Nigeria: bread basket or basket case?

There is an excellent article by Jeffrey Tayler in the current issue of The Atlantic entitled Worse than Iraq?

The article examines Nigeria's dire problems. The title references Iraq because just as that country was cobbled together by Western powers, with the effects still resonating today, so was Nigeria.

The entity of Nigeria was cobbled together to serve London's economic interests. Having established the Royal Niger Company to exploit resources in the Niger River Delta, and expanded inland from there, the British found themselves by the late nineteenth century ruling territories and peoples—some 250 ethnic groups in all—that had never coexisted in a single state. They ran Nigeria as three separate administrative zones, divided along ethnic and religious lines. The Muslim north, arid and poor but with half the country's population, would eventually gain supremacy over the army. Through a succession of military dictatorships, it would dominate (and plunder) the fertile and oil-rich but disunited south, whose largest ethnic groups—the Yoruba in the west and the Igbo in the east—together represent just 39 percent of the population. Democracy, too, has favored the north, which, united by Islam and voting as a bloc, has determined the outcome of virtually all elections. In Nigeria, where one generally votes for one's religious or ethnic brethren, democracy has deepened divisions rather than healed them.

As I've mentioned from time to time, corruption and ethnic and religious violence are choking Nigeria. Each of those feeds off and in turn influences the others. Nigeria is of particular importance to us because it supplies the US with a nontrivial amount of oil, and because the rise of Islam in northern Nigeria could be a harbinger of bigger troubles to come.

Since Nigeria gained independence, in 1960, its rulers—military and civilian alike—have systematically squandered or stolen some $400 billion in government money. According to a 2004 World Bank report, 80 percent of the country's oil wealth accrues to 1 percent of the population. As the journalist Karl Maier, whose This House Has Fallen stands as the authoritative work on modern Nigeria, has put it, Nigeria is a "criminally mismanaged corporation where the bosses are armed and have barricaded themselves inside the company safe." Nigeria's similarities to Saudi Arabia are manifold: corruption, oil wealth, a burgeoning Muslim population, and value to the United States as an energy supplier. Osama bin Laden has called Nigeria "ripe for liberation."

There will be presidential elections next year, and the direction Nigeria takes in the wake of President Obasanjo's rule may be a reaction to the corruption that has festered.

Nigeria appears to be de-developing, its hastily erected facade of modernity disintegrating and leaving city dwellers in particular struggling to survive in near-apocalyptic desolation. A drive across Lagos—the country's commercial capital and, with 13 million people, Africa's largest metropolis—reveals unmitigated chaos. The government has left roads to decay indefinitely. Thugs clear away the broken asphalt and then extract payments from drivers, using chunks of rubble to enforce their demands. Residents dig up the pavement to lay cables that tap illegally into state power lines. Armed robbers emerge from the slums to pillage cars stuck in gridlocks (aptly named "hold-ups" in regional slang) so impenetrable that the fourteen-mile trip from the airport to the city center can take four hours. Electricity blackouts of six to twelve hours a day are common. "Area boys" in loosely affiliated gangs dominate most of the city, extorting money from drivers and shop owners. Those who fail to pay up may be beaten or given a knife jab in the shoulder.

Muslims in the north feel it is their "turn" to hold the Presidency. If a majority of Nigerians agree, and are willing to change direction because current ways are not working, it may be an avenue for militant Islam to find fertile soil in Nigeria in which to take root and grow.

Whether or not [Obasanjo] stays on, his country's troubles may eventually entangle the United States. One particularly ominous scenario looms: rebels may succeed in halting oil extraction in the delta, drying up the revenues on which the northern elites depend. If, in response, a northern Muslim general were to oust the president and seize power, the United States would find itself facing an Islamic population almost five times Saudi Arabia's, radicalized and in control of the abundant oil reserves that America has vowed to protect. Should that day come, it could herald a military intervention far more massive than the Iraqi campaign.

In this post, I speculated that Iran may have reasons to stoke the unrest in Nigeria's river delta region. Another reason is Iran might be hoping for a Muslim government in Nigeria. If the unrest drives Obasanjo's government from power, and brings in a Muslim government, or even a radical Islamic government, Iran might find a willing partner to which it could export terrorism, and a partner for using oil as a weapon against the West.