Nigerians will mark their 42nd year of independence on Tuesday in a grim and fearful mood, as Africa’s most populous nation stumbles on from one political crisis to the next.
Christiana Ilupeju, a teacher and mother of four, was born on October 1, 1960, the optimistic day when Nigeria won independence from Britain and took its destiny into its own hands.
”In spite of everything, I thank God for being alive. But each time I remember our independence anniversary, I feel like cursing the day I was born into this conundrum called Nigeria,” she says.
For 30 of Christiana’s 42 years Nigeria was ruled by a series of brutal military dictators, each one vying to see who could plunder the greatest share of the nation’s growing oil wealth. Three-and-a-half years ago General Abdulsalami Abubakar handed power to a former dictator in civilian clothes, Olusegun Obasanjo, who won election in a poll organised under military rule.
Hopes were high that the ”democratic dividend” could save Nigeria’s 120 million from the twin evils of poverty and corruption. The hopes did not last long.
”So far it has been a story of disappointments and unfulfilled dreams,” said Clement Nwankwo, a rights lawyer and member of a Nigerian panel set up to monitor the transition to civil rule.
”The main concern is the failure of leadership since independence. The failure to find a vision to make Nigeria great.”
Social commentator Bola Akinterinwa writes in an independence day column: ”There is no good basis for merriment. Nigeria at 42 is being celebrated with mixed feelings of insecurity and fears for its survival.”
Such apocalyptic talk has been a commonplace of Nigerian political thought since independence, and has so far always proved overly pessimistic. Nigeria has survived.
But with political tensions rising ahead of next year’s presidential, state gubernatorial, legislative and local elections, the mood is darkening once more. Since Obasanjo’s election ushered in Nigeria’s latest tentative experiment with democracy, a wave of political and ethnic violence has swept the country, leaving more than 10 000 people dead.
The president airily dismissed the figure in a recent television interview as being relatively insignificant in a nation of 120-million, but some deaths were more telling than others.
Obasanjo’s justice minister and close confidant, Bola Ige, was shot dead last December in his private residence. Ige is the most illustrious, but far from the only politician to have been assassinated in recent months. His death has been laboriously investigated but his killers have yet to face trial. In the face of rampant violent crime, Nigerians have reached for extreme solutions.
Obasanjo’s police chief Tafa Balogun came into office this year vowing to eradicate armed robbery. Under a mission dubbed ”Fire for Fire” his men shot dead 235 people in three months. Armed robbery continues unabated. In the southeast of the country authorities in three states turned to a brutal vigilante militia, the Bakassi Boys, in a bid to
turn back the tide of lawlessness.
Three years later the gang has slaughtered hundreds of people in roadside machete executions and tortured hundreds more. Last week the police were forced to move in to shut them down. In the mainly-Muslim north the populace turned to Islam’s Sharia law, with its tough array of punishments such as stoning, flogging and amputation, to return order to their cities. The result was bloody rioting between Muslims and Christians which left thousands dead.
When single mums Safiya Husseini and Amina Lawal were sentenced to death by stoning for bearing children out of wedlock, their cases won Nigeria worldwide condemnation.
As violence sharpens the divide between north and south, the economy has stagnated. Despite Nigeria’s vast human and agricultural potential, only two businesses are worth being in: oil and politics.
No senior government figures have yet been convicted of corruption under Obasanjo, and both local and national leaders continue to live very well despite a tight budget squeeze.
The oil industry has suffered because of tight Opec quotas, but not as much as the people living near its installations have suffered from pollution and tribal conflicts fed by oil-money.
Amid a government revenue crisis Nigeria’s foreign reserves are in freefall and Finance Minister Adamu Ciroma admits he does not have enough cash to service $30-billion in foreign debt.
Unemployment remains high, inflation stands at 16,4% and attempts to kickstart the moribund manufacturing sector have been blighted by high interest rates and poor infrastructure. A programme of privatisation has proved a non-starter, with the sale of the state telecoms monopoly collapsing and that of the national airline triggering a bitter split in government. – Sapa-AFP