In the first half of 2007, a two-storeywonder banks to land in Ogbomoso and sweep through the sleepy town like the harmattan winds that yearly blanket its roofs and vegetation in sheets of dust. The town, overnight, became a place of millionaires. At that same time of the year, shops owned by Igbo merchants in Takie started to blast Olu Maintain’s club banger, Yahooze, through their speakers. It was the anthem of young, nouveau riche Nigerians.
building went up in Takie, the central hub of Ogbomoso. At the time, there were just two other two-storey buildings in proximity to it, so it was hard to miss. The building was named Olatundun House and, on its topmost floor, a banner went up with Silver Trust Investment Limited written on it. This was one of the firstThe whole town joined the wonder-bank rave: vegetable sellers on the road, merchants with shops turning in decent profits, pastors of churches, beer parlour owners, young university students, even old men days away from the grave. The wonder banks had offices in various buildings along the Oyo-Ogbomoso-Ilorin road that runs through the centre of the town. Their names signified the dreams of their customers: Gold Trust, Wealth Gate, Arrow Trust. And the ironically named Penny Wise.
Ogbomoso is home to the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (Lautech). But the town nestled among the meadows[1] cannot be assessed based on any notion of what a University town should be. Life in Ogbomoso is slow, almost idyllic. The frenetic life associated with student dwellings in Nigeria—wild parties, loud music, posters of student politicians dotting walls and fences—is concentrated to the Under G and Stadium areas of the town, spilling a little to Sabo and Orita Naira. These are all close to the University’s campus on the northern outskirts of the Town, towards Ilorin. Takie and Apake, the commercial centres, along with the other parts of town, are almost untouched by the activities of students.
The people of Ogbomoso are not overtly ambitious. In fact, we have a penchant for doing the same things, the same, monotonous way we are used to. We fry akara egbe—the stiff, teeth-endangering, cookie-like snacks made from beans paste— the same way we always have: little salt, no pepper. Almost all the families have someone who once lived in Ghana, like our town is an outpost of the gold coast. And when mobile phones entered the town, almost every young person who was not in school was selling recharge cards and making calls, before moving on to selling phones in small glass cabinets mounted on the streets.
This tendency towards homogeneity is partially responsible for how the wonder banks thrived in the town. Once a few people started to earn returns on monies saved with such banks, it was only a matter of time before the whole town joined them. Silver trust, one of the more conservative wonder banks, was at a point offering over two hundred percent returns on money saved with them in eight weeks—quick, easy money.
When you ask the residents of the town what the people who collected huge dividends from the wonder banks did with all that money, the answers are similar. The rich people are the ones who took advantage of it. Those who invested with small money did not get as much out of it. Those who made good profits in the schemes built modest flats for themselves and bought small cars like the Nissan Primera or the Mazda 626.
This was in contrast to the profiteers of the other quick-money scheme in town: cybercrime, aka Yahoo Yahoo. In the same 2007, Lautech students involved in online scam schemes were everywhere. They drove around in their Golf cars fitted with booming speakers, speeding through the town’s streets, and being a general nuisance. These boys made millions every other week, and then spent it all in the time it takes to say Yahoo! They were permanent fixtures at Siktiam Hotels, located in the southeastern outskirt of the town. Their desire to make their hostels little hotels drove the prizes of student accommodation in the areas around the school campus up. A room went for as high as seventy thousand naira per annum, at a time when three-bedroom flats could be rented for lower than fifty thousand naira in the other parts of town. Landlords knew the students could afford it. After all, their mates were fitting those little rooms with air-conditioners and high-end entertainment systems.
There is a temptation to attribute the difference between these two classes of people—the wonder bank millionaires and the Yahoo-Yahoo boys—to the difference in age and responsibility. But that is too simplistic. They obviously had different versions of the Joneses. To the average Ogbomoso man, the things he associates with the good life are: a modest house, a car that doesn’t spend too much time with the mechanic, children in private schools, etc.
For the Yahoo boy, however, the standards of luxury he looked up to were different. He was the one of, and for whom Olu Maintain sang Yahooze. His aspirations can be found in the song’s lyrics and music video: frolicking light-skinned girls, huge bling, Dollars, Hummer, Champagne, Hennessey, and Moet. He was not just content with making money and keeping it. His value resided in making it known to all around him that he had hammered. His status had changed. He sometimes could not take the trappings of his lifestyle home to his parents, for he possibly had modest, conservative folks who still struggled to pay his yearly school fees. So, he had to park his car in a friend’s house while going for holidays, or lie to the parents about the activities in school, and find reasons to stay in Ogbomoso throughout the year, partying, drinking, and living the Yahooze life.
