Nation on Board

by Lynn Schler

  We feel to bring to your notice also that before the vessel left Apapa wharf for Port Harcourt the crew have worked many hours over time and on reaching Sapele and Port Harcourt most of our crew have put in for same few pounds which they were quite sure they have in bank. The captain refused and cut it down.

  As a seaman, we work with our lives in hand to face any danger confronting the ship at all times and we must be given the chance to enjoy ourselves before eventuality.

  While the vessel was at Port Harcourt we notice there was no beer onboard for 3 days before the vessel sail out and this was before the captain and the rest of his officer have consumed the beer for a party being sponsored by the Captain.

  . . . We are sure the explanation we made in this letter to you is enough and if the captain fails to give us the money we ask for we demand the company should repatriate us home without further delay.85

  The captain’s log refuted many of the claims as false allegations and took no action but to ensure that the crew was being fed. According to seamen interviewed, it was instances such as these, in which there was unfair treatment at the hands of some officers, that led to the decline in discipline in the NNSL ships. The following description of the abuses of power reveals the bitter disregard seamen developed toward some Nigerian officers:

  One Nigerian captain told me that he wanted a crate of beer and he told me to carry it for him. I told him I don’t work for him and I can’t carry it because he didn’t pay me. He told me to clean his room for him, I abandoned it. . . . One chief engineer (then we had both white and black men), when we were serving, he asked for water, I replied that water is there and he said put some in the cup for me. There I was very angry and I told him that if you are waiting for me to put some water in the cup for you, I will not do it. He insisted on water, I was just looking at him. All other officers who were there laughed and the white captain shook his head.86

  Another seaman claimed that abuse of power was commonplace and widespread, and fostered deep-seated anger among the crew:

  The only trouble that came is usually from the officers. This often happen when most of the officers want to show off in front of their girlfriends by directing some rating to go and wash their underwear. When some rating now say no, it became the source of conflict. Some officer also have good relationship with the ratings while majority were bad. So, we know how to treat them because the Bible said that by their fruit, we shall know them. You, if you are good, we would be good to you and if you are bad we do the same to you. This problem has nothing to do with the management.87

  For some, the experience with Nigerian captains was so disappointing that they ultimately preferred the British. The disappointments with the NNSL were linked to Nigerianization: “When our people took over, there was relative peace, a short-lived peace, because the way and manner our Nigerian officers spoke to us was forceful, so either you liked it or not, we must do whatever we were told to do, obey first before complaining.” When asked if Nigerian bosses were better than the white captains, he said, “I can’t say they were better because they were both educated in the act of seamanship, but the patience the white bosses had, the Nigerian bosses never had it.”88

  Seamen who had formerly imagined themselves as “workers of the world” were now, in no uncertain terms, workers of Nigeria:

  Under the British, we usually sailed to Germany, Liverpool, Spain; if by chance, they improvised and sailed to India, the British captains paid us for such improvisation, it may be little, but that was not so with Nigerian captains. . . . ED line has improved the salary of its workers according to international standard but we, in the national line, still remain the same. . . . In ED line, we worked according to the law and when you do that you are better off, but in the national line anything could happen. Lack of discipline. . . . Even British ship officers used to taunt us that between British officers and Nigerian officers, who is better? Really, we were happy that we had our fellow Nigerians as captains and ship officers, but they maltreated us.89

  As seen in this review of working conditions and labor relations on NNSL ships, the appearance of black captains did not necessarily bring lasting harmony to NNSL ships. Conflicts with Nigerian captains and officers, and a deep disappointment with working conditions on NNSL ships, led to a longing for employment on colonial shipping vessels. Some seamen came to romanticize the relationships they had with the British officers, but these testimonies are in fact powerful indictments of the National Shipping Line as an anticlimax to seamen’s aspirations. This disappointment was only to grow over time, and evolved into a general critique of the postindependence era in Nigeria. As will be seen in the next chapter, resources of the NNSL became increasingly scarce over time, and all those associated with the Nigerian National Shipping Line, from seamen to captains and officers and management, manuevered to maximize opportunities against the backdrop of growing insecurity. The optimism that accompanied seamen’s testimonies of decolonization ultimately gave way to images of corruption and decline.

  6

  Seamen in the Shadow of the NNSL Decline and Demise

  IN AN INTERVIEW CONDUCTED in Liverpool in 2009 with a former Elder Dempster executive, the topic of discussion was the decline and demise of the Nigerian National Shipping Line (NNSL). At one point in the conversation, Kenneth Birch suggested that the process of establishing the NNSL was too hasty, and the buyout of the technical partners happened too early. Birch was critical of the politicization of the enterprise. He acknowledged the pressures that led to the Nigerian government’s decision, but he suggested that “they weren’t ready yet.”1 The sentence stayed with me throughout the remaining course of my research on the NNSL. These remarks suggested that the fate of the NNSL could have been different had there been institutional, structural, or political changes to the ways in which the Nigerian line was established and run. Throughout the interviews and archival research, I have spent much time speculating about what political, structural, or economic conditions could have or should have been in place so that the Nigerian National Shipping Line would have succeeded.

