In the ghetto or on a yacht?

Understanding Nigeria's obsession with wealth and hypergamy

On the 4th of November 2022, Nigerian billionaire Femi Otedola turned 60. As part of the festivities to celebrate that milestone, the Otedola family rented the Christina O, a luxury yacht owned by Aristotle Onassis, the second husband of the widow of John F Kennedy, for three weeks at an estimated 2 million dollars. His daughter, actress Temi Otedola informed her followers on Tiktok that it has apparently been one of his wishes to vacation on this yacht, and this birthday provided the perfect excuse to splurge. Her vlogs of the Otedolas revelling away from our prying eyes lent a charming amateurish quality  to their lives, emphasising that even on a glamorous yacht, the Otedola’s were just people. 

Except of course for Temi’s fiance, rapper and tech entrepreneur, Mr. Eazi. He’d joined them on the yacht for the festivities in line with their tradition of private family getaways, as he had done many times before. Except now he seemed less guarded, more open to introducing some unpolished humour into his interactions with the senior Otedola’s, and having that side of their relationship shared to the world. This change didn’t go unnoticed. Speculations once whispered, were now publicly paraded, with people taking sides to either accuse him of scheming his way into generational wealth or congratulate him achieving some version of the Nigerian dream. Neither side is right of course, as these things are rarely ever that simple. 

Up until this birthday, Eazi and Temi’s relationship had existed in a universe separate from the Otedola family and its sphere of influence. Mr. Eazi got famous from mainstreaming ‘Banku music’, a sub-genre of Afropop that blended contemporary hip-life and Afrobeats. His wealth came from rejigging some of the structures he’d used to fund his early tech startup ideas and convincing investors they could see similar returns in investment from Nigerian music. He met Temi Otedola through her sister Dj Cuppy and began dating soon after. 

The couple were pleasant but discreet, carefully curating the little that they shared of their life together to project ease and simplicity. Displays of ostentatious wealth were rare, and often from Mr. Eazi instead of Temi. Even their engagement, after six years together, was private and picturesque, framed against an European skyline. But this yacht vacation seemed to shift the locus of their relationship, situating Mr. Eazi in the Otedola universe in a way that introduced him as a person of interest, able to introduce unpredictably to the protective monotony of their privileged lives. One observation in particular caught my attention, and put me on a path to understand why these kinds of unions and hypergamy as a whole draws so much interest. 

Nigeria is a poor country. 90 million Nigerians live below the global poverty line, subsisting on less than one dollar a day. Maybe even half a dollar, considering how much the Naira has depreciated against the dollar in the last 4 years. The Nigerian middle class is a myth, used to create class solidarity with the stupendously wealthy. If you are not rich in Nigeria, you are either marginally comfortable and multi-dimensionally poor. A statistic that brings this vague concept into focus is a report by the NDIC that alleges only 2% of Nigeria’s 70 million account holders have more than N500,000 in their personal bank accounts at any point in time, about 1.4 million people out of an estimated 200 million. The prevalence of Nigeria’s ultra rich is probably less than 10% of that number, a ratio that skewers the balance of power so completely, our only recourse as a nation is to obsess with wealth and our relative proximity to it. 

A consequence of this severe disparity is that the average Nigerian never experiences the privileges associated with proximity to wealth. A common example would be the aversion to suffering that compels rich people to invest in infrastructure and governance so they can better enjoy the perks wealth affords them. When enough rich people congregate in any one city or state, their private interests overlap, creating momentum that reshapes their shared home in ways that reflect their acquired tastes. These projects run the gamut from the colonial (Laying rail track from coast to heartland to ease the export of stolen resources), to the contemporary (fighting laws that seek to raise taxes), encompassing the niche (lobbying for a cosmetic surgery ward at the local hospital), and the frivolous (funding a bush airstrip for that occasional night flight). What matters is that these projects, while greenlit and executed for personal gratification, ultimately become useful to all.  

The average Nigerian has never benefited from this kind of largesse, because the majority of the Nigerian elite made their money from rent seeking, embezzlement and dysfunction. Because their fortunes are not as a result of creating value, they have no incentive to share, or reshape the cities in which they made their wealth in beneficial ways that trickle down to every resident. Instead they prefer to skulk around European cities elevated by the acquired tastes of its former despots, oblivious to the lesson intertwined with the legacies of these cities. 

The best way to launder illegitimate wealth is to seed it back in the land you pillaged, refining the system to increase future yield. 

The castles, shrines, museum bound treasures people marvel at today, used to amuse or protect the rich and humiliate or control the poor, were symbols of oppression for the people whose labour and resources were used to build and maintain them. Even though most are stripped by time and progress of their original function and repurposed as tourist locations or repositories of history, these monuments are remain just as potent at sustaining the legacies of its rich, amoral patrons who saw violence and oppression as a worthy price to pay for ‘progress’. 

Legacies are important because they enforce social order and legitimise the systems used to extract wealth. Before the internet transformed urban life in Nigeria, there was no way for the average Nigerian to interact with the country’s elite, no arena to air their opinions on how the commonwealth was used or misused. Access, the only value system understood by the poor and the wealthy in equal measure, contextualised all interactions between both sides.  Propaganda was rife and all the unsanctioned information the average pre-internet Nigerian knew about our elites existed exclusively in the realm of gossip, trafficked by magazines like City people and Encomium. Gossip that could be confirmed as truth was valuable, and magazines like Ovation and ThisDay Style fed fat on the hunger for verifiable information about our ultra rich. Social media has democratised access, eliminating the funnels these middle men used to enrich themselves. It also made the traditional propaganda channels obsolete, so in its place our elite have documentaries, lavish fan pages and social media accounts, digital galleries where the average Nigerian can witness curated displays of generational wealth and make their own conclusions.

The internet also created a new social class whose wealth was not reliant on patronage to powerful people, the Nigerian nouveau riche if you will. They steamrolled traditional barriers to knowledge, and cornered markets by offering them services at a cheaper price than what was standard for the developed world.  Even at a disadvantage, they made enough to build a moat of  privilege, escaping the morass of extreme poverty.

The structurally rich, like CEOs and the CTOs of the startup ecosystem (under which Mr. Eazi falls) are part of the Nigerian nouveau riche because their wealth comes from addressing a fundamental problem with new tools or techniques. A house’s function is constant, but each generation quibbles on how best to use its limited space. Creatives who are rewarded for servicing the communal but unpredictable need for entertainment or distraction are also part of this social class. They barter the fame and influence they wield with the corporations who have historically underwritten these kinds of endeavours in exchange for wealth, and market products and services on their behalf. Successful entrepreneurs leverage solidarity with the markets they serve, growing up to the point where they exhaust goodwill and ‘exit’ their companies, exchanging control for the freedom to experiment and a comfortable cushion of wealth to break a possible fall from grace . 

The nouveau riche all come to the realisation that social mobility permanently changes how a person is perceived by their peers. No matter how understated, wealth introduces an imbalance into relationships, tilting power in favour of the person with a higher tax bracket. Even the most benevolent rich people come to realise this imbalance leads to expectations on the part of the person disadvantaged in the relationship. Those expectations bubble into support if the nouveau riche person is proactive about sharing their wealth and transparent about how it is made, and sours into entitlement if the person is reactive and discreet. Resentment is expectation at its sourest, the tang scored on to the tongue by the boundaries the nouveau riche person enforces to ensure their wealth is not depleted in service of offsetting relationship deficits. They also learn that there is a limit to how much growth they can manage on their own, an inflection point where they can either accept the limits of their influence or engage the behemoth that is generational wealth.

Nouveau riche people learn to create distance between themselves and their dependents, and begin either consciously or unconsciously to reserve business, fraternisation and deeper connections for people within or above their cadre . It is most obvious in marriage, because of the social contract that binds people in a union, requiring them to share wealth and influence. In a country like Nigeria where the vast majority of people are poor, the nouveau riche find themselves stuck in a rut of hypergamy, either as the benefactor or the beneficiary. 

As a benefactor, marriage requires a nouveau riche person to commit their present wealth and future stability in the hands of another person whose intentions are never clear until the union is final and binding. The trust that is required to make this commitment and the expectations that come with it are not criteria that can be fully articulated prior to marriage, even though  prenuptial agreements and post-nuptial agreements are attempts to notarise and enforce them. Trust and expectations must be actively negotiated over the course of the marriage, with willing and objective participants. Willing, objective participants extend grace when communicating, fully aware that external influences pull on marriage, distorting the context in which the union was first finalised. Anything other than this usually leads to disaster, which is why many nouveau riche people come to prefer hypergamy as beneficiaries, marrying their way into the elite cadres of generational wealth renowned for their far-reaching influence.

The price of admission into the cadre of generational wealth is wealth. Stupendous wealth affords its wielders the ability to circumvent order and structure and as a result they live in a rarefied reality, superimposed over our regular one. Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of media billionaire Walt Disney  has spoken extensively about the corrupting power of ultra-privilege and the detachment she experienced as an heiress. She talks of private jets and exclusive lounges, gated estates and member’s only clubs, privileges that exist to preserve wealth and reinforce social hierarchies. Even philanthropy is a feature of generational wealth as a way to depersonalise obligations and address expectations at scale, sidestepping the messiness of person-to-person interaction. To bully one’s way into those circles and demand attention requires an appetite for risk, gambling present stability as collateral in the hopes of a bigger payout. The problem with this gamble for access to the generational wealth is that most people who attain nouveau riche status do so by drawing tribute from a section of the paying public that hasn’t been captured by the systems the elite create to automate the extraction of wealth.

