Extremes
That Lagos manages to create, deploy and multiply any significant value at all is magic.
Lagos is a city of extremes. Everyone knows that and everyone it seems has come to accept that it is the motif that runs throughout the city. Extremes.
Last Sunday while waiting for my ride to Ikeja GRA, from a failed expedition to a restaurant in Maryland, I noticed some guy lying motionless on the road not minding his white outfit. There were people close by him who didn’t lift a finger. But after a few seconds other people closer to him noticed, dragged him to a corner and tried to help him stand up. “E don take something,” one burly man waved it off after taking a look. The small crowd which gathered melted too, and the unconscious was helped away.
Minutes later the man who was on the floor was sitting on a small long stool beside a metal shop, head bowed, and everyone else was going about their business as if we did not just witness a life-or-death situation. Drive 30 minutes in almost any possible direction from Ikoyi, one of Lagos’s wealthier neighbourhoods, and you will have completed Dante’s inferno, Lagos edition. Gaudy displays of opulence are sandwiched between poverty, and both sides battle a host of similar low quality problems with varying degrees of often costly success.
Regardless of where you are, the extreme characteristics of the city will find you. Sometimes multiple times in one day. No one, not even Nigeria’s president who was in town during the holidays, is able to escape Lagos’ extremes, regardless of how many layers of security and ostentatious comfort he’s tucked away in.
The extremes of Lagos is also how the city works, forcing many of its residents to constantly switch between sophistication and mild civility and bizarre disorder.
It’s inside this maelstrom that “startup” people are constantly jumping in, finding and extracting millions of dollars worth of value, or flailing around before dipping below the waves, pulled under the same vigorous force of nature that made jumping into the whirlpool attractive in the first place.
There’s a small building on Nnobi street Surulere that doesn’t look like much from outside. But is the “office” of a business that commands the respect of tens of thousands of startup people across Africa, has generated millions in revenue and possibly (indirectly) contributed tens of millions more in investments and financial value for other businesses. I worked for one of the real (online) manifestations of Big Cabal Media for a little over 24 months, but because I do not live in Lagos, I only visited recently… when I no longer worked for the business. Big Cabal’s media properties more than make up for the lack of a flamboyant office front façade.
In this respect, it’s a lot like many of the businesses it covers. The physical façade matters less and less because you can only do so much. But the rest of what creates and multiplies tangible business value must be hacktimized. It is often the only way to benefit from the other (positive) extreme swing. So everyone is trained by default often to ignore the façade (pretty or plain) and step inside for a lesson—or several—in wrangling beauty from chaos.
Years of doing this day-in and day-out is why Lagos, in spite of its many contradictions, is the startup capital of Africa—sorry I make the rules here. It’s produced the most billion-dollar valued tech startups in the last 12 years, indeed in all of Africa’s ~30 year old technology business history.
The city is certainly not the most efficient—too much energy is wasted fighting the “normal” to create, deploy and multiply economic and even social value. And sometimes this create small and big enemies. But the startup people of Lagos are relatively more effective than most places at handling its affairs. Especially when the startup people are able to find a focus and rallying point.
Given the overall chaos, the magic of Lagos is that it is able to capture any significant value at all from the daily extreme gyrations of the city. I suppose it’s the bigger story of Nigeria. But Lagos is an amplified concentration of this story. I respect it.