  But in an interview in Lagos two years later, a former engineer with the NNSL provided a very different perspective. According to Olukayode Akinsoji, the failure of the shipping line was not linked to political interventions or institutional deficiencies, but rather to the cultural distinctiveness of Nigeria. As he explained it, “Shipping depends on some elements of culture. You have to have the right culture to keep abreast in shipping, and if you don’t have that culture, it will be difficult for you to sustain shipping.” When I asked him what specifically about “Nigerian culture” put Nigerians at a disadvantage in the shipping industry, he spoke about the “time consciousness” that was lacking from Nigerian society: “Time consciousness, which shipping is all about. Time consciousness is very important. Take it from a point of view that a ship has a life span and it is operating in a competitive environment and you must optimize from the vessel within its life span in a competitive environment. Whoever does well under these circumstances often has the advantage. Based on that, everything has to fall in place. It is about a lack of time awareness.”2

  The differences in the perspectives of Birch and Akinsoji are reflective of broader academic debates regarding the political and economic history of Nigeria in the postcolonial era. Confronting a history of extreme political instability, economic failures, vast disparities in the distribution of wealth, and massive, endemic corruption, scholars have debated the roots and causes of Nigeria’s postcolonial predicaments. Debates such as these are not limited to scholars of Nigeria, and recent years have seen significant contributions to academic deliberations regarding the economic and political difficulties faced by postcolonial states in Africa. On the one side of this debate are those who identify external influences, particularly colonialism, as the cause of institutional weaknesses leading to political instability and economic stagnation in the postcolonial era. Mahmood Mamdani, for example, has argued
that the institutional legacy of colonialism remained intact following independence in Africa, and as a result, there has been little change in the nature of power in the postcolonial era. While some variations exist, Mamdani claimed that throughout the continent, the preservation of colonial institutions of rule resulted in the continuation of centralized coercive authority, nepotism, and corruption. Postcolonial elites continue to reap the benefits of despotic rule inherited from the colonial state, while the masses fail to organize any meaningful resistance to authoritarianism.3 Proponents of underdevelopment or dependency theories focus on the economic legacies of colonialism and claim that political independence did not translate into economic independence. As Alois Mlambo wrote, postcolonial states “inherited non-viable, mono-cultural economies,” and remained marginalized and disadvantaged in a “generally disabling global economic environment.”4 With regard to Nigeria specifically, Eghosa Osaghae has argued that colonialism introduced an “extractionist” state to Nigeria, whose sole purpose was to facilitate the smooth exploitation of resources and expropriation of resources, without investing in social services or development schemes. The postcolonial state, he argued, was the direct descendant of this colonial model.5 Abonyi Nnaemeka claimed that colonialism introduced a form of statehood that lacked cultural roots in Africa, and the state therefore became an “amoral entity” that was carried over into the postcolonial era.6

  Alternatively, recent years have seen the appearance of critiques and theories that attribute postcolonial political and economic predicaments to cultural norms and social systems deeply rooted in local African societies. Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, for example, claim that culturally entrenched social systems based on patrimonialism and patron-client networks centered around “Big Men” have survived and thrived in postcolonial societies, hindering the development in postcolonial Africa of democracies based on Western notions of individualism.7 In the context of Nigeria, there is a large body of literature on the role of what Richard Joseph has called “prebendalism” and its deep roots in Nigerian politics. According to Joseph, in the system of prebendalism, politicians see their office as a means of exploiting resources of the state for their own personal wealth and aggrandizement.8 Prebendalism underscores how and why Nigerian ruling elites use public office to parcel out national resources to their inner circles, but as Chudi Uwazurike wrote, it is a system “whose ethos now permeates down through the culture.”9 The patronage associated with prebendalism also has deep roots in many local political traditions. As Isaac Albert has argued, patron-client relations were the basis of political, economic, and social life in the precolonial cultures of the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo. Hierarchies and inequalities were personified in “godfather” figures, who were gatekeepers to power and provided resources and security to subordinates and loyalists. Present-day godfatherism, Albert wrote, “is a primordial tradition taken to a criminal extent.”10

  Thus, scholarly explanations for the “failures” of the postcolonial waver between institutional/structural perspectives on the one hand, and more culturally centered explanations on the other. But whether coming from the institutional or the cultural perspective, it seems that the notion of “failure” drives the literature on the postcolonial Nigerian state. How might the failure of the NNSL fit into this larger debate of politics and economics in Nigeria? The history of the Nigerian National Shipping Line follows broader trajectories that characterize postcolonial political and economic developments in Nigeria. What began as an ideological venture to symbolize Nigerian independence soon deteriorated into a breeding ground for economic waste and corruption. At all levels, from management to captains and officers, and finally seamen, those who took part in the history of the NNSL attempted to navigate a complex political and economic terrain and to turn any circumstance into an opportunity. This bleeding of the company resources meant there were no resources for maintaining ships, paying bills, and upholding contracts. By the 1990s, the NNSL was in a deep financial crisis. Ships were seized abroad for unpaid bills, and the periodic injections of funds from the government disappeared along with the rest of the company resources. The NNSL was finally shut down in 1994 by the head of state, Gen. Sani Abacha.