Expansion is a feature of generational wealth. It is necessary because each generation born into ultra-privilege, brings more mouths to feed, each hungrier than the last for the quality of life the family has attained, and more naive about the amorality needed to covetously hoard astronomical levels of wealth. Their collective weight bears down, threatening to collapse the dam of wealth that protects old money from the storms of bad governments, force majeure, economic crises, and the inevitable failures. So generational wealth expands, investigating every possible tributary of income & influence, claiming the treasures that are found and automating extraction either through trade, subterfuge or coercion. Every resource in a capitalist society is meticulously documented and categorised in preparation for eventual  extraction. Human capital is the most important resource, and the elites go to great lengths to keep those populations docile using the disorienting nectar of capitalist consumerism and intoxicating power of oppression. Anything left behind has either been deemed too much effort for the potential returns, or set aside for future extraction. 

Generational wealth transcends the individuals that wield it and attains personhood through corporatisation. Each corporation has obligations to its shareholders and employees, and is influenced only marginally by each individual person within the families that wield this generational wealth. The elite invest heavily in dependable funnels using their corporations as a proxy, relying on the nouveau riche to experiment and refine these less reliable funnels and profiting either way. Young companies like Google and Facebook have no evidence of longevity extracting from the sector that has yielded this wealth being shared. So their wealth is not vouched for and as such not worth the effort of being monitored. Popstars, no matter how famous, rely on the means of distribution established and maintained by the corporations to reach their audiences and extract value, so their fame can be accurately measured and discarded when it begins to wane.

So when a tech CEO or a famous actress courts the heir of an elite dynasty, there is never any real concern on the part of the elite. Hypergamy is not a gamble for them, the system is too big and complex to be felled by the ambition of an outsider. If anything, the audacity of a nouveau riche person to attempt to use hypergamy as a tool to access the stability of generational wealth is amusing at best. The proximity they gain to this kind of wealth crystallises the delicacy of their own, and quantifies the effort that is required to sustain their own privilege in comparison to the complex but smoothly running corporations extracting wealth on behalf of the ultra-rich. It disavows them of the notion that they wield any kind of leverage in a possible union. They can either accept the limits of their privilege and find their place within the system, return to their cadre  sufficiently chastened or issue a challenge that they can match the privilege afforded to the object of their affection with or without support of the family and its corporations. 

But this is a lesson that can only be learned from excoriating experience. Experience the vast majority of Nigerians will never gain because of the nature of our elite and how they make and sustain their wealth. There are no creature comforts or consumerism to distract the poor, and the rich here only use their money as incentive to make the poor act in their interests. Because we are forced into poverty, we never learn that it is possible to reject capitalism and the pursuit of wealth and status and still find purpose and fulfilment. Our religions, most of whom have strict teachings against avarice, are corrupted by the craze for wealth. Our politics and civil service, which in principle should centre the common man, become oligarchies serving the elite. Our society has no place for monks, communists, recusants, and individualists. We are a culture of survivalists who hoard wealth at the top or scavenge at the bottom.   

As such, our nouveau riche is doubly burdened;  they must engage with the outsize expectations of the poor while addressing the consequences of the negligence of the ultra-rich, responsibilities that put significant strain on their own wealth and threaten its stability. They cannot marry their way up literally or figuratively without alienating the consumers who legitimately supply their wealth. They cannot ally with the poor and still maintain the tenuous relationship they have with the ultra-wealthy, and the poor are too poor to sufficiently reward that kind of loyalty. These scenarios have played out in Nigeria’s banking industry affecting both neo banks like Kuda and legacy institutions like GTBank and Sterling Bank who at various points were beloved by the poor for progressive businesses and then vilified when they tried to toe the line set by the establishment for fear of reprisals. They have also played out in our weekend cut-outs, where sworn political enemies who have convinced millions to fight their proxy wars break bread and marry their children to each other in a bid to strengthen corporate alliances and cement legacies, while their sworn henchmen, some of whom have amassed admirable wealth from fighting these battles, are denied access at the point when it matters most. 

So, it is not surprising that many of us speculate about Mr. Eazi’s motives. His trajectory represents the Nigerian dream and as such his choices are accorded much more significance than any of the players in that set piece could have anticipated. It is not surprising either that much of the Nigerian discourse, online and offline centres around literal or ideological hypergamy, expectations and access. It is after all, the most prominent determinant of what kind of lives we get to lead. But the reality remains, Nigeria’s ultra-poor do not have the context or resources to shift this conversation, and its stupendously wealthy lack the foresight or incentive to do so. Any opportunity to salvage the wreck that is our country lies with Nigeria’s nouveau riche, who must accept at some point that their obligations lie with the poor who have rewarded their innovation, talent and skill, whose expectations while immense are valid. This is an epiphany very few of them will come to on their own volition, after all, no one likes responsibility. As we saw play out in during the 2020 #EndSARS protests, the poor are entitled and ungrateful and reward goodwill with selfishness. 

But ultimately, not everyone can afford a yacht, but everyone can benefit from a country.