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.

Nigeria is an oil-rich petro-state but its developmental record in one of catastrophic failure.  According to IMF, the $700 billion in oil revenues since 1960 have added almost nothing to the standard of living of the average Nigerian. More than three-quarters of oil revenues accrue to one percent of the population; a huge proportion of the country’s oil wealth, perhaps 40% or more, has been stolen.

The coastal waters of Nigeria, according to the International Maritime Bureau, are a pirate-haven, comparable to the lawless seas of Somalia and the Maluccas.  A new report Transnational Trafficking and the Rule of Law in West Africa by the UN Office for Drugs and Crime estimates that 55 million barrels of oil are stolen (‘bunkered’) each year from the Niger delta. Amnesty International’s report Petroleum, Pollution and Poverty in the Niger Delta released in June 2009 grimly inventories the environmental disaster caused by 1.5 million tons of spilled oil, describing the results of the slick alliance between international oil companies and the Nigerian state as a “human rights tragedy”.

The turn from peaceful non-violence of the sort advocated by the famous Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa to armed struggle, culminated in the dramatic appearance in late 2005 of  a new group – the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) – who launched a frontal attack on oil installation in the name of ‘resource control’ and a ‘new federalism’.  In three years they have in effect brought the oil industry to a standstill. Oil production has collapsed, (at least a million barrels a day are shut-in). Shell, the largest single operator, has closed its Western operations entirely, and its Eastern operations are barely functional. The head of Nigeria’s Central Bank recently concluded that the country’s economic future now turns on the resolution of the Niger delta crisis.

The federal government has failed conspicuously to grasp the gravity of political sentiments across the multi-ethnic oilfields. A 2007 World Bank study discovered that an astonishing 36.23% of youth interviewed revealed a “willingness or propensity to take up arms against the state”. Government sees the problem almost wholly in term of criminality. But history teaches us that any insurgency is a complex mix of greed and grievance – and one person’s criminal or terrorist is another’s liberation fighter. A 2009 survey poll reveals that local communities have no faith whatsoever in state and local governments. Their experience is one of exclusion, neglect and organized theft. This is no less the case with Haram Boko, a movement whose anti-Western sentiments speak powerfully to a generation of young Muslims for whom modern development and education has brought poverty, unemployment and a radical souring towards secular national development.

President Yar ‘Adua announced an amnesty plan for Niger delta militants on June 25 and released  Henry Okah, an important leader MEND leader, on July 13, 2009.  Good news in principle.  But the amnesty is simply an opportunity to address root problems as Okah put it. And there is precious little in the offing right now.  Secretary Clinton arrives, therefore, at a crucial moment.  Another failure of will by the government could prove to be catastrophic. MEND’s ceasefire ends on September 15th.  Something bold has to happen soon.

Secretary Clinton should highlight two important opportunities.  First, the Nigerian senate is in the middle of debating a new petroleum bill capable of addressing some of the core concerns of Niger delta activists.  Already there are signs that the new bill will ignore the voices of the oil communities.  Second, the government commissioned a forty-three person Technical Committee to provide a strategy for the future of the Niger delta.  The report has languished since its release in November 2008 in spite of the fact that it contains a clear blueprint for moving forward.  Here at least is a place to start.

Michael Watts is Class of 63 professor at the University of California, Berkeley and author with Ed Kashi of Curse of the Black Gold: Fifty Years on Oil in the Niger Delta (2008).

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.

Of course, this most recent eruption — which left 700 dead, more wounded, and thousands displaced — had its own peculiarities. Not all uprisings in diverse Nigeria are the same, though usually they are predictable. This time, the principal player was an Islamist sect based in Maiduguri in Borno state and led by 39-year old Mohammed Yusuf. Its name, Boko Haram, translates more or less as “Opposition to Western Education.”

Even established leaders of Islam in the north, who condemn Yusuf’s preaching, are aware of how government has failed Nigeria’s young. What has Western education done for them lately? For that matter, what have other Nigerian institutions, all easily seen as Western-inspired, done for them? Boko Haram was demanding something its members believed would be better.

The attacks on police stations last week were triggered by different events in different states. In Maiduguri, just weeks before the first attack, the police had opened fire on a funeral procession of Yusuf’s apparently unarmed young followers. People in Maiduguri were expecting retaliation, and Yusuf himself had declared that if he were arrested, his followers would fight back.

