In a city of fat cats and streetwise Area Boys, Lagos journalist Kirk Leigh performs a professional balancing act.
Lagos, Nigeria—Lagos is famous for its Area Boys. They are not boys at all, but actually young men from the masses of Lagos’ under- and unemployed. Other city residents admire Area Boys for surviving on their wits, even as they also fear the idle men for their roughness. Area Boys run all kinds of hustles, legal and illegal: providing muscle for heavy lifting jobs, selling odds and ends, flagging cabs for tips and providing security services that sometimes seem more like protection rackets.
What kind of professionals would Lagos produce, one wonders, if Nigeria’s lopsided economy ever found a way to absorb its teeming human capital?
The career of Nigerian business journalist Kirk Leigh, a Lagos native through and through, offers some idea. Leigh has combined knowledge of Lagos street corners with a college education to gain a reputation as one of Nigeria’s top young journalists. He is immersed and at ease in his surroundings yet still connects them to the forces outside of Lagos, and outside Nigeria.
Leigh has displayed his abilities in stories like the one he wrote about the market for smuggled Nigerian artifacts in Europe. Or his regular efforts to involve the perspectives of foreign economists—a rarity in Lagos’s dailies—in his stories about the Nigerian banking sector.
When I meet Leigh on the street in a deteriorating Lagos suburb to do an interview for a research project I’m completing for my Masters in International Affairs, I get the impression that he is someone who possesses Area Boy street smarts, a pundit’s grasp of politics and the manners of a polished professional. He stands in front of the Business Day newspaper offices in the sun with his suit coat hanging from a hand. After introducing himself, he turns to greet a security guard in the local dialect of English—I have trouble understanding it—and they share a laugh.
Later on, Leigh cements his glad-handling image when he approaches a group of taxi drivers sitting under a broad-leafed tree on rickety chairs, next to a gutter full of stagnant water. They jump at the chance to drive another colleague and me back to central Lagos—since we’re foreigners, they reckon that they can squeeze top dollar from us. But with a few doses of sternness, cajoling and charm, Leigh has convinced a taxi driver to transport us for a rock bottom price. It’s clear he’s in his element.
I ask Leigh if he ever dreams of leaving the chaos of Lagos’s sweaty millions—eight million, according to the Nigerian government, though many Lagosians think the real figure is much higher—and daily two-hour traffic jams. He laughs. “No way,” he says. “Lagos is where everything is happening.”
But partly, Leigh’s acumen as a journalist is a result of his having traveled abroad. In 2007, he participated in a training program in Germany hosted by the International Institute for Journalism. At a café serving Nigerian fast food and blaring R&B music, Leigh tells me about his awakening as a journalist when he traveled to Berlin.
“From within, you don’t get to see the broad picture—until you step out.” The training, he says, taught him to think of the “So what?” in his reporting. He came back to Business Day, and the newspaper promptly offered to promote him to assistant editor. In typical Leigh fashion, he declined.
“I didn’t consider that a promotion” Leigh says. He wanted to remain on a beat, reporting from banks and about the people the banks’ business affected. His stories regularly appeared on the front page of Business Day.
Had Lagos’ son outgrown his hometown?
“I remember having an argument with my editor here, on how you report,” he says. The editor didn’t want him to get into analysis in his stories. “When I ask them, ‘Why are you guys doing it this way?’, their reply is, ‘We’ve always done it this way.”
Soon, Leigh left the newspaper to strike out as a freelancer. After a brief stint doing public relations for a Lagos-based bank, he’s still struggling to find his way. The product he has to offer Nigerian newspapers may simply be more than they are prepared to publish.
The big shots in Nigeria are politicians, bankers and oilmen. Journalists are neither widely known nor very well paid. In a country that is one of the world’s largest producers of oil, the lifeblood of the richest economies in the world, there never seems to be enough money to go around.
Leigh has the skills and training to move to a more lucrative career, one a little closer to the industries that keep some Lagosians well fed while the vast majority piece together income from different sources. For the time being, though, he remains passionate about journalism. He says he loves the honesty of reporting.
Lagos produces numerous newspapers, but journalists on political and financial beats that have a commitment to producing unbiased work are not so easy to come by.
“Paying off journalists happens every day,” he says. “It’s the norm. Matter of fact, they come looking for the journalist: ‘Here’s my story. Here’s your money.’ So most of what you read is PR.”
The vast gap between Area Boy and well-to-do in Lagos is sparsely populated and short on opportunity. Still, Leigh is undaunted in his desire for a career that negotiates these two extremes.
Before our meeting is through, Leigh takes me to some Internet cafés near his house to help me with a story I’m writing on Nigerian Internet scammers. It’s a touchy subject, and as we cross the threshold of the first café, he whispers to me over his shoulder not to take pictures or mention I’m a journalist until he’s broken the ice.
I hang behind while Leigh chats with a young woman behind the counter at the café. In a couple of minutes, her expression of suspicion has melted into an easy smile. Soon, she’s talking, relaxed, about the impact on the café of a government crackdown on scammers, happy to grant an interview to a foreign journalist. Leigh has worked his magic again.
Back in the streets of Lagos, Area Boys keep trying to spin charm and cleverness into gold. At intersections, they hawk everything from plantain chips to toilet seats. Occasionally, the window of an air-conditioned, late model sedan slides down, and a well-dressed arm holds out a few Naira. Mostly, the cars drive on.
It’s hard to imagine anyone walking the line between these two extremes of Lagos. But journalists like Leigh just might be able to, by chronicling the economic and political forces that have created a tableau of such disparity.