How Rich Are The Rich In Nigeria?

By Dan Amor

I think it was John Paul Getty, the American-born British billionaire, philanthropist and heir to oil industry fortune, who quipped, when asked how rich he was, 'No one is really rich if he can count his money.' In Getty's day, anyone with one million British pounds ( or even one million dollars) was rated as 'rich' and anyone with more than five million pounds was 'very rich'. Above that and you were in the 'super rich' category, and when you got above the fifty million pounds level, you rated as a 'can't count'. 

President Buhari and Vice-President Osinbajo 

Nelson Bunker Hunt, who with his brother inherited a fortune even greater than Getty's, was a 'can't count' man before he tried to corner the silver market. Asked by a Senate Committee how much he was worth, he snapped, 'Hell, if I knew that, I wouldn't be worth very much'. In the United States, for many years Forbes Magazine and Fortune, among others, have published lists of the very wealthy which have been eagerly awaited events in a society where wealth is a macho symbol, to be boasted about rather than hidden. In Great Britain, however, wealth is something best not talked about, and it has never been easy to establish authoritatively just who owns what, and what they are worth. Most of the stupendous wealth in Britain as in Nigeria, had been shrouded in secrecy.

Yet, in 1989, the Sunday Times of London broke with tradition by publishing the first real guide to Britain's wealthy, causing a considerable amount of unease among those who hated being on it. In 1990, the Sunday Times repeated the exercise, adding a further 70 names to the list and raising the stake to £70 million. Both the 1989 and 1990 lists which occupied most of one entire colour magazine, have since been widely discussed and copied by the rest of Fleet Street. They have also been used as ammunition by both sides of the Old Britain versus New Britain, quoted on the one hand to show how even in the Thatcher years old money had reinforced its power, and on the other hand, to record the rise and rise of the new rich at the expense of the old in Britain. 

When the Sunday Times published the first list in 1989, the paper commented editorially on its own study, mourning the fact that, after a decade of Thatcherism, old money still dominated and paternalism appeared to be making a comeback. Others, of course, took an entirely different view of the list, expressing astonishment at the amount of new money, at the relative decline of old wealth, and the degree of egalitarianism which had crept in. It generated a debate which still goes on more than two decades after the publication.