These days, ₦30 million ($18,800) is no longer enough to throw an elaborate Lagos wedding. But in 2017, that same wedding cost a fifth as much. Décor alone can now run to ₦25 million, catering for a thousand guests to ₦15 million, and a single gele styling session can cost hundreds of thousands of naira, figures that keep rising even as the economy in which they reside does not, as Oyindamola Depo-Oyedokun examines in The Extravagant Economics of Lagos Weddings, one of the cover stories in our latest issue, Africa’s Hustle Republics.
Money is everywhere in that story and in this issue. It shows up as the deduction on a Kenyan farmer’s payslip before she’s even touched it, as the cash a Sudanese trader hands over before the proof of transfer arrives, as the WhatsApp notification from Milan that decides whether school fees in Banjul are paid on time. There is no corner of daily life across the continent it doesn’t reach first.
That ubiquity is the common thread of this issue, which traces the social life of money across Africa. Read together, the stories make a case that the continent’s economies run as much on obligation and improvisation as on GDP figures and central bank data. This is the version of the continent’s economy you may not find in your average policy brief, the one that explains why a farmer stays poor despite record export earnings, and why a phone left uncharged in Khartoum can be a matter of life or death. Read it to understand the continent as it is actually lived, in addition to how it is measured.
And as The Republic’s editor-in-chief, Wale Lawal, writes in his foreword, this issue is also a departure from an old script. In 2011, The Economist declared Africa the ‘hopeful continent’, and the decade that followed came wrapped in the language of ‘frontier markets’ and ‘Africa Rising’. That promise has since collided with depreciating currencies, inflation and waves of collapsed startups. But as Lawal writes, formal economic decline is only half the picture: where official economies have faltered, countless informal ones have flourished.
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