Nigerians on holiday in Dubai

Also published in Daily Trust

Towards the end of every year and all through the first few months of the following year, the ever-thriving tourism/business sector of the superfluously rich Dubai flourishes even more as millions of holiday-makers escaping the largely freezing temperatures of Europe, the United States and some Asian countries pour into the city to spend their holidays under the moderate winter temperatures at this time of the year.

Of course, they are also attracted by the city’s particularly glamorous tourist attractions, world-class infrastructure and luxury landmarks among which are the largest, the most luxurious, the tallest or simply the world’s most modern. This is in addition to the exciting shopping, sporting, entertainment festivities and other events, which many visitors and residents alike find too irresistible to ignore.

Though Nigerians are among the top all year round visitors to Dubai, which explains the high number of passenger flights shuttling daily between Dubai International Airport on one hand, and Lagos, Kano, Abuja and Enugu international airports on the other, yet this particular season normally attracts many Nigerian families on leisure and shopping trips.

Unlike regular Nigerian visitors most of whom are businessmen who mostly stay in budget hotels in the relatively cheap areas of the city and who also hardly have time for fun and indeed don’t want to unnecessarily incur any additional costs in pursuing it, many holidaying Nigerians are families of politicians, civil servants and/or their associates who have somehow joined the tiny and yet narrowing circle of the microscopic few Nigerians who can afford to go on holiday abroad and indeed stay in areas in Dubai where a hotel suite may cost up to $10,000 per night, in this season.

Nigerians are also among the biggest spenders in Dubai. The voluminous volumes of almost all types of merchandise and other goods that Nigerians import from Dubai, which often include things that are ordinarily too insignificant to be imported in large quantities expose the embarrassing deficit of the country’s industrial production and also highlight public’s lack of confidence in the quality of Nigerian industrial products, which are unfortunately largely substandard.

This explains the sheer amount of fortune Nigerians spend in Dubai, which underscores Nigeria’s disproportionate trade deficit in imports and exports trade equation between it, which imports almost everything from Dubai, and the United Arab Emirates, which never imports any finished product from Nigeria and hardly imports even raw materials from it either.

Also, for the many hustling Nigerian youths in Dubai who act as shopping guides for the high- spending Nigerian visitors, introducing Nigerian shoppers to Dubai traders and facilitating the sale and shipping processes of their usually large cargoes represent their major source of income in this increasingly expensive city. The traders induce the hustling youths with financial incentives in the form of a commission on every sale they generate or facilitate. The visiting Nigerian shoppers also pay them before travelling back to Nigeria.

Dubai retail traders and wholesale dealers generally assume that, when it comes to purchasing skills, Nigerians generally lack enough bargaining skills to successfully bargain for a better deal, which is to a large extent and quite surprisingly true at least in Dubai. Though this is perhaps due to the fact that they find the prices much better anyway compared with what obtains in Nigeria.

In any case, whether it is out of inferiority complex or not, it is obvious that many home-based Nigerians, consciously or unconsciously, seem excessively intimidated and behave too naively when dealing with fair-skinned foreigners both at home and abroad. Therefore, as it often happens elsewhere including Nigeria itself where many fair-skinned foreigners capitalize on this prevailing negative attitude to easily defraud many Nigerians, many Nigerian businessmen, tourists and potential investors in Dubai are deliberately overcharged particularly in real estate purchase deals or simply defrauded by Arab and Asian fraudsters masquerading as brokers or facilitators in some phony investment opportunities and other too good to be true business proposals.

After all, knowing that Nigerians are predominantly poor due to persistent leadership failure in the country over the decades, the body languages of many business owners in Dubai suggest how much they suspect the actual sources of the fortune many wealthy Nigerian businessmen and visitors spend in Dubai. Their suspicion is further supported by the apparent reluctance of many Nigerian fraud victims in Dubai to seek legal redress through official legal and judicial channels in the United Arab Emirates.

Interestingly enough, an apparently astonished expensive hotel operator in Dubai once suspiciously asked a much older and a very rich Nigerian friend of mine, what was exactly his business? Because he i.e. the hotel operator must have suspected the source of my older rich Nigerian friend’s wealth having stayed with his family in his hotel for more than a year, which was eventually extended to two consecutive years within which he also spent lavishly on a daily basis, yet he never seemed to be running any business in Dubai.

Also a Dubai-based Asian business owner who was also amazed by the spending style of the same Nigerian man and who must have also suspected the source of the man’s wealth, once told him that he (i.e. the Asian) needed the chemical used to produce fake currencies and asked the Nigerian man if he could provide it for their mutual benefit.

By the way, the Nigerian man, though admittedly rather extravagant in spending, is simply a successful businessman running legitimate businesses in Nigeria, and the source of his wealth has nothing to do with any government connection.