The outbreak of violence, then, should not have surprised the security services; certainly it did not surprise the people of Maiduguri or anyone else in Nigeria. After clashes in nearby Bauchi state a week earlier, Yusuf was widely reported as vowing to avenge police killings of his followers there. Nonetheless, those in charge of security were clearly unprepared. The police were overwhelmed, and the Army, once deployed, called in 1,000 more troops as reinforcements. The intelligence system was aware of Boko Haram and since 2007 had been advocating measures to stop its growth. The government simply ignored the advice.

Last Thursday, after a ferocious battle at Yusuf’s heavily fortified Maiduguri compound, from which he had fled, police caught up with him at the home of his father-in-law. They took him into custody and then shot him dead. Yusuf’s body has been displayed on state television. The first official story was that he was killed in a shootout and not at police headquarters. When the military produced photographs showing that they had handed him over alive to the police, officials offered a new story: that he was shot while trying to escape. Either way, his death is unlikely to bring a lasting end to this crisis. Meanwhile, the excessive force of the military response has compounded the misery of people in Maiduguri. As one bitter resident said, “They used a sledgehammer to kill an ant.” There is now growing anger at the indiscriminate killing of guilty and innocent alike.

And so it goes. Nigeria’s far north has a history of charismatic leaders who preach unorthodox Muslim beliefs and rally large numbers of young men in clashes with traditional Islamic and political authorities. In the early 1980s, a major wave of violence spread from Kano to Maiduguri. A smaller outbreak in 2004 in Yobe and Borno states was a forerunner to the present clashes. Then, a rebellious group of young men who called themselves “Taleban,” having no doubt heard the name (but not the spelling) on the Hausa service of the BBC or Voice of America, demanded the imposition of full sharia law. That same plea was sweeping all the far northern states, thanks in part to strong popular feeling that Nigeria’s secular institutions were not delivering justice. Sharia, it was hoped, would do a better job.

Boko Haram, which by some accounts evolved from the “Taleban,” judged that sharia did not help: Ironically, the four states where last week’s death and destruction occurred are all states that did adopt sharia criminal law. It is said loudly and frequently by those who live there that not only has sharia law been quietly set aside, but that now these are among the worst governed states in the country.

Meanwhile, Nigerians note that as the violence last week was escalating, their president — who is himself from the far northern state of Katsina — chose to leave the country on a visit to Brazil. (An attack on a police station in Katsina followed.) Newspaper columnists contrasted this unfavorably with the Chinese president’s decision to skip the G-8 meetings in Italy last month when unrest enveloped Xinjiang province.

And in the Niger Delta, as in the north, the goverment’s indifference to life on the ground has had growing consequences. Protests there have escalated over the years to kidnappings, explosions, and armed combat. Successive governments, especially at the lavishly funded state level, have done little to develop the area and improve people’s lives. What is different, of course, is that the delta’s oil, which despoils the mangrove creeks but funds Nigeria’s government at all levels, has also produced criminal networks whose activities, with political and even military complicity, have made the tragedy there all the more intractable. And the massive importation of weapons into the delta has made guns of all kinds — particularly AK-47s — available cheaply throughout the country, notably now in the north.

The problems are not new. Nigerians and others who cared to look closely have seen the political venality, lack of concern, and flamboyant lifestyle of the corrupt rich and powerful who have made daily life for the vast majority of the population worse and worse, year after year. A decade ago, with the return of democracy, Nigerians had high hopes. But now, after rigged elections at all levels in 2003 and 2007, and the prospect of nothing different in 2011; with unclean drinking water, a failed electrical grid, unsafe roads, ever rising crime, and a host of other grievances, they have little hope left.

The world will misunderstand if it looks at the latest Nigerian tragedy through the lens of global radical Islam. If Nigeria’s leaders do not urgently start to address their country’s most basic, obvious needs, the only question is what will trigger the next spate of armed mayhem, and where. It could be anywhere. And its causes, with deep roots in corruption in high places, will be no mystery.

Jean Herskovits is research professor of history at the State University of New York, Purchase. She has been traveling to Nigeria for nearly four decades, most recently two weeks ago.