The Awka Thesis: When Big Cars Replace Big Factories, Criminality Sustains Them
By Victor Agusiobo
I have a thesis, and Awka proves it.
Any society where you find big cars, massive buildings and high rents without corresponding productive agencies, factories and industries, must be propelled by criminality.
Drive through Awka. See big cars, massive buildings, sprawling three, four floors of marble and glass in many corners. But here the rent is high, as high as in Ikeja. But ask a simple question: where are the factories that pay for all this? Where are the industries that house their workers in those buildings? Where is the productive agency that justifies that rent?
You will find none.
Every honest economy leaves footprints. A factory explains a big car because wages are paid, goods are made, value is sold. An industrial cluster explains massive buildings because productivity needs housing. High productivity may explain high rent — people can afford it because they earn.
But when the equation is reversed and you find cars without factories, mansions without industries, rent without production — then we must ask: what is paying for what we are seeing?
Wealth does not fall from heaven. If it is not coming from production, it is coming from elsewhere.
In Awka, as in many Nigerian cities, it comes from three sources. First, rent — not hard work, but title. Men become rich because they own a piece of land, not because they work it. Second, distribution, definitely not creation, but sharing. Men become rich because they share the national cake through contracts and allocations, not because they bake a new one. Third, and most dangerous is crime, that’s the one that produces money that the law forbids but which the state tolerates.
All three can buy a Mercedes. None of them can employ a thousand people.
That is why our skyline grows while our job line does not. We have more land owners than manufacturers, more dealers than makers and obviously more estates than productive estates.
In all of this, Awka teaches us a hard lesson: a society that consumes what it does not produce will sooner or later produce what it does not dare to consume namely criminals.
Government is therefore enjoined to not just dream of those who will inhabit Anambra in 2090, but to solve the crisis of shelter for those who are stranded in Awka in 2026.
