EXCLUSIVE: Wanted at Home Nigerian Journalist David Hundeyin Discusses Crime and Poverty

Police with INTERPOL have been conducting raids against Nigeria's organized crime mafia known as "Black Axe" this past year. Photo by INTERPOL

In Part II of “Wanted at Home” our one-on-one interview with David Hundeyin, he discusses the toll his persecution by the Nigerian government is taking on himself and his family. He also goes into detail about what his relatives think of his actions and gives the world an idea about what it is really like living in Nigeria, with the high rates of crime and an economy that is steadily shrinking. In Part I of “Wanted at Home,” David talked about him not being surprised the regime of President Bola Tinubu would issue a warrant for his arrest, or how being a thorn in the president’s side has brought things to this point.

Q: You come from a family that is pretty well-off do you not?

A: Look, I have cousins in the police, military and uniformed services. I have uncles and aunties who also have political positions all over the government civil service and public service establishment. If you are familiar with how Nigeria goes… in America it is the private sector that has all of the power. The way you look at Silicon Valley is the way we look at the government in Nigeria. Because the government is by far the largest participant in the Nigerian economy, it is also the wealthiest part of the economy. If you have plans to run a mixed economy officially but it is mixed in the sense where maybe 40 percent of the country is run by a competitive market, the people who are in government is like the who’s who. So having a family that is part of the government is really a part of the ruling establishment. Even my dad, who was a senior civil servant as well before he retired and went into private real estate. So, it’s like who does this guy think he is doing the things that I do?

Having all of these relatives working in the government and you working as an investigative reporter must make for some interesting family dinner conversations. What do your relatives think about your actions?

Long story short, everyone thinks I’m either an inspiration or completely insane. My family is pretty much split down the middle on the subject of David. I have family members who haven’t said a word to me in five or six years. I have family members who see what I do and I’m like one of their favorite people. I would not say it is even. I would say there are more family members who broadly do not favor what I do. Some see me as the black sheep of the family. The majority however see me as more of an inconvenience. They know the things I’m saying are true and they know for Nigeria to become a better place there needs to be some sort of social cleansing. They know that people like me are important, but they wonder why I can’t leave it to someone else. Why does it have to be me? We are Hundeyins. We don’t need to get our hands dirty like that. Leave it to one of the great unwashed…it shouldn’t be one of us doing this. I’m soiling the family’s name by turning into some of dissident. I can’t be one of the anti-establishment people because we are the establishment is how the majority of them see me. They don’t dislike me necessarily and they don’t turn their nose up at what I do, but they just kind of wish it could be someone else and that I could become a doctor like my brother.

So, you are putting their positions in the country in jeopardy?

Absolutely.

You are disparaging the family name in their view?

Yes.

I know Americans have very little knowledge about what is happening in the rest of the world. A lot of that is because of the type of news media that they consume, or which is offered. The journalism is more for-profit driven purposes. What is it that is really going on in Nigeria?

It's a mess. I’ll start with the security side of things. If you go to Lagos or Abuja, it looks like everything is fine. These are fairly modern cities. You have high-speed internet, metro trains and all of that good stuff. But, if you venture 20 kilometers outside of those cities, there is just basically the Wild West. The major highways connecting the major cities in Nigeria are for all intensive purposes, ungoverned spaces. If you have a friend or family member who is going to do a long-distance road trip within Nigeria, it is a cause for prayer.

Wow!

You are basically gambling with your life. It is almost like a daily occurrence where you hear about a busload of passengers on the expressway being kidnapped. The kidnappers are demanding a high ransom and if the ransom is not paid, those people actually do die. That is a regular thing to the point where, while I wouldn’t say it doesn’t make the news anymore, but rather it only makes the news when it happens in significant numbers. So, for example, if say five people got kidnapped today along the road, it probably won’t make the news. But say 50 people got kidnapped, then yeah it will most likely be on the news. That is how normalized this has become. And if you are anything close to approaching the upper-middle class, you don’t even use the interstate highways anymore. You just fly. That is just the reality.

So how does all of the security problems effect other parts of Nigeria?

This ties into the economic side of things. Nigeria’s per capita income currently has basically halved over the past ten years. There have been huge wealth destruction events taking place. As of 2014, Nigeria’s GDP was 512 billion, the largest economy in Africa that was projected to hit a trillion by 2026. Now Nigeria is the fourth largest economy in Africa and the GDP has shrunk to about 285 million. The per capita income now is about $1,500 dollars a year for an adult. There is a huge poverty problem in Nigeria. It is what has been referred to as the global capitol of poverty. That means there are more people living in extreme poverty in Nigeria then there are in India. Even though India has about six times Nigeria’s population. Put that side by side with the security situation and you essentially have a crisis which is being fed by an everlasting supply chain of poor and desperate young men, who do not have any education or any sort of prospects in life, especially towards the middle belt and the northern regions of Nigeria.

Now add to that that within those big cities, something like it is estimated that every dollar circulated in the Nigerian economy, 70 cents is spent in Lagos. The remainder is taken up mostly by the other four major population centers and then the rest of the country has to basically live on nothing. So, there is extreme wealth inequality.

Black-Americans have a romanticized view of Nigeria. To hear some tell it, everything in Lagos is great. Black Americans go there, they party, they have a good time, but they really don’t see what the problems are. They don’t have a clue about some of the human atrocities that are taking place in other parts of Nigeria such as the rapes of women and the fighting amongst tribal factions.

The per capita of $1,500 a year is certainly not going to look like that if you go to Lagos or Abuja. It looks like people are doing a lot better than that there because they are. Once you go outside of those cities however, where the slight majority of Nigerians live, something like 52 percent live in rural areas, they are living in abject poverty. Like they farm to eat kind of poverty.

The extra layer on top of all of this, on paper, Nigeria has had possibly the most generous opportunity to actually industrialize itself. Between 1971 and 1977, which was the so-called “oil boom decade,” the capita income adjusted in today’s money was approaching something like $5,000 a month, which would put Nigerian families in the global middle-income bracket.

But Nigeria being Nigeria, this influx of cash wasn’t used to industrialize the country. It was used to fund a few people’s Swiss bank accounts and make a few people very wealthy. So even with Nigeria being as dirt poor as it is, it also has one of the largest concentrations of billionaires on the planet, often with them living side-by-side with some of the poorest people in the world. That is an overall high-level view of Nigeria. It is a very weird situation.

 In Part III of our interview with David Hundeyin, we will discuss the energy crisis in Nigeria and how it is contributing to the pollution crisis in the country of 219,000 million people. Also, he talks about how his book, “Breaking Point: A Journalist’s Quest for Salvation in Nigeria’s Chaos,” is making people around the world more aware of the nation’s problems and why he believes it is so important for American and British journalists to start covering the regime of Bola Tinubu and asking some tough questions of their own governments.