarking on a career in fashion, Folake Folarin-Coker studied law.
Now, she’s the fashion designer behind the successful brand Tiffany
Amber.
When we met for lunch, Abudu, who calls herself an Afro-politan media
entrepreneur, was accessorized in Saint Laurent platforms and a Birkin
bag.
Abudu said she’s living in Lagos because “it’s Africa’s time” now.
“Westerners are more interested in war, genocide, rape and H.I.V.,” she
said. “You would think if you listened to Western media that every other
person in Africa has H.I.V. For me, that’s boring. And there’s a
business angle. African brands must recognize that if you want to be
global, your environment must be considered with respect.
“Everything in Africa is so virgin right now. There is so much
interest. Big media are all putting together their Africa strategy. We
love American movies, but want to see our stories. Their approach to
Africa is like, we want to go to the moon. Don’t make us look shallow
and all about the money. There’s a lot of hard work going on.”
Abudu and other Nigerian returnees know their country’s reputation
isn’t getting any better. Polio remains endemic in the northern states,
where several vaccination workers were killed in attacks last February
that were thought to have been carried out by the extremist sect Boko
Haram. The group, whose name means “Western education is forbidden,”
also claimed responsibility for a bus station bombing that killed dozens
last week in the capital city of Abuja, and is suspected in the
kidnapping of about 200 schoolgirls from a northeastern town a day
later.
“This country has the biggest G.D.P. in Africa,” one oil industry
expat said at the Lagos Yacht Club, a hangout where British and Nigerian
sailors sip gin and tonics. “But no 24-hour power. Where is it? The
scale and quantity of what has happened here is tragic. The people are
fundamentally peaceful. They just want the basics – water and power.”
Lakin OgunbanwoAt the private Lagos Yacht Club, members sail in crafts both large and small.
One young investment banker educated in the United States who had
worked on Wall Street traded in his suit for the traditional linen gown
and trousers, and now works in his family’s investment firm in Lagos. He
pointed out that some of Nigeria’s problems stem from the newness and
insecurity of the private fortunes. “This level of wealth is a
generation deep,” he said. “You have a Lamborghini. Where do you drive
it? The roads are terrible. You take it out on Sundays and carefully
drive it to a hotel for lunch, then bring it home.”
The culture of philanthropy is growing among Nigerians and the great
chiefs do return some of their fortunes to the people. Banker Balogun
donated one of the largest pediatric hospitals in Africa to the medical
school of the Universtiy of Ibadan. Africa’s wealthiest businessman, the
billionaire cement mogul Aliko Dangote, has donated significant sums to
programs to build Nigerian small businesses, and he gave millions to
help Nigerian flood victims.
I asked Balogun whether returning elites might portend improvements
in Nigerian infrastructure and social welfare. He said the country’s
problems stem from a postcolonial backlash against foreign involvement.
“I’m 80, so I can give you my views without fear,” he said. “The
country needs a thorough transformation. After independence, we used to
think the best thing was to get Nigerians into the commanding heights.
We started with what I call a morbid dislike for foreign acquisition of
what we believed was our own enterprise. It would be good if we could
move away from that and allow highly reputed, successful business
entrepreneurs to partner with us in developing the whole place.”
Lakin OgunbanwoMansions boast water views along Queen’s Drive in Lagos’s exclusive Ikoyi neighborhood.
Chief Sonny Iwedike Odogwu invited me in for an audience at his
labyrinthine gated palace with hand-tooled Moroccan filigree ceilings,
on the palm-lined but rutted Queen’s Drive. On the day we pulled up to
the guard house, a water main was broken on the street, and we splashed
through a foot of muddy water as we pulled up. Like Balogun, Odogwu is
also in his 80s, and made his fortune as the oil and gas industry
developed. He founded one of the first Nigerian insurance brokerages
(Dyson & Diket), and insured the oil sector’s assets. On the day we
met, he wore a spotless, starched white linen robe with gold threads,
and was perched on a long couch in one of the grand sitting rooms in his
mansion (a room in the basement seats 700), considering the pleas of a
pair of women from the fashion council, who were proposing that he
finance a Brazilian-Nigerian fashion expo they wanted to attend.
Odogwu, like many of the old guard, is a very religious man. He has
donated millions to the Catholic Church and is particularly proud of
photographs of him and his wife in the Vatican earlier this year,
renewing their marriage vows in front of Pope Francis. He believes they
are the first African couple to have the Pope officiate at a marriage
renewal ceremony.
Lakin OgunbanwoThe Nigerian insurance magnate Chief Sonny Iwedike Odogwu at home.
I asked him whether he thought the vast fortunes he and his friends
control would or should trickle down to develop Nigeria. Odogwu
suggested that religion – not politics – was the answer to problems with
Nigeria’s wealth distribution issues. “There are lots of religious
organizations here,” he said. “They do a lot and we give them a lot of
money. Instead of telling people what they don’t have, they help them
out of their frustration, and make them believe that their way of life
is better than in the west.” Spiritual balm for the masses, he said, was
one good reason for him and his fellow elites to pile the collection
plate high on Sundays.
