“Nigeria’s problem and Lagos’s problem is its image. If anything, the miracle of Lagos is that its economy gallops onward even when fettered by the same federal incompetence that allows terrorism to go unchecked. Both are indigenous to Nigeria, a vast West African nation teeming with industrious strivers like Adeoti but also with poverty, despair, and violence. But Lagos does not exist in a parallel universe, any more than the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram does. And how lovely it would be to tell this bright, uplifting tale while ignoring altogether the dark and demoralizing saga of Nigeria’s grotesque terrorists, which has blocked the boomtown narrative from the world’s consciousness like a lunar eclipse.
Seemingly overnight, Lagos has transformed itself into a city of Davids clamoring to become Goliaths. Nigeria’s middle class grew from 480,000 in 1990 to 4.1 million in 2014, or 11 percent of households. The growth of the latter in Nigeria, according to a 2013 survey by Ciuci Consulting, a strategy and marketing firm in Lagos, is driven by the expanding banking, telecommunications, and services sectors, particularly in Lagos. Now the upper class is expanding, and despite persistent income inequality, so is the middle class. About 15,700 millionaires and a handful of billionaires live in Nigeria, more than 60 percent of them in Lagos.Īs with other African metropolises, oil-enriched Lagos has long nurtured an elite class only marginally inconvenienced by the squalor enveloping the city as a whole. As a result, Nigeria determined that its GDP surpassed South Africa’s in 2012 to become the continent’s largest economy.
The country recently recalculated its gross domestic product to take into account sectors of the economy that barely existed two decades ago. In Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial center, “Be Very Rich” has all but become the city’s motto. Everyone is very desperate to be very rich these days.”Īlmost anywhere else in the developing world, such a sentiment would seem pitiably delusional. With a widening grin, he added, “But the middle class, we strive. “It’s a very far distance from middle class to being rich,” Adeoti said. He wants to be a cinematographer-and perhaps one day, a Nollywood studio executive. He was saving money to travel to Hollywood. “I plan on starting my own business-something in the film industry,” he told me. But all this exposure to money and movies had whetted his appetite for more of both. Adeoti makes twice the salary he made as the manager at the Internet café. Njoku’s company has about 80 employees, with additional offices in Johannesburg, London, and New York City.
#Joe big rich town mac#
When I met David Adeoti in spring 2014, he was 24 and wearing an elegant knit shirt and designer jeans while sitting behind a Mac laptop in the sleek three-story office that now houses iROKOtv in Lagos. Adeoti signed on anyway, thinking, It’s going to sell itself. As was evident by the cramped environs, the project was perilously low on money. Njoku needed someone like Adeoti to convert “Nollywood” DVDs into a YouTube format. This, Njoku informed Adeoti, was his new business: an indigenous version of Netflix that would stream movies to Nigerian computers and bring Nigerian movies to the world. Adeoti walked inside to find six young men wedged behind desks with computer cables snaked around their feet as they typed. A few months later Adeoti inquired about a job and was invited to Njoku’s apartment. While Adeoti operated the scanner, the genteel visitor mentioned that he was trying to find investors for a new business venture and asked the Internet café manager if he enjoyed his job. Njoku asked Adeoti if he could scan some documents. His name was Jason Njoku, a bespectacled 30-year-old Londoner who had relocated to his ancestral homeland of Nigeria. One day in 2010 the shop’s customers looked up from the computers to see who had just walked in the door with the mannered British accent. Adeoti spent his money on courses at a technical institute, determined that the Internet café would not be the end of the line for him.
The banker paid Adeoti a little more than $200 a month to run the place. The Internet café in Satellite Town was run as a side business by a banker, who saw that the boy had a natural facility for computers-even the shop’s ancient desktops, which operated at lurching speeds. His birthplace was off to the north in Orile, a wretched village of flooded streets and collapsing buildings. When he was 15 years old, David Adeoti worked in an Internet café in blue-collar Satellite Town, where it was almost possible to see the gleaming towers of Lagos Island less than ten miles to the east. This story appears in the January 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine.