Lagos has its problems, many of them, but the Nigerian mega-city is nowhere near as bad as the worst negative stereotypes bandied around about it. In this respect, Lagos is a metaphor for Nigeria. The federal republic has problems, serious problems, but critique sometimes ventures into the realm of hyperbole.
The majority of the people of Nigeria live normal, regular lives; life is difficult for the majority of citizens, yes, but life is notheless basically normal. In fact the major reason there has never been a revolution or popular revolt in Nigeria is we the people have adapted to the situation, including adaptations to deal with the difficulties. We are a country where citizens carve out their own roads, generate their own electricity, pump their own water, provide their own security, create their own credit networks -- we do it all.
When I think back to my childhood and early youth, things were not "easy" by any stretch of the imagination, but we managed. And while truly terrible things do happen in Nigeria, things like "religious" riots, such things happen in particular places and at particular times. It is not like the entire country erupts in violence, nor is violence something that happens every day. And we are not unique in suffering these problems; for all our hyperbole to the contrary, everything we think of as a uniquely Nigerian problem exists in fact all over the world. As I argued in an earlier blog, there are certain things that differentiate succesfful countries from unsuccessful ones, and the propensity to corruption is not one such thing. However the likelihood of prosecution for corruption is, as is the question of whether or not the corrupt behaviour surrounds decision-making processes that tend toward increasing societal wealth or decision-making processes that don't; for example the political climate surrounding road construction in Japan is as dubious as road construction in Nigeria, but the decision-making processes (particularly in the immediate post-war decades) ensure that public servants in Japan administer an economy that is still the world's second-richest, despite the local and global changes of the last two decades.
The Federal Republic of Nigeria is a wonderful country, a beautiful country with a kaleidoscope of cultures, and a warm, generous hospitable populace. We should be consolidating the good things in our country, then expanding those good things so we eventually stamp stamp out the problem issues. We should then move forward with the project of reform and transformation.
Unfortunately, we thus far seem to prefer brinkmanship, choosing to keep ourselves and our country constantly on the edge rather than move it deep into safe territory. We the people blame our "leaders" for this, but our "leaders" are creatures of our society, and until society changes the characteristics of its leadership will not change either.
I suppose you are wondering what brought on this burst of angst?
I have been reading media articles on the on-going battle between the Nigerian Armed Forces' Joint Task Force, and the various militia groups in the Niger-Delta. It makes for depressing reading.
And it was all too predictable.
When I say predictable, I am not talking about the poverty in the Niger-Delta. There is poverty all over Nigeria (I daresay the north-east of the country is the poorest region of the country, much poorer than the Delta). And no, I am not talking about government neglect; that too is national in its scope. And I am not talking about the lack of enforcement of environmental, electoral and other laws; yes, you guessed it, it is no better in the rest of the country outside the region abutting the mouth of the Niger River.
No, the violence was predictable. Violence in Nigeria is ALWAYS predictable. Communal violence, religious riots, ethnic strife ... we see it coming, and just watch it approach. Eventually it washes over us, the survivors pick up their lives as best they can, and we begin the slow progress towards the next violent incident.
What is happening in the Niger-Delta right now (article, article, article, article, article) got me to thinking about an exchange I had with a fellow Nigerian some six years ago.
In 2003, I wrote a piece expressing worry at the proliferation of armed militias in Nigeria. Some of these militia had an ethnic or religious basis, while others (the local "vigilance" groups in particular) were drawn from a specific village or town. All of these groups were made up of "youths", a term that has a lot of meanings in Nigeria; indeed "youths" is the most frequent description of individuals involved in outbreaks of communal violence nationwide.
Anyone with a shred of sense would have been concerned at the sudden expansion in organized groups of armed youths. The concern was heightened by the realization that Nigeria was suffering an upsurge in the smuggling of heavy weaponry into the country. Our borders are porous, and private armies easily stockpiled the sort of weaponry that is only meant to be used by soldiers on warfronts. Illegal imports of heavy weaponry continues today.
