The illness is closely linked to the explosion of the Nigerian drug trade in South Africa
Paul Kirk
The Lonsdale hotel has seen better days. The air conditioners rarely function, the lights do not work, the swimming pool is empty and full of garbage, and rooms can be rented by the hour. Visitors are greeted by a row of well-built men, all of them heavily draped in gold chains, who nervously enquire in deep West African accents if one is “sorted”. None of them look like a hotel porter.
Scantily clad young ladies are almost as anxious to know whether guests are “looking for company” as they are to know how much they are prepared to pay for their companionship. And all the clerk at the front desk wants to know is whether guests are carrying a gun or knife.
The Lonsdale hotel in Durban’s West Street is one of several formerly respectable institutions that an academic study has identified as contributing to a new malaise – “sleazy hotel syndrome”.
The illness, according to Ted Leggett, an academic from the University of Natal- Durban, is closely linked to the explosion of the Nigerian drug trade in South Africa. So far the syndrome has affected only Durban and Johannesburg, but it looks set to spread unless drastic action is taken, says Leggett.
As far as Johannesburg is concerned, Leggett cites the Mariston hotel near Hillbrow as the “flagship” of the drug trade, followed by the Coronia, Mimosa and Safari.
Leggett says that in Durban five hotels inhabited almost exclusively by sex workers have deteriorated to such an extent that even Nigerian drug dealers are wary of taking up residence in them. These include the D’Urban, Evaleigh, Windley House, Camden Place and Palmerston.
And the Lonsdale? It “provides the best homologue to the Hillbrow drug hotels”, says Leggett.
Leggett, a former prosecutor with the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, believes that targeting – or even shutting down – the “hotels of shame” would significantly assist the fight against South Africa’s huge drug and vice problem.
“Taking away the buildings in which dealers settle will not eliminate the drug trade, but Nigerian dealers have long taken advantage of the fortified and well-monitored distance between the lobby and their drugs to avoid arrest,” says Leggett.
Leggett is due to present his study into sleazy hotels on July 14 at the Urban Futures conference to be held in Gauteng under the auspices of the University of the Witwatersrand and the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council. In the course of his investigation, Leggett conducted hundreds of interviews while spending countless hours in sleazy hotels himself.
Describing a typical sleazy hotel, he writes: “There is an air of post- apocalyptic menace about the place, a sense that the ordinary rules of interaction have been suspended. You are in a different world to that experienced by most South Africans, but you are just a short distance from the commercial centres of either Durban or Johannesburg.”
Leggett has discovered that throughout Durban and Johannesburg the drug dealers who dominate the sleazy hotels – which in turn dominate the drug trade – tend to be almost exclusively Ibo people from the south-east of Nigeria. The Ibo are one of 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria.
Leggett’s study has also come to explain the reason for the strange status quo where a tiny minority of a population have a virtual monopoly on the drug trade and they nearly all live in the same sleazy hotels.
Leggett says many Nigerians themselves attribute the number of Nigerians in the drug trade to two historical incidents: the Biafran War and the rise and fall of the oil price. Leggett quotes Joe Igbokwe, an Ibo commentator, as describing his people as “the Jews of Nigeria”. Igbokwe says his people are being stereotyped as “good in business, well- educated and clever, but essentially untrustworthy”. He attributes the bias to jealousy and bitterness over the Biafran War.
In January 1966 an Ibo-led coup ousted the first democratically elected government and murdered a number of Muslim politicians from the north and west of Nigeria and installed a military dictatorship. This dictatorship was in turn deposed by another coup led by Muslim Nigerians from the north.
After some months of negotiations Ibo people living in the north and west fled to the south-east and in 1969 declared Iboland to be the Republic of Biafra. At this point the federal government declared war on Biafra and laid siege to the republic – starving nearly one million Ibo to death.
The Ibo claim they are still discriminated against by the predominantly Muslim government of Nigeria, cannot find jobs in the civil service and have left Nigeria to escape discrimination.
Ibo sources have told Leggett they see nothing wrong with the drug trade as it is the only practical way to redistribute the wealth from the north to the poor south. According to many Ibo people they have taken to the black market as the formal economy is prejudiced against black people.
