Some Pareto on Nigeria

A lot of my posts on Nigeria have been focused on the horrible experiences I had with the country, and of course they've been getting bad press from the attempted airline bombing... so, as I am currently working on our Nigeria assessment, I thought I'd share some facts that will provide some perspective. 

Like many stereotypes, a few bad apples give the whole country a bad name.  In reality, Nigeria is a huge country population-wise.  There are about 160 million Nigerians, representing nearly 20% of the entire African population.  The vast majority of Nigerians are not involved in international crime organizations, corruption, terrorist groups, etc.  It is an incredibly poor country with serious issues that cannot be effectively addressed because of the chaos and lawlessness fostered by the inept government and corrupt ruling elite.  The following paints a more accurate portrait of the average Nigerian.

• About 80% of the people live in rural areas
• The average annual income is $330 per year
• Over 50% of the population is under the age of 15.  Life expectancy is 47
• Almost 50% of the population has no education whatsoever, formal or informal
• Over 40% of people are farmers
• Only 20% of households have water piped in
• Nearly 90% of the population uses a pit latrine or the bush for a toilet... only 5% use a "water system"
• Almost 60% of the population experiences severe food insecurity... another 20% experiences it mildly.  Food insecurity is "living in hunger or fear of starvation"
• Over 40% of children are stunted
• Seventy percent of children under the age of five have malaria, which kills 300,000 of them a year
• Only 15% of households own a refrigerator
• By age 19, 40% of women have had at least one child or are pregnant
• About one-third of marriages are polygamous
• About 17% of children die before age five
• A rather stark statistic highlighting the importance and broad impact of education - the under-five child mortality rate for mothers with no education is about 22%, versus under 9% for mothers possessing post-secondary education

But I cannot complete this without referencing what one of the Nigerian government officials said in response to the TSA adding Nigeria to the list of "enhanced" security procedures.  The Nigerian Information Minister said the move was "discriminatory" and unfairly punished all Nigerians for the actions of a few. 

A guy with a bomb in his underwear got on a plane in Nigeria.  He also got on a plane in Amsterdam.  Um, yes, it was discriminatory to put Nigeria on the list, just like it was discriminatory to require stepped-up inspections in Amsterdam. 

When you're solving a problem, you discriminate against the source of it.  Otherwise you're not solving it.  You're just doing nothing.  That's kind of the way it works.  Maybe that's why the Nigerian government is doing nothing substanative to solve the myriad of problems they have.

And We're Back... In Geneva

After a long and badly needed holiday, I arrived back in Geneva this afternoon and will be here for a few weeks, wrapping up our assessments.

A recap of today:

• The French Alps are beautiful in the winter (and look a lot like the Swiss Alps, but I'm staying in France this time around... unfortunately, Geneva's criminal inflation seems to have no respect for international borders)


• My latest mental model for being overseas consisted of hot and sticky diesel fumes mixed with burning garbage and wood fires and streets packed with people, vehicles of all varieties, a wide range of feral farm animals, sewage, noise, and the need for constant vigilence.  Desolate streets, virtually non-existant crime, and crisp Alpine air scented by wood-burning fireplaces was another reminder of the historical exceptionalism we take for granted in the West


• Fun fact: Apparently cats can go for over nine hours without sleep and don't lose their voice.  I know this because there was a cat sitting a few rows behind me meowing nonstop the entire way from Chicago to Zurich.  I know that because I was unable to sleep thanks to said cat, despite noise cancelling headphones pumping out monastic chanting


• If Switzerland is the world's most efficient country, the Geneva airport was left out of the survey.  Having passed through it four times now, I can definitively say their baggage handling is slower and more inept than any of the developing nations I visited (and I'm not claiming the US is any better).  They lost my bags once and the time it takes for offloading averages about thirty minutes.  I never had a single baggage problem in Africa or South Asia


• I'm not trying to hate on Nigeria and it feels like piling it on, but per the recommendation of my good friend David Brooks, I started a phenomenal book today ("From Poverty to Prosperity") that academically catalogs some of the core impediments to development that we experienced first-hand (the biggest being cultural / education "shortcomings", combined with the West handing out trillions of dollars based on the ridiculous classical economic theory that development is a direct function of capital) and has some pretty shocking statistics (as much as I hate to use statistics coming from economists who try to model human behavior with equations) that quantify the problems.  The most incredible analysis was looking at the inherent economic value of the average individual in each country, broken down by natural resources share (the total value of all natural resources divided by the number of people), produced capital share (the total return on all the capital in the county - like the outputs of factories and other investments - divided by the number of people), and the value of intangible capital represented by each person (the value of the skills, education, and other institutions in the country - like universities, the government - divided by the number of people).  The US wealth per capita (all those things added together) is about $512k, with 3% being natural resources, 16% being produced capital, and 82% being intangible capital.  For Nigeria, the wealth per capita is under $3k.  This is the crazy part - of that number, 147% is natural resources (they have Africa's largest oil reserves), 24% is produced capital, and -71% (yes, it's negative) is intangible capital.  That means that the application of the population's skills and education, combined with the activities of the government and other legal, non-commercial institutions actually destroys 71% of the country's wealth.  So if the government, skilled (non-capital) workforce, underground economy, etc. just shut down and stopped tomorrow, the country's wealth would nearly double (I'm sure that's a ham-fisted explanation that an economist would correct with hundreds of caveats, but you get the idea). That reflects just how deeply entrenched the challenges are in too many countries. It will take generations of persistent effort from the world community to overcome these barriers, but it will be impossible without national will


• I was floored to turn on the TV in France and find the Dolphins vs. Steelers game!  And it was even on two channels ahead of the EuroSport professional dart tournament!  Even more perplexing to me is the global infatuation with WWF wrestling.  Literally every country we've been to, wrestling was on a major channel every single night... this is more vexing to me than any sanitation or nutrition challenge we've encountered


• I'm not sure I have enough data points to draw a conclusion, but there seems to be a strange dichotomy on the Continent.  Europe is indisputedly much more socialist than the US - they have some of the world's strongest social safety nets, regardless of the ideological lens through which you look at them.  So, part of me would think that Europe would treat each other on the street better than we would in the US.  If they care enough about society's most vulnerable to the point of supporting them via tax rates that would spark riots in the US, one would expect them to be extraordinarily conscientous and polite, right?  My very tenuous and unscientific experience has been that people tend to be a bit more rude to strangers here than in the US, but are much more hospitable hosts (except in hotels... they're just plain rude).  I suppose the converse logic is that in the US, our social structure is built more around individual rights rather than the more communal rights focus in Europe, so we have greater mutual respect for individual "space", as it is


• I think I had my two favorite seat neighbors on my flights today. First was the over-caffeinated American girl who managed a full body fidget for the entire flight to Zurich. Even while she was sleeping she somehow managed to keep a limb constantly moving... it was like restless indiscriminate limb syndrome. Then on the flight to Geneva, I sat next to a French guy who carried on a conversation with the guy directly behind him for the majority of the flight, which necessitated leaning over and breathing on me, enabling me to conclude that he must smoke cigarettes backwards


• I realized that the first thing you see when you land in Geneva is that running the full length of both sides of the runway is a flotilla (aerotilla?) of private jets... I'm assuming that's the most effective way of transporting large quantities of illicit cash and bullion