The recent coups in Guinea-Bissau and Mali raise question regarding whether radical political change will sweep other parts of west and sub-Saharan Africa. The region is of course no stranger to dramatic and frequent political change, with 26 successful coups have occurred between 1963 and 2000. While the past decade has been quiet by comparison, recent events in Guinea-Bissau and Mali appear to indicate a rising propensity for the region's militaries to reassert power at the expense of democracy.
In Mali, the Tuareg have maintained a fierce sense of independence despite numerous peace agreements having been signed with the government -- most recently in 2008. Ongoing grievances over the lack of investment and perpetual military involvement in the North have created underlying tension that prompted a mutiny by the armed forces which spiraled into the coup. Mali's military capitalized on the instability that is inherent in any fragmented state, but the ease with which it was able to sweep into power is a concern, as it represents the clear failure of a structural foundation to support the country's nascent democracy. So many Malians had become disenchanted with their country's political system and widespread corruption that the initial attempts to visit Mali by West African leaders following the coup were rebuffed by sympathetic crowds.
Guinea-Bissau's situation is somewhat different, the country having experienced at least six political assassinations and three attempted coups over the past three years -- making it by far the most coup prone country in Africa. Although a connection between events in Mali and Guinea-Bissau is perhaps therefore tenuous, it is a reminder (as if one were needed) that political change is an ever-present component of the landscape in many parts of Africa.
Having a democratic tradition spanning 32 years, Mali would not appear to be the most obvious contender for non-democratic change, but the rapid collapse of the government indicates that simply paying lip service to democracy will not prevent political upheaval. While the dramatic change of government in Libya may have contributed to the coup in Mali, events in both Guinea-Bissau and Mali remind us how fragile democracy in many West African states is. A combination of populations divided ethnically and/or religiously, weak central government control, and rising disillusionment by a greater percentage of citizens -- who object to rampant corruption and a failure on the part of the central government to deliver basic needs -- reinforces underlying fragility. And given that these fragile democracies often coexist with militaries who are underpaid and also disillusioned, it comes as no surprise that perceived security threats are often used as an excuse to promote political change.
So what does all this imply for Nigeria? Since the unification of Northern and Southern Nigeria in 1914, the country has long struggled to create a cohesive national identity. As a result of the inherent ethnic and religious tension between north and south, the Salafist movement Boko Haram (BH) has recently made its presence felt through a series of attacks on a variety of targets in the north. Since the movement's birth in 2003 it has maintained opposition to a secular government in Abuja, with the aim of making the country ungovernable. BH has changed its strategy -- moving away from attacking security forces and focusing instead on attempting to inflame existing sectarian tensions by targeting civilians. This is a particularly worrisome development considering the volatility of Nigeria's ethnic and religious fault lines.
Although much of the violence occurs along ethnic and religious lines, many of the underlying grievances that BH have been able to exploit revolve around perceived inequality between the north and south, especially regarding who is (and is not) benefiting from the nation's oil wealth. Despite Nigeria's booming economy -- with growth rates ranging between 5.4 percent and 7.9 percent from 2005 to 2010 -- the central government has failed to distribute oil revenues equitably. During the same period, the number of people living in absolute poverty actually rose, with those in the north faring worse than their southern counterparts. Similar to Mali, Nigeria has struggled to integrate the north of the country economically, resulting in further polarization along religious and ethnic lines.
Political relations in the country have also worsened since President Jonathon decided to break the implicit agreement he made with the country's political groups that leadership would rotate between northern and southern candidates every two terms. As he now attempts to push through a host of reformist policies the president faces strong opposition from influential northern politicians. Both Babangida and Gusau -- who vied with Jonathon for PDP leadership in the 2011 election -- have the potential to seriously undermine his government if they cannot find common ground. Concessions would most likely come from revisions to the Petroleum Industry Bill, the manner in which the Sovereign Wealth Fund operates, and, ultimately, granting amnesty to relatively moderate BH members. While such concessions would be damaging to Jonathan's reformist agenda, they would also likely result in a significant erosion of political support for BH.
This presents Jonathon with a serious conundrum: BH presently benefits from grass root support in the north of the country and its current campaign to raise sectarian tension is leaving the government in an increasingly weakened position. Given the rising potential for serious civil strife in the future, Nigeria's military may believe it has no choice but to intervene in the political process. Unfortunately for Jonathon, one of the most viable strategies for subduing the BH threat is to make concessions to northern political elites, but doing so runs the risk of jeopardizing long overdue progress against corruption and how the country's oil wealth is managed, which themselves are key to improving the governance and thus the stability of the country.
