Every time I come here, it’s the heat. It confronts you as soon as you step out of the airport, reminding you that this place, home, is not wherever you just flew in from. The heat is bearable, but only barely, and you wonder how the police manage, standing at their checkpoints all day, dressed in all black, always enthusiastic. Especially when you “tip” them.
Once you get over the heat, you can’t get over how dirty it is. Plastic bottle here, candy wrapper there, random nylon bag stuck in a tree. (Why won’t anyone take it down?) No matter right now…you’re keeping your eyes open for a taxi. You didn’t accept the rides offered by the shady guys that came up to you outside “Arrivals” – this city has a history of kidnapping, and you refuse to be a statistic. Though the incidence rates have declined in the past few years, you know to only accept taxis of a certain color, and so when you see the tell-tale yellow or gold, you push your trolley of luggage over to begin negotiations. You begin as everyone else here does…
“Hola, amigo.”
This is Mexico City, and it feels more like home to me than any other city in the world besides Lagos. It’s the air. It’s the heat. It’s the way people drive (like maniacs, in case you’re wondering). It’s the super-packed Ruta Verde buses I take to work in Santa Fe. It’s the street food (the tacos here are excellent – still not better than suya, but close). It’s also the traffic. Dear God the traffic.
Mexico and Nigeria (the “M” and “N” in Jim O’Neill’s “MINT” countries) are two of the most important economies in the emerging markets — with Nigeria growing at 7 percent yearly to a $510 billion GDP in 2014, and Mexico being the 14th largest economy on earth, at $1.3 trillion. The parallels I found living in these two remarkable countries are…well…remarkable.
Mexico and Nigeria are countries inhabited by old, storied civilizations, like the Maya and the Benin Empire respectively, where the most prosaic of daily conversations carries a hint of the “we’ve been here for a while” sentiment. Citizens are friendly and the food is amazing. But both countries carry the deep burden of not living up to potential. In both Nigeria and Mexico, the poor are terribly poor and the rich are magnificently rich. In both countries, it’s quite common to see Rolls-Royces stuck in traffic next to public buses bursting with humanity.
Where Nigeria has wrestled with the Boko Haram insurgency in its rural north eastern states near its borders with Cameroon, Chad and Niger, Mexico has waged war against six exceedingly violent drug cartels along its northern border towns with the United States. Both countries have been on the receiving end of a State Department Travel Advisory, and the human and financial loss in both countries is almost incalculable.
Both countries have a history of corruption in government, and politicians in both countries make empty promises to fight the rot even as they stand accused of being its primary beneficiaries.
Mexico has Carlos Slim, a billionaire business magnate with his hands in almost everything and a near-monopoly on a necessity: telecommunications. Nigeria has Aliko Dangote, a billionaire business magnate with his hands in almost everything and a near-monopoly on a necessity: cement.
Nigeria’s economic center, Lagos, is packed with an estimated 18 million inhabitants. Mexico’s economic center, Mexico City, is even more packed, with over 22 million inhabitants. Lagos’ wealthy build estates in upscale Ikoyi and Banana Island; Mexico City has Polanco and Lomas de Chapultapec. If I closed my eyes during my morning bus commutes to work and just listened to the street noise, I wouldn’t be able to tell which city I was in.
On my getting to the office in Sante Fe, though, away from the traffic and the crime and the noise in the streets, Mexico City distances itself from Lagos with the simplest of actions: I plug in my laptop, and the “battery charging” indicator lights up, assuring me that power is flowing. The same is true eight hours into my work day. And the next day, and the day after that. Actually, in the months I spent in Mexico City, I don’t recall not having electricity. Last time I visited Lagos, I don’t recall that I ever had a full day of power – without a generator. In Nigeria, as we all know, this is the norm. Nigeria can produce 5,500 megawatts (MW) of electricity but currently distributes less than 2000 (MW) of electricity for its 180 million people. Mexico’s installed capacity generates over 60000 MW, for a population 70 percent that size.
In my La Condesa rental apartment, when I pretended to cook and turned on the tap in the kitchen, water came out – clear, usable water. Everyone knows not to drink the tap water in Mexico City, but at least I have the option. At home in Lekki, Lagos, we provide our own water from a bore hole. In Mexico City, the buses may be packed, but at least the main roads are well-paved. A journey along the numerous unpaved roads in Lagos requires a helmet.
Even the way the two countries celebrate their histories is remarkably different: The National Museum in Lagos looks like this:
Mexico City’s Museo Anthropologia looks like this:
From their macro indicators ($1.3 trillion GDP for Mexico, $510 billion for Nigeria; $35.2billion in net FDI inflow for Mexico vs. $5.6 billion for Nigeria) to the quality and number of our educational institutions, staring at Mexico and Nigeria for too long is like meeting twins raised in the same household who have grown into totally different adults: One became a well-respected dentist while the other is in rehab for a cocaine addiction.
What gets to me is not the spate of challenges Nigeria faces – enough has been written on the subject—but the idea that Mexico, a country with so many similar characteristics (e.g., the resource “curse”, tribal/cultural tensions, violence , corruption, and more), has managed to create a daily reality so fundamentally different from Nigeria’s. How? Why?
Some point to the neighbors. Mexico shares a border with the United States, one of the largest consumer markets on earth, and a key source of investment. In the 20 years since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexico has grown from a bit-player on the world economic stage to a titan, thanks in part to the benefits of trade with the US and Canada. (For more information on NAFTA you can read The Council on Foreign Relations Primer.)
