Comments on naijablog: Soyinka weighs in..

@Tay - Naeto C a source? ffs you just invalidated ...

2010-05-07T18:37:12.895+01:00

@Tay - Naeto C a source? ffs you just invalidated everything you have ever said - ever...

I've watched 2 parts of the documentary and I ...

2010-05-06T08:34:42.282+01:00

I've watched 2 parts of the documentary and I loved every vibrant and resilient minute of it.
What's all the noise about? Was any part of the documentary made at a set? Comeon! Its the other side of nigeria we all choose to ignore everyday.
So, instead of all that negativity, embrace it and learn from it for there is much to be learnt from this documentary.
pEaCe!

@ Jeremy,I provided you with three separate source...

2010-05-04T18:45:01.381+01:00

@ Jeremy,I provided you with three separate sources which say Nigeria's middle class is growing...not quite sure how that is clutching at straws.

You're the one who seems hell bent on believing that Nigeria's middle/professional class is a "sliver" of the population, which is false. I know from personal and insider experience that it is alive and well.

My definition of middle class isn't just from a consumer perspective - I never said that. You made that up. Of course it includes beliefs systems, traditional social status and cultural mores - just like the definition of a middle class in most other societies.

for me... the programme is just reality in our fac...

2010-05-03T19:04:47.387+01:00

for me... the programme is just reality in our face. most Nigerians who want to pretend that everything is fine at home don't like it... but i don't care about anything else but the truth.

the surprising thing is that we Nigerians care nothing about the plights of our fellow Nigerians who are suffering, but we hate it when a foreign media decides to bring them to our face...

some people want them to show VI, Lekki, new estates in Ajah, Maitama, Wuse etc etc. but when i went to Nigeria last year, my attention was drawn to these poor areas than the beautiful places. i couldn't help feeling sorry for the millions who have to live that across the whole nation.

i think more attention should be paid to such areas with a view to show us how they have been neglected.

okay one question: how many big, beautiful houses are currently un-occupied in VI or Maitama because their owners reside in other parts of the world and hence don't really need the houses? should BBC then be showing us such houses?

Tay, you are clutching to straws. If you ask any t...

2010-05-03T07:43:39.146+01:00

Tay, you are clutching to straws. If you ask any teacher or doctor who is not working at some fancy private institution whether they feel among the professional class you'll get your answer. They might well have a middle class perspective, but they certainly can't afford to shop at The Palms. Most civil servants in Nigeria earn a pittance as basic salary. Given that your take on being middle class was from a consumer perspective (rather than a cultural or ideological perspective), we can safely say there is no basis to believe there is a growing middle class in Nigeria.

The Lagos perspective: of young people working in banking or telecoms on the islands, is a distortion of the national reality. You'll find that the number of such professionals spread across the country is tiny, especially in the North. Behind it all, there is no sense in which any of this can be said to be growing. On what basis would it be doing so? A significant percentage of civil servants in Nigeria (perhaps the largest formal employer in the country) are not professional staff: go to any ministry or department and you'll see that for each higher grade staffer, there'll be 'secretaries' who type things out (often still on typewriters in State Governments).

It all boils down to this: Nigeria earns a large chunk of its GDP and almost all of its forex through oil. Oil is not a labour intensive sector anywhere in the world. Until the govt makes a decision to genuinely support a diversification away from a single source of revenue, there won't be growth in the middle class. There are many things the govt could do at the same time, such as taking education seriously and allocating similar percentages of its annual budget to education as Ghana does, or taking communications infrastructure seriously to bring broadband in to the country (we wait and we wait and we wait). And of course, increasing power supply would be a driver that enables greater competitiveness in the country, which would lead to larger companies and job creation.

Perhaps one day all this will happen.

@Jeremy The clip did not say there is no proof of ...

