Justice In Nigeria Now

By Professor Michael J. Watts, UC Berkeley

As Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and her entourage arrives this week in Abuja, the bright new capital of the Nigeria, their hosts will try to put the best face on what is the gravest political crisis the country has faced since their civil war ended almost four decades ago.  The uninspired government of President Musa Yar’ Adua, who took office in 2007 on the back of elections massively fraudulent even by Nigeria’s appallingly low standards, faces a dual political crisis.  In the oil-producing Niger delta a long simmering military insurgency has crippled the oil and gas industry which accounts for over 80% of government income and virtually all of Nigeria’s export revenues.  A counter-insurgency by federal forces launched in May 2009 produced a ferocious response by the insurgents including in July an audacious attack on key oil installations in Lagos, the economic capital of the country.

In the north of Nigeria, the Muslim heartland and the home-base of the powerful ruling northern oligarchy, a Taliban-styled Islamist group – Boko Haram – was brutally repressed by government security forces in early August.  Heavy bombardment of the movement’s compound resulted in large numbers of casualties, and culminated in the extra-judicial killing of the movement’s leader Mohammed Yusuf in Maiduguri at the hands of the police.  Two key economic and political regions of the Nigerian federation are in effect under lockdown.   After two years of drift and serial ineptitude, Nigeria now stands at a tipping point.

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Nigeria’s problem isn’t Islamist fundamentalism — it’s the country’s corrupt and self-serving government

by Jean Herskovits

reprinted from Foreign Policy originally published on August 3, 2009

Nigeria’s latest spate of violence — which began with attacks on police stations in four northern states — is not what it seems. Superficially, the story looks similar to (though it was not connected with) outbreaks of Islamist fanaticism elsewhere in the world: An Islamist sect run amok, threatening a town’s security, demanding an end to Western institutions, and seeking to impose a strict religious code. But instead, the clashes are a northern Nigerian version of what is happening in another (mostly Christian) region of the country, the Niger Delta. Both are violent reactions to the flagrant lack of concern on the part of those who govern for the welfare of the governed.

Ten years of supposed democracy have yielded mounting poverty and deprivation of every kind in Nigeria. Young people, undereducated by a collapsed educational system, may “graduate,” but only into joblessness. Lives decline, frustration grows, and angry young men are too easily persuaded to pick up readily accessible guns in protest when something sparks their rage. Meanwhile, those in power at all levels ignore the business of governing and instead enrich themselves. Law and order deteriorate. The Nigerian police, which are federal, are called on, but they have grievances of their own. Ill-trained, ill-paid, and housed in squalid barracks, they are feared for their indiscriminate use of force. The military, though more professional, is not prepared for dealing with unrest — and unrest has proliferated more and more.

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