  The NNSL decline toward the misappropriation of resources and blatant acts of illegality must be seen against a broader backdrop that is full of complexities. Daniel Smith’s work offers a useful model for taking into account the multitude of structural and cultural factors underlying the demise of the NNSL. In a study of contemporary Nigeria, Smith set out to understand what he described as a society plagued by corruption. Smith argued that corruption is neither solely institutional nor solely cultural, but rather rooted in “the complex intertwining of popular morality, contemporary social processes and postcolonial statecraft.”11 Nigerians have had a complex and contradictory relationship to corruption, as they engage in the social reproduction of corruption “even as they are also its primary victims and principal critics.” Thus, while Nigerians frequently condemn corruption, they also participate in behaviors that enable and even glorify it. But corruption is not experienced in the same ways across class, and it is essential to pay attention to what stories are being told about corruption and who is telling them. According to Smith, the focus on discourses and practices of corruption can provide rare insights into the aspirations and frustrations of Nigerians, but it can also reveal the enormous inequalities that characterize postcolonial Nigerian society.

  Following the suggestion of Daniel Smith, this chapter will examine the complex set of factors that led to economic insecurity and inequality in the NNSL as the backdrop for understanding the decline to misappropriation, illegality, and, finally, liquidation. It will be seen that the NNSL, which began as a political endeavor, was underfunded and mismanaged by politicians and their networks of clients, who had little understanding or interest in developing a successful shipping company. Instability was exacerbated by a lack of committed leadership, and in the absence of authority, all parties involved attempted to seize opportunities as a safety net in a climate of immense uncertainty. The examination of the demise of the NNSL demonstrates that material inequalities become a breeding ground for corruption, and corruption can therefore not be understood in isolation from inequality and injustice. It will be seen that the turn to illegality, in the forms of theft or drug trafficking on the part of seamen, or misappropriation of company resources on the part of officers and management, cannot be divorced from broader political and economic contexts.

  THE RISE AND FALL OF THE NNSL

  The troubled history of the Nigerian National Shipping Line has been documented by several scholars. From the start, the endeavor faced disadvantages rooted in the inequalities of the political economy of the international shipping industry. Political and economic circumstances in Nigeria also greatly limited the potential for the NNSL to succeed: There was a lack of sufficient resources to operate and expand, a profoundly unstable political climate in Nigeria that led to a revolving door of management hirings and firings, and an acute lack of the managerial and technical expertise necessary for running a successful shipping venture. This list of insurmountable challenges brought debilitating instability to the NNSL over time, leading the way to abuses by those who had little vested interest in the growth and success of the company over the long term. The NNSL thus became an easy source of revenue for politicians and their networks of clients who lacked both the knowledge and the commitment necessary for nurturing a successful shipping venture. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, economic booms added lifelines to the company that were quickly exploited or wasted, only prolonging the inevitable outcome of liquidation that came in 1994.

  As seen in chapter 4, the establishment of the NNSL was primarily an expression of economic nationalism, and had great symbolic significance for a nation on the eve of independence from colonial rule, but the viability of the venture as a successful shipping business was given little consideration. Gerald Chidi wrote, “Th
e ships were indeed expected to play the role of ‘Ambassadors’ for the emerging independent country.”12 Beginning with the hasty buyout of the technical partners in 1961, political agendas shaped the history of the NNSL until its demise in the 1990s, and ideological rhetoric was continually invoked by politicians and management to explain company policies.

  From the start, appointments to the management of the NNSL were political, resulting in the selection of company directors and board members who had little knowledge of the shipping industry. Already in 1962, Elder Dempster officials were concerned by the impact that this politicization would have on the NNSL, as seen in the following correspondence regarding the appointment of Kolawole Balogun, an NCNC politician with close ties to Nnamdi Azikiwe, to replace Louis Ojukwu: “The new Chairman is by background a politician and there is no doubt that his appointment as Chairman of the Nigerian National Lines is entirely a political one. In these circumstances, Chief Balogun will no doubt associate himself with the type of publicity to which the Nigerian press is always very willing to listen in relation to the National Shipping Line.”13 The fears of this Elder Dempster official were not unfounded, and Balogun did indeed use his new position to unleash a virulent critique in the press of the global shipping industry and the disadvantages faced by developing countries aspiring to ship their cargo at reasonable rates. As Lloyd’s reported in 1962, Chief Balogun took over the chairmanship of the NNSL by declaring “The Battle for Cargo”:

  The Nigerian National Line must have its own share of cargo and we will not be brushed aside by all sorts of formulae worked out with no other intention than to keep developing countries in their place. We do not ask to be pampered but we do ask to be given our own share of trade. We propose to expand. Nigeria will build new ships. We are aware that many shipbuilding yards all over the world are now offering reasonable prices and easy terms. Naturally, we are tempted to secure the best ships, pay reasonable prices and securing the most favourable terms having regard to many commitments of a developing country like Nigeria. First, we would naturally look forward to doing business with our old friends, but if we are taken for granted we would look further afield.14