Contemplating Nigeria’s Future

The state authoritarian tactics in handling the festering crisis over environmental degradation, underdevelopment, resource control against the advice of its general staff to the effect that it is a political problem, which requires a political solution and not military, could lead to an all out war that might unhinge the huge joke called Nigeria.

Over a decade ago, Robert Kaplan in his Coming Anarchy, captured the unpleasant living conditions of West African people. He noted that West Africa had become a metaphor of global “demographic, environmental and societal stress in which anarchy emerged as the ‘strategic’ danger”. The sub-region was not only embedded in diseases, and overpopulation, it was thick with crimes, resource scarcity, private armies and drug cartels. The strategic danger meant the absence of the rule of law, responsible and legitimate governments, and the subversion of the democratic method, i.e. free and fair elections.

Kaplan’s strategic anarchy is an existing reality among the peoples of West Africa. In particular, Nigeria dramatises its entire elements. Take its economy for example. It is not merely rentier but solely dependent on rents from sales of crude oil. It is estimated by the World Bank to have earned about $400billion since the late fifties when oil exploitation in commercial quantity began. Much of this earning from the sector, which is the sole prop of the country’s national economy, has been misappropriated, misapplied, stolen and stashed away in foreign bank accounts by a backward and warped ruling class. The result has been the destruction of national infrastructure, destruction of the productive base of the economy and the absence of planning or ‘planning without facts’. Single-minded fixation to the oil returns has led to incremental erosion of federalism, the basis upon which the country entered into statehood. As Michael Watts of University of California has rightly noted, “The heart of the Nigerian petro-state is unearned income, and its central dynamic is the fiscal sociology of the distribution of and access to oil rents.” The oil complex has spawned false indicators of nation-building such as rigged population, over-reliance on oil and looting of the national till and a corresponding unleashing of   separatist impulse in many of Nigerian nationalities. Imagine, the dawn of 45 years from now and, as experts predict, crude reserve is exhausted, what shape will Nigeria take? Forty-five years may be charitable. In one stretch of the imagination, Patrick Wilmot characterised the country in 2006 as an “earthly battlefield”. In 2036, it would “be worse than Armageddon”.  It is these elements of the Nigerian state that the US intelligence report in 2005 qualified thus: “While Nigeria’s leaders are locked in a bad marriage that all dislike but dare not leave, there are possibilities that could disrupt the precarious equilibrium in Abuja.” How do you sustain a country that continually lies against itself—rigged population, over reliance on a single export and looting of the national till?

The Niger-Delta currently represents the country’s Achilles’ heel. The state authoritarian tactics in handling the festering crisis over environmental degradation, underdevelopment and resource control against the advice of its general staff to the effect that it is a political problem, which requires a political solution and not military, could lead to an all out war that might unhinge the huge joke called Nigeria. In a brazen case of a country turning its arms against its own population, the country’s army, heeding some political hawks in and out of Aso Rock, the country’s seat of government, including foreign interests, have carried out series of aerial bombardment of the peoples of the Niger-Delta, the latest being the 24 June 2008 assault on Niger-Delta militants in Bayelsa State. The limited resistance of the Niger-Delta militants has resulted in a shut in of about one million bpd as at February 2008. The Niger-Delta crisis is expensive for the country. From 1999-2004, the country lost about $6.8billion as a result of the crisis. And in May 2007, the government was forced to plug shortfall in revenue with about $2.7billion from its excess crude account. The recent attack on Bonga offshore rig, if anything, is indicative of the growing capacity of the militants. Need the Nigerian ruling class be told post-9/11 reflection of the British historian Eric Hosbawm? According to him, since the end of the Cold War “most military operations… have been conducted not by conscript armies, but by small bodies of regular or irregular troops, in many cases operating high-technology weapons and protected against the risk of incurring casualties”. Indeed, 21st century wars would no longer be fought by conventional armies as individuals could wage war on nation states. One can surmise that the moribund state actors in Nigeria are perhaps playing into the US geo-strategic calculation in the “ungovernable” Niger-Delta for which it sets out the old fashioned Grand Area plan.  According to Noam Chomsky, the Grand Area plan was the area strategically necessary for world control and embraced the entire western hemisphere, the Far East and the former British Empire. Its realisation meant the imposition of pliant regimes in those areas designed as strategic for US interest. All these have entered into the vortex of Niger-Delta politics. In the Le Monde Diplomatique, Michael T. Klare in a reflection on US energy security lends credence to this point to the extent that this year, Pentagon will turn on the US AFRICOM, its latest overseas combat command. Nevertheless, a relationship does exist between AFRICOM and US dependence on the oil in the Gulf of Guinea, but never admitted publicly by officials of the department of defence except in private briefings.

Sometime in 2003, a film on the British marines tackling the Niger-Delta militants was premiered in Birmingham. Indeed, there was a similar report of US war games on the Niger Delta by the National Army War College’s Centre for Strategic Leadership between 31 May and 2 June 2000. The oil companies, namely, Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, took part alongside the State Department’s African Affairs Bureau and the Pentagon, the Environmental Protection Agency and officials from the CIA and DIA. The formal creation of African Command, AFRICOM, in 2007 under General William Ward has sealed that objective. As Insider Weekly has rightly observed in its 7 July 2008 issue, the hue and cry about the summit on the Niger-Delta is a red herring designed to fail and provide a basis for military intervention. The end results are anyone’s guess. Interest will play a dominant role, foreign forces will side with the most strategic partner in the anarchic scenario and Nigeria’s territorial integrity may be violated.

