By Remi Adekoya

During a recent trip spent travelling across Nigeria, a banker friend of mine advised me to “keep things positive” if I ever shared my observations in “western media”. I pointed out Nigeria is currently in dire economic straits; many civil servants haven’t received a salary this year, pensions are going unpaid, people are struggling to feed their families and children are actually starving to death in the country’s north-east. “Writing about it won’t help those people. And you know negative western media stories on Africa only make these white folk and others look down on us,” my friend replied. Over the years, I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed by numerous middle- and upper-class Nigerians. In fact, it is an attitude I’ve observed amongst better-off Africans in general.

When it comes to western media coverage of Africa, the continent’s privileged classes are usually more concerned with the perceptions created than with the realities depicted. They find images of suffering Africans annoying because these “perpetuate negative stereotypes” by “portraying Africa as a poor and backward continent.” The actual suffering being depicted rarely elicits as much outrage as the fact it is being exposed for the world to see.

Meanwhile, whenever I chatted with regular Nigerians, once they heard I’m a journalist (in Europe), they’d say something like: “Make sure people over there know we are suffering here,” or “Let them know how bad things are in Nigeria, someone needs to talk to our government.” The last worry on their mind was how Nigeria’s image might suffer in the process.

It is middle-class intellectuals and the political or business elite who love to complain about how Africa is “misrepresented” in western media, not the poor and oppressed who are the subject of that reporting. But the privileged classes resent seeing Africa’s widespread poverty on display. Instead, they demand “balanced media coverage”. That sounds perfectly reasonable, but what exactly do they mean?

For instance, 62.6% of Nigerians currently live in poverty, compared to 27.2% in 1980. Yet for some Nigerians, “balanced media coverage” amounts to talking up the latest individual success story as evidence “not all Africans are poor and suffering” and that the country is “making progress”. But what kind of progress sees the percentage of people living in poverty more than double since 1980? It is countries like China, India or Brazil who have reduced poverty levels significantly in recent decades that have the right to speak of progress, yet some Nigerians will insist media show the “positives” in a country where poverty has ballooned in the same period.

A 2015 Pew Research survey revealed sub-Saharan Africa as a whole has made the least progress among all developing regions toward reducing extreme poverty since 1990. The percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day in the region currently stands at 41%, more than twice as high as any other region in the world (Southern Asia comes next at 17%). Of course, inconvenient statistics can always be brushed aside.

In 2014 the World Bank reported that Nigeria had the third highest number of poor people in the world. The then president Goodluck Jonathan bristled at the suggestion, saying: “If you talk about ownership of private jets, Nigeria will be among the first 10 countries, yet they are saying that Nigeria is among the five poorest countries.” Furthermore he pointed out Aliko Dangote, a Nigerian businessman, “was recently classified among the 25 richest people in the world”. Wasn’t this proof Nigerian poverty is grossly exaggerated?

Jonathan’s ludicrous response aptly illustrates the prevalent attitude within the privileged classes. It is a combination of denial bordering on the delusional coupled with a post-colonial complex – emotional responses which attempt to shout down unpleasant statistics and imply that whenever the western world talks of African poverty, the aim is to paint the continent in a bad light.

Read more at http://roape.net/2016/10/14/nigerias-chattering-classes-poverty-denial-africa/