karl_51

A debate in the Canadian Parliament on the abduction of some 200 Nigerian school girls offers a chance for all parties to express horror, outrage and solidarity with the victims.

That is what happened this past Monday night when the House of Commons took up NDP Foreign Affairs Critic Paul Dewar’s suggestion to consider the abductions, and what Canada could do about them. 

“More than 50 schools were attacked in the first seven months in 2013,” Dewar told the House. “Beyond the immediate casualties, these attacks create a culture of fear. After 50 students were killed in a September 2013 attack, around 1,000 students fled the campus. The Borno state ministry of education estimated that 15,000 children in the state stopped attending classes … as a result of those attacks.”

Dewar went on to talk about the ten million children not in school in Nigeria, and the need for Canada to uphold the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Among Dewar’s concrete proposals were that Canada should increase its support for the Global Partnership for Education. That’s an umbrella group supported by UNICEF, UNESCO, the World Bank and many countries in both the North and South, which focuses on primary and secondary education.

The NDP Critic also prodded the Conservative government to “finally sign the Arms Trade Treaty so no longer may the menace of small arms and terrorism go together, that we take that tool away from the terrorists.”

One hundred and eighteen countries have signed that Treaty, including the U.S., but Canada is conspicuously absent. Gun lobby groups in Canada have lobbied ferociously against the Treaty. They say it would provide a back door to the reintroduction of a long gun registry in Canada.

Conservative Employment Minister Jason Kenney did not want to focus on restricting bad guys’ access to the weapons of terror. He wanted to talk about the religious extremist nature of the group that abducted the girls, Boko Haram.

“I was surprised … to hear that the member did not reflect on the nature of the culprits,” Kenney intoned. “Boko Haram … has been spreading violence and wreaking havoc for years now in northern Nigeria. It is responsible for bombing dozens of churches and murdering thousands of innocent civilians… Christians at Christmas and Easter are constantly targeted for bombings by this organization…”

Extremist Islam is nowhere near the whole story

In the West, we usually, as Kenney did, identify the perpetrators of the recent crimes as simply Muslim extremists — irrational and violent religious fanatics.

It is a convenient sobriquet, although Boko Haram’s appeal to young Nigerians is based as much on politics and economics as on religion.

Nigeria is about evenly divided between Christians and Muslims. Since the rather recent revival of a form of democracy in that country (1999), the two religious groups have tended to share political power. 

President Goodluck Jonathan is a Christian from the predominantly Christian and “animist” South. He got his current job through succession, and as a result of an informal Muslim-Christian power-sharing arrangement. Jonathan had been Vice-President to a Muslim President who died in office.  

This power-sharing is the usual practice in Nigerian politics. When there is a Muslim President, there is a Christian Vice-President, and vice-versa.

It is a cozy accommodation among members of a privileged elite — an elite which encompasses both religious groups.

Who gets left out of the arrangement? The large majority of Nigerians, that’s who.

Indeed, although the oil-rich mammoth of Africa is nominally a democracy, its economy and politics is dominated by a small and tightly knit kleptocracy, which has, with near impunity, helped itself to a good part of the country’s immense oil wealth.

When the globally respected Chief of the Nigerian Central Bank publicly chided the government on what he said was $20 billion USD that seemed to have disappeared from state revenues, there was no outrage among the members of the political class. Instead, the Chief was fired — and then, for good measure, labelled a terrorist.

Knowledgeable observers in Nigeria report that Boko Haram succeeds in recruiting young men to its ranks because those youths are poor and without prospects, not because they have any particular devotion to fundamentalist dogma.

The appropriation of a good part of the country’s considerable wealth by a small number of people is so obvious and so open that even impoverished youth in the arid North, far from the oil fields of the humid Southeast, can’t help but notice.

That brazen theft of Nigeria’s patrimony has to rankle in the hearts of unemployed youth. It must make even the lunacies of Boko Haram seem like an attractive career choice.

How the story of ‘Biafra’ links to present–day troubles

This writer lived in Nigeria for a while, in the early 1970s, just after the end of the civil war (1967-1970). 

That conflict was one of the bloodiest since the end of WWII. Well more than three million people perished, most from starvation and disease. Yet today the Nigerian civil war is nearly forgotten. Try mentioning “Biafra” to a group of notionally well-educated folks and see how many know what you’re talking about. 

Biafra was the name the Eastern Nigerian Region gave to itself when it seceded from the federation and declared independence in 1967.

That secession had followed two military coups, the first undertaken by junior officers whose stated aim was to cleanse the country of corruption. The second coup, the so-called Colonels’ coup, was carried out by senior officers, who installed a respected General from a small minority tribe as head of state.

