Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with 180 million people, and its
largest economy with a US$1.1 trillion GDP, is imploding: Insurrections
by Boko Haram and others; sectarian butchery where the country’s Muslim
north meets its Christian south; corruption so rampant it ranks as the
country’s second-largest industry; and plummeting oil production are
making the country ungovernable.
This resource-rich former British colony — until recently Africa’s
largest oil exporter — is now racking up deficits, and negotiating
multi-billion dollar bailouts through agencies such as the World Bank.
But bailouts from rich countries won’t cure Nigeria’s dysfunctions. This
immense country is artificial, a forced union of three major and
hundreds of minor ethnic groups speaking different languages, observing
different legal codes and loyal to different tribal groups. Nigeria’s
cure will start when the ahistorical boundary cavalierly drawn on a map
by Britain’s colonial masters dissolves. The more coherent constituent
nations to emerge — composed largely of the Igbo in the southeast, the
Yoruba in the southwest and the Hausa and Fulani in the north — would be
less burdened by the many rivalries that now hobble the central
government, and better positioned to govern themselves.
A first attempt at that necessary dissolution occurred in 1967, seven
years after Britain gave Nigeria its independence, when the Igbo and
related tribes of its oil-producing southeast broke away to form the
Republic of Biafra. This nascent black African Christian republic, with a
population of 14 million in an area larger than Ireland, was soon
officially recognized by other black nations in Africa as well as Haiti
in North America, and was unofficially supported by France, Spain,
Norway, Israel and other Western nations, along with the Vatican and
various Catholic organizations such as U.S. Catholic Relief Services.
Biafrans, who had a culture of village democracy, tended to be skilled,
entrepreneurial, relatively prosperous and relatively literate. The
Republic of Biafra had the international legitimacy, the human capital
and the resource wealth to be viable.
But the support that came from its sympathizers was almost entirely
moral, forcing Biafra and its initial 3,000-man army to manufacture most
of its own arms in a civil war against the Nigerian army, which was
armed by the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. Some two to three
million perished in the two-and-a-half years that Biafrans held out
against their better armed, more numerous enemy, before surrendering and
reintegrating into Nigeria.
Nigeria since the Biafran War saw waves of military coups and
repression. It stayed intact only because its oil revenues enabled the
central government to finance its military and to buy off rebel
insurgents. With oil revenues down, the central government reduced the
payouts to tens of thousands of militants by 70 per cent, leading to
widespread upset. In recent weeks, a new pro-Biafran militant group
demanding sovereignty, the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), has attacked the
country’s oil infrastructure, almost halving Nigeria’s oil production to
1.4 million barrels a day. “Our goal is to cripple Nigeria’s economy,”
NDA vowed, and it is making good on its vow. Among its successes:
blowing up two Chevron export terminals and an underwater pipeline that
forced Royal Dutch Shell to shut a terminal handling 250,000 barrels of
oil a day.
The Nigerian military not only needs to contain popular unrest in the
Biafra region — the local press reports 53 killed in a “Biafra
bloodbath” on Monday during a march commemorating the anniversary of
Biafran independence — it also needs to contend with Boko Haram, which
aims to establish a caliphate in the Muslim north-east. But Nigerian
forces are dispirited and ineffectual, short of ammunition, poorly
trained and poorly paid.
Even if World Bank financing comes through, the loans won’t do much for
an economy in shambles. The national currency has depreciated 70 per
cent in the last year, leading to high inflation; government workers in
26 of the country’s 36 states haven’t received their monthly salary for
months; and severe gasoline shortages led the government to end price
controls, causing a 67 per cent hike in prices at the pump.
Nigeria doesn’t need cash; it needs good governance, which is likelier
to occur if the Igbo rule themselves in the southeast, the Yoruba in the
southwest and the Hausa and Fulani in the north. The West blew it a
half-century ago when the Igbos attempted to achieve self-determination
by establishing the Republic of Biafra. We may soon see a reprise of
that civil war. How the West responds will determine whether the nation
states within Nigeria achieve self-determination, or whether Nigeria,
like Libya and Somalia, becomes another failed state.
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