While the coups in Guinea-Bissau and Mali may not have immediate ramifications for Nigeria, the government would be smart to bear them in mind as it grapples with its plethora of problems. Maintaining strained relations across disparate regions is no recipe for a secure democracy, and in an ever shrinking world there is no telling when an external event may suddenly alter the balance -- as returning Tuareg fighters did in Mali. With its own pockmarked history of military juntas, Nigeria is of course no stranger to coups, and while the professionalization of its military and the country's rising prominence internationally would appear to make a coup less likely, the threat BH poses cannot be overlooked.
If BH achieves its aim of making Nigeria ungovernable, any outcome suddenly becomes conceivable, given Nigeria's modern political history. Preventing BH from exploiting sectarian tension is therefore paramount, but shoring up the support of northern political figures while driving through a reformist agenda will be no easy task. How resilient Nigeria will be to a future coup depends on whether president Jonathon is able to balance these two objectives. It is important to remember that Nigeria's return to democracy was only a dozen years ago. Given Nigeria's tumultuous political history, the propensity of its military to seize power, and the nature of current political change in North and West Africa, many Nigerians must be wishing their own democratic political foundation was a bit more entrenched.
Daniel Wagner is CEO of Country Risk Solutions, a cross-border risk consulting firm based in Connecticut (USA), Director of Global Strategy with the PRS Group, and author of the new book Managing Country Risk (www.managingcountryrisk.com).
Joshua Wallace is a research analyst with CRS.
Joshua can be followed on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/JLP_Wallace
Follow Daniel Wagner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/countryriskmgmt
Ben Barber: Boko Haram: Killers For God
While it is true that an appetite for a coup is seemingly low and there are a raft of factors that mean Nigeria is not Mali or Guinea-Bissau it is undoubtedly facing a period of instability and the insurgency of BH is a bit too serious to be called a ‘passing phase’. With there being no clear cut path of how the government should or will deal with all the problems, the interesting question is what will the fallout be. What the article was pointing out was that due to the various dimensions and entangled nature of the issues at hand, in solving one concern Jonathon needs to be careful of not exacerbating another. The fact that Nigeria was ruled by Northern elites for the bulk of its independence only underscores the importance of Northern elites in maintaining the unity of Nigeria, and in doing so the scale of the conundrum which Jonathon faces.
Of course poverty is pervasive throughout Nigeria; however it is clear that Northern politicians feel aggrieved around what they gain from the south, for example, Prof Abdullahi recently came out with that message at the Arewa Elders Forum. The sentiment that the North is not necessarily benefiting from its arrangement with the South is significant because it must, in part, be seen as a reason to why many Northern politicians have remained silent on condemning BH.
1. There is a revolt against the established socio-political order in Muslim Northern Nigeria (Northern elite and traditional rulers).
2. There is a growing Salafist Islamic movement.
3. There is a growing Christian population and a backlash against the spread of Christianity in Nigeria's far North.
4. There is a growing detachment of Nigeria's Middle Belt from the far North (these two regions have traditionally been aligned).
5. There are politically motivated clashes between Christian and Muslim ethnic groups in the Middle Belt.
The Northern elites need to be more careful than Jonathan and most Nigerians will be very happy to see them gone from the power stakes. The North will not leave Nigeria and will not initiate divorce proceedings - without the Oil-rich South, Nigeria's far North will be a little different from Niger.
How did Jonathan win this election? By forging an alliance of the South and the Middle Belt. That is Nigeria's new reality and given that the Northern elite played a very minor role in Jonathan's election victory, have you considered what motivates him?
Lost in most analyses is the human angle. Real people have been killed, many from the South, Middle Belt and North. I expect to see a "Sons of Iraq" style awakening in Kano (the business community there will simply not sit back and watch its future destroyed).
This Northern elite is losing the legitimacy of the Northern people and has nothing positive to offer to Nigeria's future.
Boko Haram is a revolt against this elite, so they are more of a problem than a solution to anything in Nigeria.
We are tired of them, please stop telling us how to run our country.
The only historically and legally accurate definition of the North is an area that extends from the Niger and Benue River basins to the border with Niger. In that areas states like Taraba, Benue, Plateau and Adamawa have Christian majorities. States like Nassarawa, Kogi and Kaduna are almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims. States like Borno, Yobe, Bauchi and Gombe have significant Christian minorities.
