Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa by Howard W. French Read Free Book Online Page A

was a marvel of Africa. As recently as the 1980s, Nigeria had been a country that sensed it was going places. The country proudly led the continent in democratization, in the fight against apartheid and in boldly developing heavy industries—oil, steel, automobiles—that no black nation had mastered before.
    In the 1980s, the new Lagos airport boasted retractable boarding corridors that allowed passengers to avoid the rainy season’s deluges and walk straight from the plane to the terminal. This might seem like a negligible detail to a Westerner, but here the symbolism was important. Landing in Lagos was meant to feel just like arriving at Heathrow or JFK, sending a message to the world that Nigeria was no moldering African backwater, but an emerging power.
    As my plane landed at the airport a decade later, however, I had to clamber down the rolling stairway from the aircraft the old-fashioned way and then precariously climb back up a teetering, ladder-style stairway into those fancy boarding bridges, which had long been immobilized by rust and a lack of maintenance. Corruption had eaten away at everything here since that bygone era of pride and optimism. Most would say the rot had started under the elected government of Shehu Shagari, who was overthrown in a military coup in 1983, and things had gotten steadily worse under a succession of bemedaled generals.
    Nigeria had become one of Africa’s most tragic stories, as if a great family franchise had been run into the ground by decadent nephews prematurely handed the reins of management. The callow nephews in this tale were army generals, and like King Midas in reverse, the officers who had run the country for the last decade had debased everything they had touched, starting, of course, with politics, which they had turned into a contest of self-enrichment.
    The leader who ran the country in the mid-1990s, General Sani Abacha, stood out even in this crowd. As an officer who had been involved at a senior level in every coup since the one that overthrew Shagari, he represented the final evolutionary wrinkle of a predatory, runaway institution: a general who offered no explanations for his actions, no smiles and no mercy. With the coup to prevent Abiola from taking office as the elected president in November 1993, Abacha had finally become the man in charge, no longer a power in the shadow of the more respected, more charming or more ostentatiously clever generals he had once served.
    In the months before my arrival, Nigerians were discovering to their horror that Abacha was more interested in killing people than in dazzling them. He gladly ruled from the shadows, from behind dark glasses, where he seemed to relish his image as the person his country-men feared most. Abacha rarely appeared in public, working by night and sleeping well into the day. He reportedly kept long lists of enemies, real and imagined, whom he methodically tracked, executed or jailed. Gradually he came to take on the aura of a motion picture monster, and in a society notable for bold individualism, for a people who were not intimidated easily, Abacha lurked menacingly in the popular imagination, like Jaws, a hidden leviathan that gave people the chills.
    I had taken care not to check any bags, and was relieved to get through the immigration formalities without a hitch. My relief was redoubled when I stepped outside and was approached by David, who by way of bona fides showed me the telex that I had sent his boss. A broad, thickset man of medium height and a ready smile, David insisted on carrying my bags, and we began our long walk to the parking area, where he had left his car.
    As we descended a stairway, a thin, sinister-looking man wearing an agbada, the loose and flowing three-piece outfits favored by many Nigerians, approached me and asked to see my papers. David, who was walking a few paces ahead, turned to say to me in his guttural English, “Don’t mind that man.” I wasn’t inclined to