2010-05-02T23:51:49.655+01:00

@Jeremy The clip did not say there is no proof of a growing middle class; at the end it simply said the infrasture needed to sustain this class is very poor. Some sources say the Nigerian middle class is growing:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+rise+and+rise+of+Nigeria's+middle+class.-a0210057084

http://annansi.com/blog/2009/08/growing-middle-class-and-africas-demographic-opportunity/

Some say it is dwindling. There don't seem to be definitive figures and certainly none that suggest the middle class is just a "sliver" or has "shrunk to a rump" as you say. From personal informal evidence the middle in Nigeria is robust; the singer in the clip Naeto C himself said from his own experience there is a thriving middle class and "tons" of civil servants, professionals etc.

And there always been. There have always been teachers, doctors and lawyers and there always will be. As new investment opportunities arise in Nigeria and across the continent, facilitated by the mobile phone revolution, the class will only expand. Added to this are returnees who are aiding economic growth. The World Bank has recently injected over $100 million to improve infrastructure and trading routes from Nigeria throughtout the west coast. According to the World Bank GDP growth in subsaharan Africa over the last decade was 5.4% - larger than the US. And things will only get better.

I totally agree ojere! Check out my blog people ht...

2010-05-02T22:29:03.172+01:00

I totally agree ojere! Check out my blog people http://pisceangem.blogspot.com/ and follow me http://twitter.com/pisceangem

Tay: the youtube clip started off badly: as if sho...

2010-05-02T21:26:56.280+01:00

Tay: the youtube clip started off badly: as if shots from people shopping at The Palms proves anything about a growing middle class. All indicators still point to the middle class shrinking ever more to a rump. There was a passing bubble of financial services employment in the past few years which was built air and has decidedly popped. I was relieved to see the clip ending on a more realistic note. There is no evidence that there is a middle class growing in Nigeria; there simply aren't enough professional jobs to go round, and the staples of a middle class: a good education system and a health care system that offers well paid jobs, simply don't exist.

@ Tay, Nkem is defending the BBC, who are you defe...

2010-05-02T16:47:28.188+01:00

@ Tay, Nkem is defending the BBC, who are you defending, the Nigerian middle class? :)

I think what most of us who are "excusing" the BBC are saying is: if this sh*t didn't exist the BBC could never have filmed it. Call it simplistic - but it is what it is. Now who're you voting for Babangida or....OMG, I don't even know who else is running! Isn't that awful?!

I sent out an email to a group of friends giving t...

2010-05-02T16:07:23.010+01:00

I sent out an email to a group of friends giving the documentary the thumbs up and someone responded saying that, 'many Nigerians are not happy with the documentary because it belittles Nigerians.'

I don't know what they're outraged about. It's not a documentary about poverty, equality or whatever run-of-the-mill third world documentary people were expecting. It's a documentary celebrating the resourcefulness and enterprising nature of honest, hardworking people living in what anthropologists and sociologists the world over agree is one of the most extreme urban environments in the world.

The documentary showed, not told, that while the government was indeed focused on destroying the places they filmed: Olusosun and Makoko, preferring only to see them as slums, what the government was intending to destroy were communities with familial ties and their own commercial hubs.

Those so-called naija people should celebrate the resourcefulness of the agricultural college graduate who figured out a way to turn animal blood into manure and sell it to farmers as chicken feed. They should celebrate the enterprising nature of the university student who pays his school fees himself by physically logging trees in Ogun state and figuring how to get it to Lagos via river, a three day journey. My father was born into a poor family. To make his money, he physically walked to Lagos from Ogun state in flip flops, a journey that took several days. He slept in gutters, ditches and wherever he could find shelter on his way to Lagos and when he got to Lagos, he had to work and sleep wherever he could. In short, he was like those people featured in the documentary. The resilience, resourcefulness, strength of character and enterprising nature of those people featured in the documentary were exactly the same things that he exhibited when he got to Lagos.

Ultimately, all documentary makers tell a story. But for those stories to work, there must be key characters who embody what in essence is the heart, themes and issues of the documentary. The documentary makers found those characters in Welcome in Lagos and they did a bloody good job.