The coups had ethnic and religious overtones, and exacerbated tensions in a vast country that, at its birth, was very much an unnatural creation of colonialism.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the British did not assert their colonial authority over a single entity, which we now know as Nigeria. They created separate and distinct colonies in the largely Muslim North, and in the Southeast and Southwest, where, at the time, traditional religious practices pre-dominated.

In the North, the British encountered well-established hierarchical and theocratic monarchies, and decided to assert control through what they famously called “indirect rule.” They left vestiges of the existing indigenous ruling order in place; and they kept Christian missionaries, with their Western education, out.

Although there were many ethnic groups in the North, there was one dominant group whose language was used by almost all: the Hausa.

In the South, the British ruled directly and opened the doors to missionaries, with their education and westernization. The Yoruba, Igbo, Benin and many other peoples of the South adopted Western ways, in varying degrees, particularly Western education.

Southerners, especially the Igbo of the Southeast, became, to some extent, junior partners to Empire, providing skilled labour to the colonial civil service and an entrepreneurial middle class.

Many Igbos, Yoruba and other Southerners moved to the North to take advantage of opportunities in small business and colonial administration. In Northern cities, such as Kano, Kaduna and Maiduguri, the local people took to calling any new district inhabited by these “outsiders”  a “Sabon Gari” — a strangers’ quarter — a term still used today.

The junior officers who engineered the first coup in 1967 were, as it happens, almost all Igbo. They seized power with a sudden and well-planned outburst of well-targeted and murderous violence. In one blood-soaked night they assassinated most of the key political figures of the country, including the North’s most powerful and revered politician, the Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello.

The reaction in the North was quick and equally violent. Many Northerners turned on the Igbos in their midst in a series of what were, in effect, bloody pogroms. The Northern Igbos fled back to their homeland in the Southeast, creating a sense in that homeland of being besieged and under attack.

The counter-coup, led largely by Hausa and Yoruba officers, pushed the Igbos over the edge, and they declared the independence of what had been Nigeria’s Eastern Region. 

The newly created country known as Biafra included not only most of the Igbos, but many other minority ethnic groups, such as the martyred poet Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoni, largely concentrated on the oil-rich coast.  

Secessionist Biafra had almost all of the country’s known oil and gas reserves, and so war was predictable and almost inevitable.

And war there was, between the Biafrans and the so-called ‘federal’ Nigerians.

It was an unequal match, from the outset.

The Americans were notionally neutral and tied down by their adventure in Viet Nam; but both the British and Russians supported the federal side. The Chinese provided some support to the Biafran secessionists, as did the dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, which still had African colonies and thus great interest in the continent.

The federal side was much stronger, more populous, richer and better equipped, and had much more powerful allies. It fairly quickly gained the upper hand.

Forced starvation became one of the federal Nigerians’ weapons of war. They effectively blockaded Biafra’s access to outside goods, and whenever they took over secessionist territory destroyed much of its farming capacity.

Hope after the civil war was soon betrayed by greed and corruption

When the war ended the erstwhile Eastern Region was in ruins; but there was some effort to pump money and aid in to build it back up.

When I was working in Nigeria, not too long after the end of the war, one had the sense that the military government, headed by General Yakubu Gowon, was making genuine efforts to knit the disparate religious and ethnic groups together.

The government also seemed interested in using its generous oil revenues to build up the country’s infrastructure, especially its schools.

And Gowon’s government had an ambitious plan to bring in universal primary education throughout Nigeria. Western volunteer teachers, working in teacher training colleges, were part of that effort.

Sadly, that resolve did not last.

The Gowon government fell to another coup, which fell to another, while oil revenues continued to flow.

There was a brief period of return to civilian rule, then yet another coup, which brought to power the country’s most brutal military dictatorship, led by the notorious Sani Abacha. All the while, multinational oil companies were making huge profits and paying royalties to the Nigerian government, without inquiring too deeply as to where that money went.  

The man who was Vice-President during that brief civilian interregnum once complained that the greatest curse to befall Nigeria was oil.

The easy money from black gold, he said, distorted economic incentives in the country, resulting in neglect of the once-thriving manufacturing and agriculture sectors. As well, it created a greedy class of ruthless opportunists willing to play any angle to get a piece of the oil bonanza.

Nigeria has been a democracy for 15 years now, but electoral democracy has not delivered the goods for most of the country’s citizens.

Long Africa’s largest country by population, the oil rich country has now surpassed South Africa as the continent’s largest economy. However, that giant economy suffers from an extremely unequal distribution of wealth.

Today, many decades after an early and relatively enlightened military government committed itself to the goal of universal, public education, Nigeria is farther than ever from that goal.

Karl Nerenberg

Karl Nerenberg joined rabble in 2011 to cover Canadian politics. He has worked as a journalist and filmmaker for many decades, including two and a half decades at CBC/Radio-Canada. Among his career highlights...