Excerpts from a 28 page publication written by Prof W. Akintunde Isaacs-Sodeye in 1992.

Chapter 2

THE DIAGNOSIS

Genesis of the disease - A flashback.

A. 1965. It was the year 1965, I had been a Senior House Officer in the Outpatients' Emergency Unit at Lagos Teaching Hospital. It was very busy and there were many cases to see. Taxi-cabs came and went. Some drivers stayed to wait for their clients. Just outside the windows, there was a constant hum of chatter. This was a "window" to the world of Lagos. These drivers saw everything, knew everything. "Their government cannot last much longer, the poor cannot get justice, nothing seems to work" that was the trend in the gossip. They were dissecting the situation of living in Lagos and Nigeria.

There were great parties every week-end in Lagos. If one desired to be approved of by elite society, one had to "spray" -.money at parties often. How effective you were as a prominent member of the government or society was determined by how much money you disbursed at parties to artistes, dancers, relatives etc. How much it cost when you got married or buried your father or mother might make or break you in your career. Who you were was spelt out, not by the level of your take-home pay but by how much you spent in public. Truly, conspicious expenditure has always been the best determinant of earning capacity. As a result since we all shopped in the same market, prices rose steadily. People were induced to cut corners.

The rat race was not confined to the individual level - whole clans (population groups) entered into competition. Indeed, the early history of the Nigerian disease was mainly a story of ethnic political rivalries, because no sense of national consciousness existed, it was every man for himself. Thus, in the first half of our thirty year - plague, inter-ethnic competition made it difficult for Nigeria to pull forward.

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