By Azubuike Ishiekwene
LAGOS—Former American Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell recently expressed that the 2011 elections could tip the country over the brink, into chaos or worse. The main reasons, according to Campbell: failure of elite consensus regarding power-sharing, an absence of a strong central leader, and the fragile electoral reform process. Campbell predicted that Nigerian politicians, already split along ethnic lines, would inflame religious tensions and the fragile peace in the Niger Delta, leading to a deadly post-election crisis.
Under these circumstances, the military may be tempted to strike.
For a country used to hearing the worst about itself, Campbell’s forecast, in a recent article for Foreign Affairs, will hardly come as a shock. A few years ago, a U.S. intelligence report that Nigeria would disintegrate by 2015 caused alarm and contempt in roughly equal measure.
Eight years ago, Karl Maier, the veteran Africa correspondent for London’s Independent newspaper and a contributor to The Economist and the Washington Post, had written a book titled, “This House Has Fallen,” a blunt commentary on how corruption, greed and bigotry endangered the country’s future. In reaction to the book, those who truly believed that the house had fallen wanted to know what would become of the rubble; those who thought the book was only a warning wanted to know how to prevent the disaster; and those who were furious over Maier’s audacity would have been happy to see the author hung by the spine of his own book.
At 50, Nigeria can no longer be afraid of asking itself the hard questions just because they appear politically inconvenient. Politicians preach unity all the time, but have managed to foment one civil war that claimed over a million lives and over a dozen religious crises that have left parts of the country a seething cauldron.
Some love to pretend that they believe in merit and fairness, but are usually the first to chuck out a candidate just by the sound of his name, tone of voice, or the state where he was born. It is even worse if the candidate is a “she.” The constitution gushes about equality before the law and guarantees full rights of citizenship, but many can’t get justice except by pulling strings or paying for it. The same constitution that guarantees full rights of citizenship puts quotas above competence. Isn’t that why the ruling People’s Democratic Party has been more concerned about zoning than about what the aspirants for the party’s ticket have to offer the country?
Nigeria loves to think that it is safe, secure and unbreakable because it has size, mineral resources and a big ego. But Princeton Lyman, who served as American ambassador to Nigeria more than two decades earlier than Campbell, has already trashed these myths. As he pointed out at the Achebe Colloquium last December, neither the fact that one in every five Africans is Nigerian, nor potential mineral wealth, is a guarantee of a secure future. Nigeria can’t be fooling itself at 50. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia collapsed not because they did not have size, but, in part, because they were too big to manage.
Sudan is roughly one-third of Nigeria’s population, but what it lacks in numbers it nearly makes up for in the sheer vastness of landmass and mineral wealth. Yet, neither has saved it from the calamities of a ghastly civil war.
Neither the fact that one in every five Africans is Nigerian, nor potential mineral wealth, is a guarantee of a secure future. Nigeria can’t be fooling itself at 50.
Brazil, India and China show that size matters sometimes. However, value flows in the direction of size not for its own sake, but only if it can also find relatively skilled labour, stability, basic infrastructure and reasonable guarantee of the sanctity of contracts. Failure in these areas has not only led Nigeria to be cited frequently in doomsday scenarios. It has also meant that much of the world is passing Nigeria by. Those who used to worry a lot about Nigeria’s well-being and its inability to live up to its role—the United States, Britain and South Africa—can hardly be bothered anymore.
Spare me that hackneyed story about the serious setbacks of colonial rule. Malaysia, a country three years younger and with a similar colonial heritage, borrowed its first palm kernel seedlings from Nigeria, and now that country is in a different league altogether. Singapore was similarly in the throes of a corrupt and incompetent leadership before Lee Kwan Yew and his followers turned that island city-state into one of the world’s most advanced countries.
If Nigeria wants the next 50 years to be different, it must face down its demons—punish corruption, provide infrastructure and micro-credit, and insist on an electoral system that produces credible leadership. I disagree with Campbell that the failure of consensus over power sharing or the absence of a strongman, like Obasanjo, for example, is necessarily a bad omen. Strongmen, godfathers and moneybags have been the bane of the country’s politics.
The failure of consensus, which Campbell so deplores, is not as much a failure as it is the beginning of the end of an archaic recruitment system. It’s a good thing for the country, especially since politicians of all shades, including the traditional strongmen, are now compelled to negotiate a different model. The country needs one badly.
Vested interests will, of course, resist it, but such resistance need not lead to chaos and bloodshed.
It is possible to take the cynical view—that Campbell’s analysis is more an alert to the American establishment about the increasing unreliability of its fourth biggest oil supplier than it is a prophecy about whether or not Nigeria is doomed.
If Nigeria can humble itself and take a long, hard look at the mirror, it just might find that it has been its own worst enemy. As the country marks its 50th anniversary, forecasts such as those of John Campbell should be a wake-up call.
Azubuike Ishiekwene, a member of the editorial board of World Policy Journal, has been an investigative reporter, a features writer, a member of the editorial board, and the editor of Punch Titles, Nigeria’s largest selling newspapers. He is the author of Nuhu Ribadu, a book on Nigeria’s stalled anti-corruption war, the chair of the CNN/MultiChoice African Journalist of the Year Award panel, and a member of the board of the World Editors Forum.
Image via Flickr, user MikeBlyth