- Electric power supply (buy a generator and supply it with diesel everyday);
- Water supply (dig a good borehole or buy tanker loads of water on a weekly basis from private suppliers);
- Education for your kids ( go private );
- Security for the home (security guards and the lot);
- Healthcare (private doctors, private hospitals, and healthcare secured overseas);
Protest movements: the growing anger of the middle classes
Nigerian writer Sina Odugbemi wrote this piece on the World Bank’s Governance Blog, which was reposted on Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power Blog, followed by most of the LAB Team. It struck us that the same perception could be useful in analysing elements of the recent protest movements in Brazil and Chile, to name only two examples.
The growing militancy of middle class citizens in developing countries is very much in the news these days; and there is a corresponding attempt to understand why so many protest movements in developing countries are now being led by hitherto quiescent middle classes. I have particularly enjoyed analyses by Francis Fukuyama in the Wall Street Journal, President Lula of Brazil in the New York Times and James Surowiecki in the New Yorker. The humble contribution I’d like to make (from my personal experience) is this. To understand the growing anger of middle class citizens in developing countries you have to understand two aspects of the conditions under which they live: the merely bit and the barely bit.
Let’s begin with the merely bit; that is, why in many of these countries when you are merely middle-class you have a problem. To grasp why being merely middle class is a tough situation to be in you have to understand what those they aspire to be like (the well to do in their societies) are able to provide for themselves. Before I left Nigeria in the middle 1990s, the wife of one of our leading politicians came up with the following insight: that to be comfortable you had to become your own local government. And she was right. Here are the things that your local government should provide and it did not and so you had to provide these things for yourself: