Lagos — This west African country of 206 million people boasts the world's fastest growing fintech market and booming technology start-ups. Nollywood, its film industry, and writers such as Chimamanda Adichie, have gripped the world's imagination. Nigeria's Gen Z musicians are conquering the world with the pulsating beats of Davido, Wizkid and Burna Boy, among others.
But beneath these outward indications of confidence and potential, Africa's most populous country and largest economy by GDP is a boiling cauldron of many conflicts that have left millions of its citizens destitute and hopeless and have cast a cloud over its future.
The favorite question Nigerians debate is: can Nigeria survive?
The decade-old Boko Haram/Islamic State West Africa insurgency in the country's Northeast region has killed an estimated 50,000 people and left two million more internally displaced. Terrorist "bandits" in the Northwest kill, rape and kidnap for ransom and have successfully attacked even military installations. Muslim pastoralists, with their herds, fleeing climate change in the Sahel clash violently over land and water resources with the mainly Christian, mostly farming communities in Nigeria's Middle Belt. Low–intensity armed conflict is simmering between Nigeria's military and security agents and separatist groups in the country's Southeast region, as well as militants in the oil-rich but environmentally degraded Niger Delta.
Nigeria is a large theatre of many silent wars.
While the overstretched Nigerian military is deployed in two-thirds of the country's 36 states, and several admirable local efforts at peace building by humanitarian organizations such as the Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding Initiative are underway, these approaches are only scratching at the surface of the problem. They address the symptoms but not the causes of Nigeria's intra-national conflicts.
Building peace begins with diagnosing the problem.
A serious effort at peacebuilding in Nigeria must begin by diagnosing the problem correctly. Solving the problem requires an approach that goes beyond patching up a short-lived "peace of the graveyard".
Such an effort must be geared to constructing healthy, mutually respectful relationships across Nigeria's many divides of ethnicity, religion and class. That approach must strike at - and remove - the structural factors that have generated continual domestic conflict for six decades.
The country must address questions of equity, justice, and the omnipresent 'National Question'. Since Nigeria's independence from the United Kingdom in 1960, it has faced a crisis of nationhood. The country's political leadership elite have failed to invent, and agree on, a commonly shared vision of what Nigeria means for its citizens.
Instead, as a ladder to power, politicians have exploited the cleavages and lack of trust among the country's disparate ethnic groups and its two main religions – Christianity and Islam – each of which claim roughly equal numbers of adherents at about 45 percent of the population. Such leadership has widened the trust deficit.
Democracy, while seemingly encouraging citizens' choice of their leaders in contrast to decades of military rule, also has bred fractionalization. This is not because democracy is bad. It is because democracy is, as we have seen even in more politically mature countries such as the United States, fragile and far from fool-proof.
As politics in Nigeria has been a contest for power and domination by some ethnic and religious groups over others, sectarian identity has trumped a unifying national one. Competition to control state resources – primarily crude oil since the 1970s – has intensified the quest for power. Dividends of democracy have been hard to find.
Governance has therefore failed, leaving nearly half the country's population in extreme poverty. 'Electoralism' – the ritual of periodic, mostly rigged elections without an informed voting electorate or strong underlying institutions – has trumped the use of democracy as a tool to mobilize a national consensus for development.
Nigeria was born in dissonance.
Nigeria's history has shaped its present. Today's generation must understand the context, as a prerequisite for creating the durable changes for which Nigerians have longed.
European powers, meeting in Berlin in 1884, divided Africa among themselves and outlined the continent's colonial boundaries. The people who lived there were subdued by force.
Present-day Nigeria was created in 1914 by an amalgamation of two British Protectorates that were outlined on the Berlin Conference map. The new entity incorporated 250 disparate ethnic nationalities.
The British Protectorate of Southern Nigeria, had begun to embrace Christianity and was economically dynamic and politically republican. The other, the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, was mainly Muslim and faced the Arab world in its historical links. Northern Nigeria was a mostly feudal and conservative society, but it has a significant Christian minority.
At the time of the Amalgamation of 1914, the northern region was economically dependent on subventions from the British Colonial Office. A main reason for the Amalgamation was to deploy Southern Nigeria's budget surplus to defray the budget deficits in the Northern Protectorate. At the same time, Colonial Britain clearly favored the largely Muslim north over the South in Nigeria's internal political dynamics. The ostensible reason was the region's large land mass and population, but the cultural similarity between that part of Nigeria and the Britain of class-dominated societies played a role.