The North could be up to 40% Christian, so the "largely Muslim North" mantra of uninformed Western analysts needs to challenged.
So the religious tension is not mainly "between the North and South", but WITHIN the North.
Secondly, poverty is pervasive in Nigeria - and singling out the "North" (whatever that means) for favoured treatment is unworkable. The BBC did a documentary series "Welcome to Lagos" and the deep poverty in Southern Nigeria was chronicled - I suggest you watch it, it is on Youtube. In addition, Nigeria's premier business daily debunked claims of "Northern poverty relative to the South": http://businessdayonline.com/NG/index.php/analysis/columnists/36138-johnnie-carson-the-us-and-boko-haram
Thirdly, left out of this analysis is the fact that Nigeria was ruled by the Northern elite for 38 out of its 51 years of independence. So the Nigerian state, with all its dysfunction is largely a creation of the "North".
I detect a combination of deliberate simplification, oversight (after all they are only bloody Africans) and misplaced emphasis. It shows in most, if not all analysis of the Nigerian crisis.
It isn't really difficult to see where this stems from. All the research money has flowed to the "Muslim North" or the Niger Delta. So there are very few Western experts with a holistic understanding of Nigeria. The graduate students who study Northern Nigeria focus on a Northern Nigeria that is only Islamic, but that isn't the reality of Northern Nigeria. Nobody is seriously studying the Middle Belt and everywhere else is treated like a vast black hole.
Diplomatic representation isn't much better either. The US has an consulate in Lagos and an embassy in Abuja. So it doesn't really know what is going on in say, the Middle Belt and the South East. This is why the US Ambassador tends to be frequently called to order for elementary factual errors (e.g. referring to Borno State, the seat of Boko Haram as Hausa-Fulani - it is Kanuri).
Bad information leads to bad policy prescriptions.
Maybe even looser than the EU.
Considering Nigerian size, I don't think 2 millions bpd should be considered a vast oil revenues. Nigeria is currently the sixth or seventh most populous country in the world but produces less oil than most of the oil countries (whose population are sometimes the same as a medium-sized Nigerian city). Nigeria is an oil producing country in the same sense as China is.
85% living on less than $2 a day is always hard for me to believe because the activities on ground just don't support. For example, about 100 million mobile phone users can't be living on $2 per day.
It is the same statistics, in 2000 by analysts sitting comfortably in London and New York, that claimed that Nigerians are so poor that by 2010 only 5 million Nigerians will be able to afford mobile phones. MTN and others ignored such warnings to prove them wrong.
The military is gone for good. It was forced out in 1999, not that they wanted to leave but Nigerians sent them packing. There are ethnic militias everywhere now. The days of taking over a govt by capturing the state house and radio station are long over.
1. Nigeria's Gini Coefficient (a measure of inequality) is higher than both Guinea Bissau and Mali's, at 43,
2. The percentage of people living under either $1.25 or $2.00 per day (a widely used measure of poverty) is higher than both Guinea Bissau and Mali, at 68% and 85% respectively, and
3. Nigeria's ranking in the Human Development Index is .46, the same as Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and Yemen).
In spite of the vast oil revenues created by Nigeria's oil industry, little of it 'trickles down' to the average person. 85% of the country's people live on less than $2 per day. There aren't many oil producing countries that can top that unfortunate statistic.
Nigeria also remains one of the most corrupt countries on earth, with a Transparency Index ranking of 2.4 - the same as Bangladesh and Zimbabwe.
The root causes of uprisings all over the world have to do with corruption, poverty, inequality, and religious divisiveness. Nigeria has all the ingredients required for the military to come back out of the barracks. If things get bad enough, they still could...
DW
You don't really know what you are talking about here. A return of the military will be the end of Nigeria - quite simple. All you Western analysts think that the only "aggrieved" and "alienated" people in Nigeria are Muslims from the North (Christians in the North don't count).
When the coup happens look forward to seeing what the other "poverty-stricken", "alienated" and "aggrieved" groups do.
The Boko Haram problem is nothing more than an acute symptom of income inequality and deep poverty in the North. It will not be solved overnight, but it is still a passing phase, just like every other malaise that Nigerians have endured over the past three to four decades. The electricity problem though, on the other hand ...
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They are each other.