Caught Up In A Cycle of Dysfunction
In the home I grew up in, we had a generator that we used for about a decade. It actually served us well by national standards even though its entire engine was replaced at some point. It was also repaired countless number of times by a few gen repairers. Most times, they were the same issues that were repaired: generator not coming on, unstable light, and engine knock. And for almost every tines, it seems like there was something to change.
The generator powered both out home and restaurant which was on the ground floor for roughly 4 hours every day from 7pm— except Sundays when it came on solely on my dad’s directive which was usually reluctantly given after saying something that would always include, “where you see money for fuel?”.
The repairs mostly involved getting something new and they’d say something like, “ Oga, na something inside the carburetor don spoil. Just gimme 1–5 and I go rush go Alaba go buy am”. They rarely return the same day and when its finally fixed, they end up returning a few weeks later (days in some cases) to do some other repairs. This is pretty much the same issue with our electrician, plumber, tiler, painter.
I grew up in Nigeria, a country that thrives on ambition and accolades. For the longest time, we’ve carried on our heads the ‘giant of Africa’ maxim but its hard to see any substance to that title.
Nigeria is the kind of country that has in it thousands of cars that will drive from 0 to 60 in ten seconds on roads where the probability of them not killing everything, whether man or chicken, within and around is as low as the number of hours most cities have power in a week.
It also has an optimistic view of technological progress — that (as Suketu Metah put it about Mumbai, in his book Maximum City) if you reach for the moon, you will somehow, automatically, span the technical labour in the world. However, that seems like some utopian dream as the current reality is quite the opposite. At least 75 million do not have basic literacy skills. In addition, there are over 10.5 million out-of-school children in Nigeria—the highest number of out-of-school children in the world, which is 20 million.
Nigeria produces some of the best technical brains in the world as its common for us to go abroad and prosper in almost any given field. But for some reason, she has forgotten to teach my Gen guy at home how to repair my generator so it stays fixed.
It seems like we are stuck in a Nigerian-oriented system of education in which those who work with their hands have to learn for themselves — and be babysit all through the process.
“Education has to do with reading and writing, with abstractions with higher thought.” — Suketu Metah
So in order to get work done properly by a local technician, you would need to first make friends with him; you’d need to find a common ground — usually football or corruption among the political class. You can’t bring to his attention too aggressively the fact that he is incompetent or crooked, because you will need him to set right the messed up work he’s done the first time before fixing the new problems that has risen due to his former poor job.
Ironically, the exact opposite method can also work. There have been cases where owners of cars have seen their mechanics with his family riding his car to church. Or when people go to change the screen of their smartphone only to find out the battery life has reduced. Calling Agbero on those people seem to solve the problem.
I sometimes wonder if Nigerians has adapted well to mass production, or standardization. All things modern seems to fail regularly for all sorts of flimpsy reasons: plumbing, telephones, NEPA, movement of huge blocks of traffic, my generator.
It is clear that Nigeria is positioned to imitate a Western City, maybe Chicago in the 1920s. And, like all other imitations of the West here — the accents people put on, appliances, the parties the rich throw— this imitation, too, is neither here nor there.