In the north, the minority but politically dominant Fulani group who migrated from other parts of West Africa had conquered indigenous Hausa and other ethnic groups in the early 19th century. The south was comprised of the Yoruba, the Igbo and ethnic minorities. These dichotomies, one religious within communities of different faiths and ethnicities in northern Nigeria, and another at the national level between the Muslim north and the mostly Christian south, have deepened over decades.
There have been constant intercommunal clashes between Muslim and Christian communities, in particular, in Kaduna and Plateau States. There also have been clashes between extremist Islamic groups on one hand, and moderate Muslims and Christians on the other hand. This is the origin of the Boko Haram conflict. The phrase Boko Haram means "Western education is forbidden".
Who owns the oil?
The rise of crude oil in the 1970s as Nigeria's main natural resource – and the source of 90 percent of its foreign exchange earnings – introduced another element of conflict: who owns the oil and its revenues?
For 48 of its 62 years of independence, political power in Nigeria has been in the hands of governments headed by soldiers or politicians from the north. Officers of northern origin ruled the country under military regimes for 28 years, while politicians from the region have led Nigeria for a combined 20 years of civilian democratic rule.
This domination of Nigerian politics has included the appropriation of oil "rents" and their patronage-distribution to rent-seekers, including across sectarian divides, a pattern was made possible by the end of real federalism. Before the country's first military coup in 1966, the country's different regions had significant control of their natural resources.
Ironically, Maj-Gen. Johnson-Thomas Aguiyi Ironsi, the country's first military head of state was an ethnic Igbo from Southern Nigeria. He lasted for only six months before he was overthrown and killed in a counter-coup led by northern officers. In another irony. Ironsi had become Nigeria's leader after he foiled another coup attempt in which two revered Northern Nigerian leaders – national Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa and the regional premier of the Northern Region, Sir Ahmadu Bello, were killed by the executioners of the thwarted coup.
Subsequent military regimes, in particular that of General Yakubu Gowon, appropriated ownership of natural resources to Nigeria's central government. Although Nigeria is a federation in theory, in practice it remains administered as a unitary state in which the central government – and by extension the ethnic-religious groups that are dominant therein – remain far more powerful than the country's constituent states. These states were, in fact, created by dictatorial military regimes, making an oxymoron of the term 'federal'. Today's Nigeria is a federation more in theory than in reality.
The perennial 'National Question'
This matter lies at the heart of the so-called National Question. In reality, the National Question is a series of questions: What is Nigeria? Who is a Nigerian? Is Nigeria's current constitution, grandfathered in 1999 by the military regime that midwifed the return of democracy that year, truly a representation of the wishes of Nigerians about the nature and structure of this troubled union?
What is the place of ethnic minorities? This issue has triggered militancy in the oil-rich Niger Delta, as many young men in the region increasingly resented their states' lack of determinative authority over the revenues from their soil. The region remained "the goose that lays the golden egg", providing – mismanaged – fiscal revenues that have underpinned the Nigerian state.
Nigeria has a tax to GDP ratio of six percent, the lowest in the world. Crude-oil theft by criminal elements in cahoots with some members of the state security apparatus has undermined both oil production and revenues.
The unanswered National Question and the political marginalization of the Igbo, one of Nigeria's three largest ethnic groups, has led to simmering antagonism punctuated by brutal violence in Nigeria's southeast. There has been a resurgence of separatist movements calling for the restoration of Biafra – the short-lived secessionist republic that proclaimed independence in 1967, leading to a civil war that claimed two million lives before the rebellion was defeated in 1970.
The conflict in Nigeria's Middle Belt is rooted in the desertification caused by climate change. But it is exacerbated by suspicions among local communities that the attacks by mostly Fulani herders – and the inability or unwillingness of security agencies to prevent the attacks, protect local residents or bring the killers to justice – is part of an ethnic agenda of expansion that their ancestors had successfully repelled two centuries earlier.
Building a durable peace requires leadership
Against a background of ancient historic hatreds and today's conflicts, Nigeria and Nigerians must find their way forward. The alternative may be a violent descent of the country into chaos, resulting in a break-up akin to the former Yugoslavia – a scenario complicated by the existence of 250 ethnic nationalities – or one of state collapse like Somalia, with the state becoming a theatre of higher intensity armed conflict, under attack from terrorism of varying hues.
