Daniel Shaibu

The rush to own a house in Nigeria has never been driven strictly by investment logic. Historically, it has been driven by uncertainty, by the fear that once the breadwinner’s income dips, or once he dies, his dependants may be left exposed. That is the context in which Nigerians rush to own property. Those who can afford more even go as far as building houses for rent, because even when it is not the most profitable economic venture, it is the only form of hedging most Nigerians know or trust. At the heart of this mindset is also the awareness that there is no welfare system strong enough to protect one’s dependants. So breadwinners do what they feel they must do. This same instinct plays out across the country, even in public service. Officeholders rush to divert public resources entrusted to them in order to acquire property for themselves, aware that the “opportunity” may not return, and that there is no reliable welfare system to cushion them when the income stops. In fact, their families and friends are often the first to remind them of this. In the end, personal financial security is prioritised over public welfare, and this is partly why we are where we are: a country with one of the widest inequality gaps on the planet. Those who argue against the wisdom of spending one’s savings to build a house are often speaking from a different reality. Some have lived abroad, where the desperation of the struggling class to own property is not always considered a smart move. Others are financially informed enough to know there are better investment options than dumping all one’s money into property while denying oneself a decent life. But Nigeria is a breadwinner’s nightmare. Every day, you live with the fear that your dependants may not be able to afford the next rent if your income, or your existence, stops. Where I draw the line is in building a mansion that nobody in your family can maintain after you are gone. I have seen this happen in Abuja, where families had to sell a large family house just to buy a smaller, more manageable one to live in. So, perhaps both sides of the argument can agree on where to draw the line. Owning a house in Nigeria is not a black-and-white matter. It is not always the smartest investment, but it is often the most emotionally and socially understandable one.

What Western society possesses, perhaps more than any other civilisation, is not moral purity, but a deeply rooted culture of reason, argument, and resistance. Even when a demagogue rises among them and captures the instruments of power, opposition is rarely slow in coming. And that is precisely why they remain at the forefront of modern civilisation when it comes to logical thinking and setting the pace. Even now, amid America’s alignment with Israel in the widening war with Iran, some of the fiercest criticism of the United States continues to come from within the West itself. Some of the fiercest critics of the US are Americans themselves, so much so that many elite universities and centres of thought have found themselves in Donald Trump’s crosshairs for standing on the opposite side of his policies. The West is not where it is because of its bombers, warships, and missiles alone. It is where it is because of the depth of its ideas, the strength of its institutions, and the culture of dissent that forces power to answer for itself. That is something all of us have to learn from them. They are just as flawed as the rest of us, but they do not always stand by and watch. I believe that if slavery had existed in some societies with the military capability the West possessed during the abolition era, it might still have remained in practice. Yet even as the engineer of that transatlantic misery, resistance arose from within. That capacity for self-critique is one of the few redeeming strengths of Western civilisation, even when its foreign policy remains drenched in hypocrisy. In the last three years, I have had the privilege of travelling the world, and one of my favourite pastimes is having conversations with both the policy elite and everyday people in the countries I visit. That has shaped the way I see our continent. Africa has been far too comfortable in its dependency, and it is almost insulting that we still function as a glorified satellite of the Western metropolis at this stage of the century. What is happening in the world is happening, in part, because the West initiates and we react. They set the terms; we consume the outcomes. We are drip-fed ideas, technology, finance, and even ambition. And this has sustained a power structure in which we spend our lives yearning to escape to societies whose achievements, in many cases, we could build for ourselves. We aspire to have elsewhere what we have refused to create at home. My latest trips were to Ethiopia, the only African country that escaped formal colonial rule, notwithstanding the Italian attempt. And what has happened there in the last five years, by African standards, is nothing short of astonishing. The very Addis Ababa that used to look like Kaduna is now rising skyward, straining to become Dubai. I call it astonishing because they were the second-poorest country on the planet at the dawn of this century, and the only country worse off than them was a war-torn Somalia. That, to me, is the message. The West may dominate the world with force, and the US may drag dependent nations in its wake as it prosecutes this war in support of Israel, but force alone has never been the deepest source of civilisational power. The real source is the ability to produce ideas, build institutions, encourage dissent, and act with ambition. Until Africa learns to do that for itself, rather than waiting to be spoon-fed by others, we will remain dependent, reactive, and forever tempted to run towards the very world we should be capable of building with our own hands. Because, after all, how many African countries can produce an ordinary gun or have the patent to produce a weapon to protect their territory? That is precisely the reason we are still on the leash.