When I wrote that essay in 2003, Nigeria had been amidst another upsurge, this one of communal and political violence. The rise in violence began after General Abdulsalami Abubakar (rtd.) handed the presidency to General Olusegun Obasanjo (rtd), ushering in the Fourth Republic in 1999. There are NO RELIABLE STATISTICS on violence in Nigeria, but at the time the (possibly sensationalistic) media estimates put the numbers of victims of all the outbreaks combined in the thousands. In a lengthy document published in 2007, Human Rights Watch estimated 11,000 dead (and quoted the Nigerian National Commission on Refugees' figure of 3 million displaced) in 481 outbreaks between 1999 and 2006 (a rate of 1 outbreak every 5 days).
So I wrote this essay in 2003, warning of the dangers of allowing the situation to get out of hand. It was not alarmism, but pragmatic caution.
Most African countries that became failed or semi-failed states went through a period where armed groups arose and weapons smuggling got out of hand. Most of these countries appeared to be normal (or at least normal by African standards) until the moment they just seemed to suddenly collapsed. I say "seemed" because in every case the causes of the ultimate collapse were visible and observable for decades, but the citizenry did nothing to force change.
And before someone starts to tell me that Nigeria shows no signs of trouble, please think about Cote d'Ivoire. The Ivoirien republic, was not just "normal by African standards", but was held by most Africans and non-Africans to be the West African answer to Botswana. Cote d'Ivoire is not exactly "failed", but none of their cheerleaders foresaw, predicted or expected the West African miracle would suffer ten years (and rising) of political instability, coups, war and near-breakup. All those years that commentators yabbed Nigeria and hailed Cote d'Ivoire, and here we are in 2009, and we are more politically stable than they are, despite the current violence in the Niger-Delta; the federal government is not about to fall, Nigeria is not about to split in two, and we are under no danger of having French troops pour in to establish a ceasefire line.
But that does not mean the situation in Nigeria is "good" or "safe".
In years past, I was obliged (don't ask why) to intensely study Felix Houphouet Boigny's Cote d'Ivoire with an honest, unbiased eye. Anyone who did the same would have seen all of the weaknesses that came to bear after Boigny's death. At a vital and fundamental level, the "wealthy" and "stable" Cote d'Ivoire of Boigny was not as different from the "poor" and "unstable" Zaire of Mobutu as you were led to believe. In both cases, the death of the autocratic strongman exposed the absence of a "state" beyond that individual.
But neither of those cases is as annoying to me as Liberia. The issues that gave rise to Liberia's quarter-century of chaos (starting with the Samuel Doe coup, and continuing to the end of the Civil War) were visible for more than 100 years. People need to take advantage of stability to reform and transform, rather than exploiting the short-term absence of consequence to make hay while the sun shines.
When I wrote that article in 2003, I was trying to warn that it was better to deal with certain things when they are small, instead of doing nothing and waiting until the problems metastasize and become major problems.
That 2003 essay attracted a response from a fellow Nigerian who declared that I was an alarmist. He came just short of politely saying I was full of crap. All was well, he insisted, nothing was wrong, and I and everyone else should rejoice that we were democratic, or something along those lines.
He was not alone in his complacency.
A lot of Nigerians welcomed these militia groups. Not all of us, but many of us. The Odua Peoples Congress, the Bakassi Boys and the Hisbah were particularly popular in some circles. Allegedly, the OPC and the Bakassi Boys were fighting armed robbery, and supposedly the Hisbah were waging war on the every sinful decadence of society.
I guess many of us were frustrated with the ineffective police and the absence of law enforcement and security. Heck, I have been surprised to find there are people who support lynchings! Not everyone, and probably most people don't, but opposition to lynching is not 100%, which is what I hoped it would be. When the newspapers report that "a suspected armed robber" was lynched, there are people who say "it serves him right" without first asking themselves if he was guilty.
It is frustration that causes this, frustration with government, law enforcement and the judiciary, the kind of frustration that makes people hero-worship flawed figures like Nuhu Ribadu.
But what if that was me or you facing the wrath of a lynch mob? What if you or I were wrongly accused? What if it was one of our brothers, fathers or sons? If the police are rubbish at investigation and the judiciary is rubbish at sorting out the guilty from the innocent, shouldn't we focus our energy on forcing transformation of the police and judiciary, rather than supporting random groups of citizens who lynch in the name of justice?
And do you realize EVERY act of communal and religious violence involves groups of "youths" who set out to lynch on the basis of rumours, innuendo, gossip and accusations that ascribe guilt of "something" to their victims? When you live in a country where that sort of behaviour is tolerated in certain contexts, don't be surprised when it occurs in other contexts too. We are telling youths that it is okay to lynch fellow citizens when they (the youths) decide these citizens are guilty of "something".