The country's security and economic crisis have their roots in the absence of a sense of nationhood. Despite the indisputably higher challenge of managing a heterogeneous state relative to a more homogenous one, it is possible to manufacture a national consensus for peace and development in Nigeria. But this is a task for the kind of leadership that has so far proved to be in short supply.
The challenge of peacebuilding is the main hurdle facing whoever wins the country's next presidential election, scheduled for February 2023. The next president must possess the political will and skill to drive a process that will create a consensus around the National Question and the country's structural challenges, which would then be legislated into the Constitution.
Nigeria's political elite, or at least influential parts of it, have avoided confronting this question for too long. Nigeria, its much-heralded potential for real prosperity and greatness notwithstanding, is in reality a broken country.
Perhaps the root of the problem is that the original national consensus was subverted. As Nigeria struggled for independence from Britain, its elites were keenly conscious of the artificial construct that was 'Nigeria' and were determined to avoid political domination by any group. Agreement was reached between the Northern, Western and Eastern Regions, with the backing of the British colonial authorities, that a large country of diverse people was best structured constitutionally as a federation rather than a unitary state. Leaders of the Northern and Western Regions argued most strongly in favour of this outcome.
The federalization process began in 1947 and culminated in the MacPherson Constitution of 1951 and was the basis of the country's 1960 Independence Constitution. This federal structure was broken by the military intervention of 1966 and the subsequent extended periods of military rule. It has not been restored. But it must, if a lasting peace is to be constructed.
Four steps towards peace and national survival
A constitutional restructuring of Nigeria will address many of the structural generators of conflict between Nigeria's component groups and foster a devolution of responsibility and accountability for development in Nigeria's component states or regions.
- Key to achieving such a consensus is the political elite of Northern Nigeria, some members of which remain reticent about a constitutional return to genuine federalism that would lead to loss of political advantage in national politics. It is important to address these fears with practical steps, such as a transition period to full fiscal federalism, giving the region time to prepare for its full implementation.
- The second approach to peacebuilding is to ensure impartial accountability for the violent crimes and violations of human rights of individuals and communities. It will require a political leadership truly committed to the rule of law. This is an important path to peace, for there can be no peace without justice. Given Nigeria's ethnic and religious polarization, the lack of independent institutions and frequent attachment to group identity, this scenario at this stage in the country's politics will require a leadership committed more to genuine nation building than to sub-national agendas. Leaders must be able to take strong decisions on the basis of transparent processes.
- Third, and with specific reference to the herder-farmer conflict in the Middle Belt and other parts of the country, the Federal Government of Nigeria must combine the implementation of effective climate change mitigation strategies with incentives and support by state governments for the establishment of commercial cattle ranches for the pastoralists and their animals.
- Finally, it is important for peacebuilding in Nigeria that we confront history. Truth and reconciliation commissions, which can legitimately be set up only by state governments, can help. We must use Nigeria's history as a tool for peacebuilding by learning its lessons. Ethnic and religious groups in Nigeria need to avoid what the author Adichie has described as "the danger of a single story". We must acknowledge that, especially in the politics of Nigeria's First Republic and the violent coups of 1966, all sides in these conflicts have caused pain to others. All sides have been victims. This approach will help us escape the conflict–promoting trap of singular historical narratives meant to perpetuate victimhood and thus justify divisiveness.
A renaissance of great possibilities is within our grasp.
As the elections of 2023 loom, partisan politics is once again in the air in Nigeria. Increasingly, the elections are viewed by many as a battle between the country's disappointing past and a more hopeful future. Most young Nigerians are drawn far more to technology, entertainment and entrepreneurship than to ancient ethnic hatreds and are potentially more coherent across Nigeria's divides of faith, tribe and tongue.
While this conventional wisdom will be tested at the polls – especially the presidential elections – it is a firm indication that Nigeria, troubled as it surely is now, has a path to success. The outcome of the 2023 democratic transition is uniquely important, for it will create space for the National Question that stokes Nigeria's hidden wars to be put squarely on the table. For real peace to come to our country, we must exorcise the demons that afflict us collectively and have denied us the opportunity to experience a renaissance of great possibilities.
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Kingsley Moghalu is the founder and CEO of Sogato Strategies LLC, a global investment and risk advisory firm, and of the Institute for Governance and Economic Transformation, a public policy think tank. He is former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, professor of international business and public policy at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He has been a United Nations official and was head of global partnerships for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. He was a presidential candidate in Nigeria's presidential election in 2019. His most recent book is Emerging Africa: How the Global Economy's 'Last Frontier' Can Prosper and Matter.