We Nigerians should look beyond the aesthetics. So what if the documentary didn't show the swanky $$$$ million villas, boats, shopping malls etc that are springing up in Lagos and Abuja? So bloody what. It's not that kind of documentary. It's a documentary celebrating something far more important; the strength of the human spirit. And if moaning Nigerians cannot see that because they are too busy being offended by the documentary that dared to go into the visually unattractive places, then tough. If that documentary was filmed in an inner city, urban warzone area of the UK and they focused on exactly the same kind of characters working and living in the same kind of environment as the Welcome to Lagos one, albeit in the UK, featuring white not black people, then what would their reaction be? Wouldn't they celebrate their tenacity, vibrancy and self-determination? So, why wouldn't they do the same for their people, working and living in the slums of Lagos?

They should get over themselves.

"For goodness sake, us Naijas talk a lot of c...

2010-05-02T10:24:50.331+01:00

"For goodness sake, us Naijas talk a lot of crap! If you do not like the BBC's welcome to lagos, go do your own. The BBC is not the NTA."

What on earth is your point? Nigerian film-makers such as Funmi Iyanda and Jide Olanrewaju ARE doing their own films. We'd just like a fairer representation from the western media when they do their own. What do you and others find so difficult to understand about that?

This is from the latest Guardian review by John Crace:

"Even if Greatest Cities of the World were, by some hideous mischance, to run to 20 series, Griff would be unlikely to make it to Lagos. There's no lovely architecture there, just a megacity of 16 million people and counting."

Of course he believes Lagos has no lovely architecture because the documentary did not show any. It didn't show the National Theatre, the beautiful church and mosque near Ikeja airport, TBS cathedral etc etc. One-sided portrayals of Nigeria perpetuate ignorance such that shown by this reviewer.

As for a lack of a middle class, check this out - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs-q-mdi_yw&feature=related

Btw does NKem actually have a view on the documentary itself? All his post seems to say is "I work for the BBC, I work for the BBC, I work for the BBC". That's nice.

BOY, DO I LOVE THE HIGHLIFE MUSIC PLAYED IN THE DO...

2010-05-02T05:16:07.922+01:00

BOY, DO I LOVE THE HIGHLIFE MUSIC PLAYED IN THE DOCUMENTARY. DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHO SANG THE SONGS, ESPECIALLY THE ONE AT THE END OF THE 3RD EPISODE.

" . . . No society can be healthy without a g...

2010-05-01T23:03:26.904+01:00

" . . . No society can be healthy without a growing middle class."

With this statement, you clearly show your utter ignorance of the country that you live in. No growing middle class indeed.

For goodness sake, us Naijas talk a lot of crap! I...

2010-05-01T22:34:52.429+01:00

For goodness sake, us Naijas talk a lot of crap! If you do not like the BBC's welcome to lagos, go do your own. The BBC is not the NTA. Even if it had an agenda, that's their prerogative. Talking of which, even the useless NTA has an agenda, so what's the problem? Al Jazeera has an agenda, so does CNN, ABC or the state controlled Chinese News Service. BTW, if we Naijas had an identity we are proud of, we would stop aping Brits and Americans, which we do badly anyway. Oops i digress.

@Saul the title of the film was the London no one ...

2010-05-01T18:33:47.627+01:00

@Saul the title of the film was the London no one knows about not Welcome to London. The title already gives you an inkling to what you are about to watch! That is the difference between those two films

Nkem, my sincere apologises on my spelling, it was...

2010-05-01T12:04:39.619+01:00

Nkem, my sincere apologises on my spelling, it was 1.21am in the morning :-)

Richard, it was a documentary film, which according to Wikipedia (LOL!) is defined as “a broad category of visual expressions that is based on the attempt, in one fashion or another, to document reality”

To believe that a UK based Commissioning Editor will sign up to a documentary about a bunch of middle class families in Lagos, doing middle class things that middle class families do here in the UK, is naive at best or delusional at worst!

If you think this series was propaganda, then simply find a Commissioning Editor, pitch your preferred option of a documentary about the lives of middle class Africans and get it aired.

I have lived and worked in the New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Vienna and currently shuttle between London and Paris and over these years never have I come across anyone who pigeonholed me with whatever the prevailing media portrayal of Nigerians (there is one exception, which was in Jo’burgh SA, but this is an entirely different story!) was at the time. I have always been judged by my actions and I don’t think I move in a special circle, as this is the same for most people I know.