We do not even have a single national definition of what this "something" is. Pick-pockets have been lynched, as well as people accused (but never convicted) of desecrating Holy books.
But I digress. I am talking about the armed militia, and my 2003 essay.
The OPC, Bakassi Boys and Hisbah were only the most famous of the militia, a fame derived probably from their close association to the old politico-regional, ethno-political and politico-religious tripod of Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa respectively. This alone should have worried people, but if it did, the worry did not show, and life continued as usual.
The crime wave was also the excuse for some state governors to create state-run pseudo-police. None of these entities was exactly called "state police" but all acted as though that was what they were. Some of the pseudo-police were off-shoots of the earlier "vigilance" militia, and some were "new". Among the citizenry were those who thought it appropriate in a federation for states to have their own police forces, even if the disliked 1999 constitution did not allow it. Quietly, all citizens acknowledged these pseudo-police (and in many cases the "real" police too) performed like private political enforcers for the respective state governors.
Some of these militia, political enforcers for PDP and ANPP politicians in the Niger-Delta, grew dissatisfied with their lot. The regional governors (and deputy-governors, wink, wink) were getting rich off of oil derivation money, and were not sharing it as generously as the enforcers had hoped. So the erstwhile enforcers found new work, as the "Niger-Delta militants", armed groups whose "militancy" extended only to getting rich by stealing and selling crude oil.
To survive, they need the cooperation of powerful political figures and the acquiescence of Niger-Delta communities among which they hide; to the former they give a share of the bunkering wealth, and for the latter they pretend to be stealing and enriching themselves in the name of protesting marginalization. But significantly, these groups started out as private militia in the employ of politicians, and were most notable (pre-bunkering) for helping to rig elections in favour of the very PDP politicians they now profess to oppose.
Nigeria lost $23 billion last year, from a combination of theft (a.k.a bunkering) and the sabotage of oil-related infrastructure. With the current offensive by the JTF against the "militants", Bloomberg.com estimates our output to have fallen to 50% of installed capacity.
The Nigerian Armed Forces are often accused of being overly harsh, and of causing more-than-excessive collateral damage to citizens and to communitiess in which they are deployed. The problem with these critics is they all seem to think the Army is being particularly wicked or malevolent towards these peoples and communities. In fact, they are not. The sad, depressingly, pathetically hopeless truth is this is the only way they have been trained to fight. Our armed forces have used these exact same "tactics" in every conflict, large and small, since their existence. The Armed Forces do not have the capacity for precision warfare. And mind you, even so-called precision warfare creates too much collateral damage, but we don't even have the fig-leaf of appearing at least to be trying to be precise. Some years back I read the memoir of a journalist who traveled through NPFL/RUF territory during the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and he mentioned an incident when a Nigerian alpha jet missed its intended target (an enemy headquarters building) and instead killed a civilian who was still in the streets after everyone else had run for cover. The alpha jet pilot did not intend the outcome, in fact what struck me about the story is the pilot did not have laser-guided weaponry or smart bombs; he flew over the target a couple of times, trying to manually calculate the best moment to manually drop his bombs; it was like something out of the 1940s, and like most of the bombers of that era, it was more likely the bomb would miss than actually hit the target.
This is the only way our military knows how to fight, so it is either they do this, or they do nothing. And sometimes (for example when communal violence breaks out, or when NPFL/RUF are cutting off people's arms and ears and burning them alive in their homes) it is impossible for the military to avoid being sent into combat. Frankly, it is long past time for the Armed Forces to be reformed and transformed, including dramatic improvements in TRAINING, TACTICS and EQUIPMENT. But that is a story for another blog, and is also yet another thing that we have known about for decades but done nothing about.
It should never have come to this. This low-intensity conflict in the Niger-Delta is the sort of thing I was warning of way back in 2003. We did not have to leave it to fester this long, leave it to metastasize, leave it to the point where low-intensity battles are necessary, with the attendant suffering of the civilian population.
I expect the JTF will prevail .... sort of. They will win some kind of victory, but the victory will not be the end of risk in the Delta or of risk in the broader sense.
The Federal Republic is in serious need of reform and transformation, and the longer we put it off, the more the long-term risk.
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