In 2007, the US Congress passed an energy bill  in which its scientists are empowered to research for an alternative to oil as a source of energy especially for its auto consumption since the country realised that the quest for oil has lured it into avoidable conflicts world-wide. The direction in this regard is biofuel–ethanol. According to C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota, use of ethanol in the United States was expected to reach over 6 billion gallons in 2006 while that of biodiesel was expected to be about 250 million gallons. In 2005, the U.S. government mandated the use of 7.5 billion gallons of biofuel annually by 2012; in early 2007, 37 governors projected 12 billion gallons by 2010, President Bush moved it further to 35 billion gallons by 2017. Brazil, which sat up after the oil shock of the 1970s, equals US ethanol production level. Although there has been a general apprehension that biofuel will increase global food crisis because of its reliance on sugarcane and corn, recent researches have shown that ethanol can now be produced from elephant grass, woody plants and straw among others. Interestingly, South-East Asian countries have now joined the ethanol race. The simple truth is that the search for an alternative source of energy other than the hydrocarbon is already bearing fruits. After the oil shock of the 1970s, Denmark, a country that once relied 100 per cent on oil import as source of energy, developed the combined heat and power, CHP, technology which can capture the heat and electricity from waste incinerator.  Today, it has several combined heat and power plants which can be fuelled by coal, natural gas, wood pellets and straw. The recent hydrogen-powered life car which is powered by a bank of lightweight hydrogen fuel cells developed by Qinetiq, a UK defence firm, increases the tally. It points in one direction—cars surely will run on water. To be sure, Klare was right to stress that, “…given the right investment and research policies—and the will to apply something other than force to energy supply issues—oil’s historic role as the world’s paramount fuel could relatively quickly draw to a close.”  In the not-so-distant future all of this will culminate in a global commercial success and it will be bye-bye to petro-dollars.

The pertinent question is what then happens to the country’s oil reserve? Do we have an industrial base that can convert oil into optimum domestic use?  To be sure, in Nigeria, the transformation of oil as an energy source coupled with a population growing at geometric progression, will lead to resource war, an anarchic situation, which international powers may be unable to resolve. The US 2005 intelligence report on Nigeria was right when it noted that, “A failed Nigeria probably could not be reconstituted for many years – if ever – and not without massive international assistance.”

It is common knowledge that the Nigerian President, Umar Yar’Adua, a beneficiary of an infamous electoral process, is ill. During the presidential campaign, there was wide allegation to the effect that he had died in Germany where he had gone for medical attention. On account of this, former President Olusegun Obasanjo had to dramatise the fact that he was alive in an open telephone conversation in Abeokuta campaign grounds. Upon ‘election’ as President of Nigeria, the public had lived with a great deal of uncertainty as to the lie of his health. In a chat with the media during the fete over his one year in office as Nigerian President, Yar’Adua admitted for the first time that he has renal problem. We all know that most kidney problems if not well managed are terminal and we can only wish Mr. President well. Further than how Nigerians view it, the President’s health is loaded with politics, and has internal dynamics that constitute a ladder to anarchy. You may not believe Sahara Reporters, but let us state hypothetically that when the President had cause to go to Germany for medical attention, there was a negative play of constitutional powers. Power did not pass over to his constitutional deputy; the levers were held by the trio of his former Chief of Staff, General Mohammed Abdullahi, National Security Adviser, General Sarki Muktar and the Secretary to the Federal Government, Ambassador Babagana Kingibe. Further stretch your imagination: if Mr. President were to slip into mortality, God forbid, what then happens? Will his constitutional deputy succeed him? Politics of succession which subverts the constitution will lead to an implosion. This might force the most organised force of society to intervene. This is a likely source of future anarchy, perhaps captured in the US intelligence report, “The most important would be a junior officer coup that could destabilise the country to the extent that open warfare breaks out in many places in a sustained manner.”

Knowledge rules the world. The West has continued to emphasise its leadership in the knowledge superhighway. Philip Emeagwali puts it succinctly: “I once believed that capital was another word for money, the accumulated wealth of a country or its people. Surely, I thought, wealth is determined by the money or property in one’s possession. Then I saw a Deutsche Bank advertisement in the Wall Street Journal that proclaimed: ‘Ideas are capital. The rest is just money.’”

Since independence, the country’s education has witnessed incremental decline under the jackboot of the military and their civilian counterparts. In the bizarre context, academics with self-respect voted with their feet out of the country and, as aliens of extra-ordinary ability, are contributing to the development of their host countries while their fatherland suffers. In fact, Nigerian rulers have continued with morbid glee the deconstruction of education, issuing licences to those who stole from the national till to establish private universities to the detriment of public schools. Wilmot bemoaned this reality. According to him, “…universities which provide the engine room for development in modern industrial countries have been reduced to intellectual cemeteries where the death of mind is celebrated by uniformed ignoramuses and their civilian bootlickers. Because of the anti-intellectualism of the ruling class, it has waged a systematic war against the universities since 1966. With few interruptions, it has targeted the best and brightest on the campuses, equating criticism with sedition and dissent for treason.”

The dismal state of education today represents a danger to the health of the country, with half-baked graduates populating the army of the unemployed who can not relate to their world in critical ways and are incapable of standing up to their peers elsewhere in the world.

The foregoing scenarios which I have painted are the consequences of misrule by a warped ruling class, consumerist and outward oriented. The class is so fatalistic and foolhardy that it does not contemplate its own survival, talk less that of its people

– Excerpts from Dr. Akhaine’s new book, titled, ‘The Next Anarchy,’ billed for presentation at the Ikeja Airport Hotel, Lagos on Thursday 31 July 2008.

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