That, in part, explains why the Ibo have no desire to stay in Nigeria. But there is yet another dynamic to explain their interest in the drug trade.
During the oil boom, oil-rich Nigerians travelled the world in luxury, with many settling abroad. But when the price of oil crashed so did Nigerian wealth. In the 10 years between 1982 and 1992 Nigeria dropped 42 places in the World Bank poverty ratings.
In a short time a large number of well- educated Nigerians – mostly Ibo people – found themselves without jobs at home and unwilling to drop their living standards. These young Nigerians, Leggett believes, simply tapped the resources of Nigerian communities in Bangkok and Rio and began to trade in narcotics.
In piecing together the evolution of the sleazy hotels, Leggett has not established why Nigerians chose to settle in Hillbrow, where they soon struck up a relationship with sex workers in the area.
Urban decay began to set in to both Johannesburg and Durban at more or less the same time as more residents began to leave town for the suburbs and hotels came to be built outside of the central business district. Large numbers of once-pleasant hotels became “sleazy”, catering almost exclusively to drug dealers, addicts and prostitutes.
Soon adult entertainment venues began to open up and these were fed by the numerous runaways that, Leggett writes, “are attracted mothlike to the city lights. Women in street sex work need their drugs to cope and dealers begin to sprout like mushrooms wherever they operate. The demand for cheap accommodation is high and hotel standards begin to drop as upscale clients find alternatives.”
Leggett describes how sex workers have a real reason to want to spread the drug use among their clients. Once customer have taken crack they often forget about sex and come to the prostitute simply to buy drugs. Prostitutes know where to buy the biggest rocks of crack cocaine and by buying large rocks and cutting them in half they can satisfy the customer and themselves.
Leggett’s study has shown that life inside the sleazy hotels dominated by Nigerian drug dealers and their prostitute drug pushers is relatively democratic and well-controlled. When British colonists invaded Iboland they found a people who had no chiefs, but instead existed in small democratic fraternal societies. This facet of Ibo culture, says Leggett, has been exported to the sleazy hotels of Durban and Johannesburg.
Leggett says: “Each building has a ‘building committee’ which elects a president, a vice-president, a secretary, a treasurer and a ‘task team’. These committees are bound by a constitution and pass decrees that are binding on all Nigerian residents. An area may be declared a ‘no-go zone’ for example, and any Nigerian entering this area will be fined. The fines are collected by the task team which is the enforcement arm of the committee. Fees are also paid into a legal fund that is then used to bail out [or bribe free] members who are incarcerated, and to repatriate the bodies of the dead.”
This self-governance has limited levels of violence and prevented price wars that could depress the price of cocaine.
Nigerian drug dealers do not engage in violence themselves, but if a “hit” is required, they hire Zimbabwean or local thugs. However, a more common way of dealing with a maverick is to have a police contact arrest them.
Leggett has noticed that while dens of vice, the hotels are often credited with bringing order to downtown areas as the “building committees” drive away violent criminals who may scare off customers. The organisation of the hotels includes a rigid system of job reservation. Due to the large number of Nigerians in residence, a new resident often has to serve an apprenticeship of up to six months during which time he is only allowed to make pipes to smoke crack in and make and sell dagga cigarettes.
But once this apprenticeship has been served profits can be lucrative. In Johannesburg the Mariston hotel is often a launchpad for dealers who move to hotels in Sandton and Rosebank. In Durban the wealthier dealers are beginning to move from the sleazy hotels into the affluent area of Morningside.
Leggett in his study recommends that in order to fight the sleazy hotel syndrome Nigerian asylum-seekers should have their applications heard as quickly as possible.
During his study, he discovered that many Nigerian drug dealers do not even want to be in South Africa.
“Some of the Nigerians interviewed, in fact, claimed they were duped into coming to this country. Seeing Nigerians coming home rich from ‘business’ in South Africa they were scammed into buying packages for immigration including passports, airfare and ground transport to beautiful downtown Hillbrow.”
This trend points out the need to educate the Nigerian public about social realities in South Africa. Perhaps the airing of a video on inner-city Johannesburg on Nigerian television would be a good place to start.