It was a documentary that showed things the way they were, that you did not like its subject matter is tantamount to saying that what was shown does not exist. If you and the Prof want to take a swipe at someone then take the swipe at the leaders of Nigeria – the two-bit punks that allow this to exist in the country they govern and while we at it, please spare me this colonialist drivel, Nigeria got her independence almost 50 years ago.

My grandfather was a farmer and my grandmother was a market trader, they lived in a mud hut. They sent their kids to school and my Dad got a scholarship (a Nigerian government one!) to study at Berkeley, that was his chance to better his lot and by default mine. Where was that opportunity for the people we saw in the documentary, all of whom were smart, intelligent and given access to the opportunities we had, would most probably kick our collective butts in terms of improving their lot!

At no stage did they moan about things they just got on with it. I have always been fully aware that it was by the simple matter of “accident of birth” that I live the pampered life I live now, for which I am grateful, but I take solace from the fact that had that “accident of birth” lead to me being on the other side, I will have managed, just as the people shown in the series manage. The programme conveyed that loud and clear, it’s a shame you are so blinded by an innate victim hood mentality you missed the essence of the programme.

Alao – genius, spot on! Am not aware of Fummi Iyanda, I will look out for her work. dam dam, I cracked my ribs laughing!!

@Alao I no fit laugh! While we're at it, why d...

2010-05-01T09:53:45.288+01:00

@Alao I no fit laugh! While we're at it, why don't we ask the Lagosians in the documentary to stop aspiring for any life outside the ghetto, we don't want them getting contaminated and turning into the "meaningless and vacuous" elite . Please find time to tell aunty Funmi to stop showing the elite, Oh I forgot, she's one of them, well according to the descriptions here, she fits right in which means she must be vile etc? Thank God BBC listened to you and others and made sure to surgically excise any Funmi Iyanda's from 'Welcome to Lagos'.

I'll advise you not to get yourself up in a knot, this programme was not for shot for you. You and other Nigerians are an inconsequential blip in the scheme of things apart from being the incidental subjects. Lagos slum is your reality (according to some the only reality), it's what the Nigerian is steeped in so you don't need to see it on tv to experience it.

The argument as to whether the beeb should include (notice I said include and not exclusively show) any other side to Lagos is this: The programme is made for British kids out there for whom there's a deficit when it comes to reporting from Africa. For them there are no demographics in Africa that resemble Funmi Iyanda. It is what the critics are addressing. This programme (yes we know, it's about mega cities) is their introduction to Lagos, Africa and beyond that, the black experience. Now you and others can insist no one should talk about it, that's your prerogative. Unfortunately for you, people out here are allowed to criticise the media. They have a code and have to consider issues of race etc. It may be the never criticise culture that keeps Nigeria stagnant.

There's no altruistic dimension to BBCs reporting and and I think where we agree is that no-one but Nigerians can solve Nigerias problems.

^alao, ----- Why can't all the noise makers he...

2010-05-01T07:20:52.299+01:00

^alao,
-----
Why can't all the noise makers here include our Noble lureate support the likes of Funmi Iyanda to make more films, more documentaries.
-----

And who's to say they have not ? are are not ?

You make no sense! by and large.

Richard: at no point did I imply there was no midd...

2010-05-01T03:16:49.062+01:00

Richard: at no point did I imply there was no middle class or people like you in Nigeria. However, the middle class back in the 1970s and even 1980s was much larger than it is now (think how much lecturers and doctors salaries have diminished relative to the cost of living since then). Now, the middle class has shrunk to a rump. No society can be healthy without a growing middle class.

Richard, are you paying BBC to acknowledge you? we...

2010-05-01T02:03:20.188+01:00

Richard, are you paying BBC to acknowledge you? wetin do the 8.6Billion naira auntie dora spent to revamp NTA international- the black and white one. What happened to all those professionals working in the media-they are too lazy to record a documentary?
When last ddi you even watch a nigerian documentary by nigerians?