Nigeria’s comparable experiment with regional economic integration is the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Its primary aim is to increase trade, promote growth, and move towards a regional currency – all in theory positive goals – but the combined GDP of the member countries is around $700 billion, three quarters of which comes from Nigeria. If Mexico has the benefit of wealthy neighbours buying everything it can manufacture, Nigeria has had no such luck.
Of course, there are many sides to a discussion on NAFTA, and several economists have submitted that its economic benefits to Mexico are mixed, but NAFTA has at least had the sort of effect on Mexico that IMF loan covenants seek for developing economies all over the world: the tightening of economic policies, and institutional changes that have helped seed an era of growth and prosperity. Most economic measures point to a Mexico far stronger than it was twenty years ago.
But that can’t be the whole story, can it? It’s not like Nigeria hasn’t introduced positive economic policies in the last twenty years, and it’s not as though the Nigerian economy isn’t growing – the country continues to climb in rankings of countries by economic strength.
Why then are the daily experiences of big-city Mexicans and Nigerians, away from GDP figures and in the glare of life on the ground, so markedly different? There’s a library’s worth of answers – the presence of strong societal institutions, rule of law, benevolent leadership, geopolitical history, access to healthcare and education…the list goes on, and gets longer still with one thought recently shared with me:
A friend once explained to me that certain neighborhoods in US cities have noticeably better police presence, well-maintained roads, and public transportation than others just a few minutes’ drive away– all because of the “taxable base”. He suggested that politicians are incentivized to perform where rich and middle-class people live, because that’s where the tax money and votes come from, and that’s where deals and contracts matter most. Large city centers and other areas of concentrated wealth reflect the needs and wants of the politically valuable who live there
These words were on my mind on my last trip to Mexico City where, as I drove along paved roads through the fancy neighborhood of Polanco, I tried to pay a bit more attention to the store-fronts: Gucci, Prada, Zegna, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany’s. The traffic lights worked. They had a functional sewage system and, of course, electricity. Large parts of the city seemed built for the taxable, voting elite. Rich Mexicans can live and shop in Mexico! Rich Nigerians shop…in Dubai and London. Analysis from Global Blue placed Nigerians as fifth on the list of nationalities by spend when visiting the UK (at GBP 573 per average transaction), after the Middle East, Russia, Thailand, and China, and VerdictRetail expects UK retail spend by Nigerians to grow 67 percent between 2013 and 2018. Middle-class Mexicans, those who form a large part of the taxable base, live and spend in Mexico. Middle-class Nigerians live and spend all over the world.
My evidence is anecdotal, but it seems as though emigration from Mexico leaves behind the very rich and the middle class whilst emigration from Nigeria leaves behind the very rich and the very poor. This matters.
When we think of people “escaping” Mexico, we picture people at the bottom of the economic pyramid traveling north for employment opportunities that will let them send dollars home and take better care of their family. They are gardeners, construction workers and nannies – hard-working citizens who found the challenges of living in a highly bifurcated Mexico too great.
The Nigerians who “escape” Nigeria seem like a totally different group of people, largely made up of the middle class – our potential taxable base. These are Nigerians who can afford SAT study materials (even if only barely), and buy the plane tickets to receive education (or surgery) abroad. Many Nigerians living abroad are doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, and bankers. This leaves behind the wealthy who don’t need the government, and the poor, who the government feels it doesn’t need.
Though we export our fair share of unskilled labor, research by the Migration Policy Institute shows that Nigerians are among the most educated immigrant groups in the United States. This could be due in part to Nigerians using student visas in large numbers to emigrate to and live in the United States, but this doesn’t diminish the work ethic and drive of the emigrants themselves. This too – thousands of driven and educated people away from home – matters.
It would follow that a contributing factor to countries like Mexico providing such a different “quality of life” for their middle class could be that a large part of their taxable and voting base – the people and organizations to which leaders feel they are answerable, have remained in the country. In Nigeria, the richest can provide for themselves, and the poor can be ignored or managed; “stomach infrastructure” replaces actual infrastructure. When our “answerable base” has had enough, they simply ferry their families out to a university in Maryland, and ten years later their children are proud Master’s Degree holders working at Credit Suisse.
The obvious next question is “why?” Why do Nigeria’s rich leave when the going gets tough, while Mexico’s stay? I can’t claim to know exactly; my best guess would be a sense of shared history and nationalism that Nigeria hasn’t quite mastered. In elections and in political debate, we vote tribe and not country. Any gathering of friends at a table quickly devolves into a discussion about how “useless” the country is; we are our own worst critics, almost embarrassed to show our green passports in public.
While Mexico has built statues to heroes on both sides of its internal wars, Nigeria has instead largely made enemies of those within. Mexico belongs to Mexicans. Nigeria belongs to the South or the North or the East or the West or the Muslims or the Christians, depending on who you talk to.
The result is a diminished sense of ownership, and maybe that explains why those who are able leave, taking their money, influence, and votes with them. Many of those who stay have “back-up” homes abroad, just in case it all falls apart. This runs counter to the pride citizens of our peer countries have in themselves, the sort I would argue compels a government to put the basics in place.
In a democracy every vote counts, but politicians might find it more difficult to ignore a considerably larger middle class of the collectively influential and concerned. To be more blunt, Mexico’s government suffers from the same allegations of corruption and mismanagement as Nigeria’s, but they still manage to keep the lights on. A possible reason could be the people who stick around to make them do it.