It is easy, from the foregoing, to think the people of Ogbomoso are smart, uber-conservative people, immune to the splashy lifestyle that pervades the rest of Nigeria. That is false. During this time, loud, low-quality multimedia-capable phones aka China Phones, which were new to the Nigerian market, were introduced to the people and sold as a luxury good. Some of them went for as much as two hundred percent above the price they were sold in Lagos. Parties in town also took on an increasingly gaudy sheen.
The act of entertaining people in a community as a display of wealth is one we Yorubas are famed for. There is an urban dictionary entry on the web for Owambe, as a word that describes extravagant parties. The word, from its Yoruba origin, can be taken to mean wealth is there, and this is our way of flaunting. Or, if seen in the more literal it is there translation,Owambe can also be taken as the statement of those who reference where it is happening.
While the people of Ogbomoso are not known for their parties, the way Ijebu people are, the instinct to still give a family a good name by putting up an elaborate show at any event—weddings, burials, naming ceremonies etc.—is very present in our blood. This was made manifest as more people in the town found their way to wealth via the wonder banks. At the wedding of one of the beneficiaries, drinks were passed out to servers, in an open football field, from the back of a commercial cold truck.
All of Ogbomoso was answering to the same stimulus: a desire to fit the community-defined constructs of how to properly spend money. Those who built houses and bought cars did so because that is what everyone around them did, and were no better than the Yahoo-boys who spent their wealth on hedonistic pleasures. And neither of them did better than those who spent the money to entertain strangers.
Late 2007, the Central Bank of Nigeria started a crack down on the wonder banks, eventually stopping their operations altogether. Depending on whom you talk to, the wonder banks were either witch-hunted by CBN, or their plan all along was to scam people. Those who remained stubborn and chose to stay away from the rave would share stories about the latter. There’s the man who, like the prodigal son, asked his father for his inheritance, then put it all, late in the game, into the wonder banks. He became a gateman in Lautech. A certain Iya elefo strong-armed her cooperative society into giving her forty-five thousand naira. She lost it all. Another man sold lands put in his trust by friends, and ended up neck-deep in debt. But the truth is, many did make money out of it, and only a few squandered it. By the time the year came to a close, the rave had ended.
At the time, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission was also turning the heat on cyber crimes across the country. They were busting into cybercafés to arrest young men posing as women to seduce naive foreigners. While the exit of the wonder banks, signalled an abrupt end of the luxury for many in Ogbomoso, Yahoo-boys did not go down so lightly. They invented ways of sustaining their lifestyle. One of the recipients of the wonder banks’ largesse, a teacher, lost her dividends to a gang of robbers who followed her home. Robberies like this were attributed to the Yahoo boys. They were also said to have graduated to Yahoo-plus—euphemism for blood-money, i.e., using human parts to generate wealth, either by selling to politicians who were looking for diabolic means to retain power, or by using the parts themselves to make their own wealth. Before long, girls were warned to desist from entering the cars of Yahoo boys. Of course, these were all rumours, a way of demonising a phenomenon that refused to go away. But in a big small town, where everyone knows everyone, stories and rumours quickly become legends.
One could wonder what would have happened if the wonder banks and cybercrime windfalls had occurred in 2015? Would the pseudo-conservatism that made the gainers spend their money on houses remain unchanged, or would they have become Yahoo-boy lite themselves: opting for champagne in their parties, bling on their necks and gadgets in their palms? Or would they have done something radical, like spend the money better on moneymaking endeavours, thereby turning the town into a better place for commerce and industry?
Nine years later, Ogbomoso still remains a sleepy town. The only marked change between 2007 and today is a dual carriageway that runs through the town, being constructed by the new state government. Many do not remember the details of the wonder banks again. The only thing left to remember is that money came through Ogbomoso and people spent it. Then money left, just as quickly as it came, and the town has little to show for it.
We should not be quick to judge Ogbomoso, for the town’s story is our story. Both old-money (financially established families) and new money (the rising bourgeoisie middle-class) across the country still spend a bulk of their wealth on socially expected endeavours: ceremonies, real estate, fleet of cars etc. There are a few exceptions to this, and those exceptions represent a majority of the families that rule Nigeria’s economic sector. What if the people with real estate locked up in Abuja and Lagos had spent their money on enterprises that would have involved calculated economic and financial risks, and gains?
Perhaps, we should be slow in judging old money and new money too, for we can ask this of the country as a whole: What if we had spent wisely the windfall gotten from oil, and squandered by various governments across the military and civilian regimes, on the now-declining mining/manufacturing/agricultural sectors of the country?
We can, however, judge Nigeria, for, at a time, this was a country with wealth from the oil wonder bank, singing and dancing Yahooze into international disrepute. Now, the rave has ended and we have nothing to show for it. There’s a recession in town now, and with it, the wonder banks and pyramid schemes are returning, but not in Ogbomoso. We learnt our lessons once already.
[1] A phrase from the town’s adopted anthem. Originally in Yoruba: Ilu ti a tedo si arin odan
0 comments:
Post a Comment