Abeg make you na wait o, dem oyinbo people go come help you show better side of lagos keep suay-ing and parring mehn

I don't even see what the issue is. If Soyinka...

2010-04-30T23:48:30.490+01:00

I don't even see what the issue is. If Soyinka doesn't like what the BBC have done, when he was spearheading the recently concluded Lagos carnival, why didn't he asked them to do a documentary about Lagos that is not colonialists? There are too many people complaining and doing nothing.

I remember seeing a documentary about Nigerian history made by a young banker in the UK. He screened it in Nigeria to raise more money to finish the film. Did any of the money bags in the room offer something? Hell no. They are too busy waiting for Nkem's auntie to do the job for them so that they can call them colonists. If you don't like what you see, do something about it. If you don't like how you are represented, create your own representation(s). There's enough money in the country to do so.

How come people are not talking about Funmi Iyanda's latest offering. She goes to the street, to the Makoko, to Ikoyi and to the life of the Lagos money bags. She gives us a broad spectrum of Naija life. And I must say the part about rich Nigerians is the most vile and pointless piece of filming. But I understand what Funmi is trying to do - to show the meaninglessness and vacousiness of the Nigerian elite.

Why can't all the noise makers here include our Noble lureate support the likes of Funmi Iyanda to make more films, more documentaries.

I beg all of you go and sit down.

Right from the first few minutes it's very obv...

2010-04-30T14:23:14.952+01:00

Right from the first few minutes it's very obvious that there is an 'angle' to the documentary. I grew up in Lagos, and i have lots of other friends who did; we never lived in slums neither were our parents rich. And, there were a LOT of us. Yes, there is still something called the middle class even in Nigeria. Why is it wrong for people like us to be acknowledged? Why does it always have to be the few uber-rich and the extremely poor, (and obviously with the latter always taking precedence) when it comes to documentaries about Africa?

I'm presently in the US and I have interacted with people from other developing countries - India, China etc. We share experiences, we had the same consumer goods etc - I was not out of place. Yet judging by the constant media portrayal of 'Africans' that would never have been possible.

In the past it was always the remote villages that were in focus. These days, you can show the cities - but ONLY the slums. Jeremy, I disagree with you completely. Some of us lived relatively 'normal' lives, we had a WC, TV, newspapers, dining room etc yet my mum was merely a teacher. True, there wasn't constant electricity nor constant water but we didn't live off a refuse bin. I join Wole Soyinka in dissing this 'documentary'. It is propaganda and junk.

There is nothing wrong with the way Nigeria is por...

2010-04-30T13:51:25.188+01:00

There is nothing wrong with the way Nigeria is portrayed there, I think it pretty much portrayed everyday activities in Lagos

^ Nkem, How could you disclaim the position 4 dem...

2010-04-30T13:38:22.094+01:00

^
Nkem,

How could you disclaim the position 4 dem bbc,
and then proceed to say: It doesnt have an agenda ?

You might not have an agenda btw, but you have a thrust.

@any rate, no use complaining, Nigeria itself is baby britain. Someone is gonna tell us too someday, mama had no agenda for im pickin...shey ?

oshisko

First of all, I should start with a disclaimer. Th...

2010-04-30T12:14:06.411+01:00

First of all, I should start with a disclaimer. The (rather mild) views I'm about to express are not those of my employer.

There so many comments I agree with on this thread, that I want to snog you guys individually. But lots of you are anonymous - so who do I send my smackers to?

I work for the BBC, and for all its faults I will always defend it on one particular point, it doesn't have an "agenda". Day in day out, I go to work with people who have their hearts, but just as importantly, their heads, in the right place. To quote the Reithian mantra, our job is to "inform, educate and entertain", and I suspect after this programme critics might want to add, "to cause a ruckus" to that list. All that colonialist, racist, prejudiced BBC stuff doesn't hold water. So for whatever the greatness or crapness of Welcome to Lagos, there was no "agenda".

And I wouldn't be working for the BBC if I didn't take the bait on this point of pedantry, Anonymous 1.21, it's "Auntie". :-)