The Fiction Called Nigeria

It's an extremely rare thing when journalists and do-gooders pontificating on Africa's woes pause to consider just how rooted the problems are in unresolved issues of ethnic autonomy, so this article on Nigeria is all the more notable for doing so head on: "Nigeria" has always been nothing more than an administrative fiction representing a certain amount of territory the British managed to grab before the French could, and subsequently held together by nothing more than military force and shared elite greed for unearned oil income. The following excerpt illustrates just how transparent the fiction of a "Nigerian" nation remains:

    Political violence of the type that preceded the country's elections in 1999 and 2003 appears to be on the rise as well. The wife of a prominent northern politician was found stabbed to death in her home. Nothing was taken from the house, according to Nigerian newspaper reports, leading many to conclude that her killing was a warning to her husband, Abubakar Rimi, a crucial member of a coalition of powerful northerners opposed to any extension of Mr. Obasanjo's rule.

    Nigeria's vice president, Atiku Abubakar, a former general and northerner, would like to succeed Mr. Obasanjo, but the president has made it clear that he opposes that, and a deepening political row in the governing party has broken out over the succession question.

    In the complex ethnic politics of Nigeria, factions have emerged in the People's Democratic Party urging that the presidency shift to a different ethnic group. Ruled for most of its history by Muslim generals from the north, Nigerians in the South-South, as the Niger Delta is known, say it is their turn, while northerners say that after two terms of Mr. Obasanjo, a Yoruba Christian from the southwest, they should get the presidency again.

Notice how nothing is said here of allowing the votes of the people to determine who gets what: it is simply assumed by all parties as an uncontroversial fact that it is some region or other's "turn" to have at the top political office, as if it were a prize holiday or trinket, rather than an office with responsibilities to the whole of the country. All one has to do to understand the endemic nature of corruption in Nigeria is to appreciate that this mentality is the norm at all levels of government and in every political arena: power is not thought of as something to be used sparingly to maintain law and order and facilitate commerce and industry, but as a means of providing massive patronage for one's own ethnic group (and particularly one's own friends and relatives) at the expense of others, and therefore a zero-sum game. In such an atmosphere, any measure one might wish to take which stands to benefit one group more than another will necessarily be opposed, however sensible it may be or how substantial its likely benefits: try to trim the civil service or enforce promotion by merit and the Northerners will interpret it as a Southern attempt to purge them of influence; propose privatizing and deregulating electricity generation and you'll be accused of favoring the Delta and South-East, where such businesses make most sense to set up; declare your intention to open up telecommunications and sell off NITEL and the predictable grumbling about a conspiracy to benefit the Yoruba South-West will start up ,

The biggest problem, though, is that few international observers are willing to acknowledge the reality of the problem, let alone its intractability, as illustrated by the following surreal passage:

    ,  a report on the future of sub-Saharan Africa published by the National Intelligence Council, a government think tank for the United States intelligence services, after a conference on the topic last March, identified the collapse of Nigeria as the most important risk facing Africa today.

    "While currently Nigeria's leaders are locked in a bad marriage that all dislike but dare not leave, there are possibilities that could disrupt the precarious equilibrium in Abuja," the report said. "If Nigeria were to become a failed state, it could drag down a large part of the West African region."

    "Further," it continued, "a failed Nigeria probably could not be reconstituted for many years - if ever - and not without massive international assistance."

Left unexplained here is why exactly it would be a good thing for those who are currently called "Nigerians" if a state which had split asunder was to be reconstituted: it is simply assumed to be a good thing that it be so, as if the past 45 years of "One Nigeria" had been a glorious success in terms of governance. With such blinkered, conservative thinking rife in Western (and particularly American) elite circles, is it really any wonder that Iraq has turned out to be the mess that it is? Heaven forbid that anyone recognize that artificial states patched together by Western imperialists deserve to die natural deaths: only when Europeans descend to inter-ethnic warfare does such thinking ever seem to come into play. Rather than muttering rubbish about "failed states" and "massive international assistance", more insightful thinkers would suggest ways to facilitate an amicable divorce of the kind seen with the Czechs and Slovaks, or of Russia and the Baltic states it had absorbed into its communist empire, but with Africa the only option ever put on the table is keeping things as they are, even in the face of open and massive failure as in the Congo or Ivory Coast.

Ethnic strife is at the very heart of Africa's atrocious record of government, which in turn is why the region lags behind the rest of the world in growth, and until all the world's do-gooders and international busybodies come to acknowledge what any African on the street could tell them if only they were willing to listen, none of the grandiose schemes being conjured up in Western thinktanks to "save" the continent stand a chance in hell of making the slightest bit of difference for the better. The problems Lydia Polgreen sees in Nigeria are emblematic of those which plague most of Africa south of the Sahara.

January 23, 2006 in Africa, International Affairs, Politics | Permalink

Link: http://foreigndispatches.typepad.com/dispatches/2006/01/the_fiction_cal.html

Drusilla, all Yorubas in Ghana are not native to Ghana. Yorubas are only native to Benin (they make 10 percent of the population there) and Nigeria (make about 22 percent of the population here). Here is a map that shows you the ancestral territories of the Yorubas and other Nigerian ethnic groups. The map is still accurate till this day.

http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/countries/Nigeria.html

Yoruba territory ends in eastern Togo/Western Benin (the country directly west of Benin, but there isn't any drive to unify all of Yoruba territory. Only the ones that are in Nigeria.

Here is a map of West-Africa.

http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2000/Bekoutou/map.html

Lastly, this is a really nice map that was taken during the 1953 census. It shows all the major ethnic groups in the country. It is the most up to date map that is currently avaible.

http://www.waado.org/NigerDelta/Maps/willink_commission/willink_commision_nigeria.html