35 - Nigeria: A Failed State Where Things Fall Apart
The combined armies of Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon struck last week against Boko Haram guerilla encampments near Lake Chad, killing 100 or more Islamic insurgents, wounding many more, and inflicting a serious setback to the fundamentalist movement that has created havoc in northeastern Nigeria and adjoining states for more than a decade.
This signal assault on Boko Haram represents a major shift in Nigeria’s long-running attempt to inflict damaging blows on one of its main sources of internal instability. Nothing in the Nigerian wars will be as dangerous or as criminal as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but by seeking consummate political leadership and a Federal government that is more committed than now to its citizens, Nigeria can leave its mark on Africa.
The other challenges are equally worrying: a spate of random killings and kidnappings for ransom by criminal gangs in Kaduna State; long-running vicious battles over land and water between Muslim Fulani pastoralists and Christian agriculturalists in Plateau State; attacks on the petroleum pumping facilities of foreign companies in the Niger Delta region; and numerous pirates preying on oil tankers and other vessels in the Gulf of Guinea. More than 3.2 million Nigerians are internally displaced as a result of these conflicts.
Boko Haram began as a backward-looking opponent of Western (i.e., modern) education, and as a nihilistic critic of virtually all other conventional secular practices in the Muslim states of northern Nigeria. At its heyday – roughly 2012 and 2013 – Boko Haram controlled much of Borno State, Nigeria’s northeasternmost redoubt, encircled Maiduguri, that state’s capital, and raided as far as the cities of Kano and Abuja. It reinforced its ranks by kidnapping schoolgirls as “wives,” sex slaves, and combatants. Its youthful brigades specialized in suicide bombing attacks on schools, mosques, and markets. Although it began as a backward-looking ideological movement to cleanse Muslim Nigeria of “Western” learning, and thus to purify Islam, by 2013 and now in 2022, Boko Haram is almost entirely a murderous movement of marauders.
The mystery is why the very large and powerful Nigerian military has not long ago – as President Muhammadu Buhari promised – “wiped out” Boko Haram. Since Boko Haram, on the run from the Nigerian army, has now expanded its zone of discontent to include the parts of Cameroon, Chad, and Niger that neighbor Borno, the Nigerian army has also been aided by formidable fighting forces from Chad, patrols from Cameroon, and air attacks from Niger. American surveillance and intelligence have also helped the Nigerians, as have British reconnaissance missions. But, as the Americans and Britons have often indicated, the Nigerian military effort has periodically been weakened by endemic corruption (padding military ranks, pilfering supplies, and stealing funds meant for the war effort). For those reasons, and also because Boko Haram has managed to retreat, guerrilla-fashion, into hard to penetrate forests, the remnants of the insurgent force remain at large, capable of raiding encampments and sending lone girl suicide bombers to blow themselves up in front of mosques.
Just possibly, last week’s effective raid by the four cooperating armies was decisive, leaving Boko Haram seriously weakened. Soldiers of the original Boko Haram may now number fewer than 3000. The Islamic State, West Africa Province, which split from Boko Haram three years ago, may have fewer fighters, but it is reputedly more tightly run and tightly disciplined.
Neither northeastern Nigerian militant Islamist group is driven, nowadays, by ideological fervor. Like so many other insurgent groups in Africa, Boko Haram and the Islamic State pay their warriors and buy their equipment and ammunition with profits from a thriving narcotics trade. Heroin, for example, comes across Africa from Pakistan via al-Shabaab in Somalia; cocaine transits from South America, via Guinea-Bissau (a narco-state). Precursor chemicals for methamphetamine manufacturing, and the drug itself, come from China and Myanmar overland. The final product often ends up in Mexico, en route to the U. S,
Like other Islamist insurgencies in Africa, both Boko Haram and the Islamic State are no longer driven ideologically. Avarice and an inability to contemplate a more prosaic life drive both northeastern Nigerian insurgent enterprises.
Criminality Unleashed
Just as the Borno area has been unstable for a decade, with Boko Haram and the Islamic State out-witting and out-maneuvering the security forces of Nigeria, so within the last decade Fulani herdsmen have attacked sedentary farmers in the Middle Belt of the country and near Abuja, the national capital. Boko Haram has largely avoided serious losses before last week. The pastoralists likewise have largely assaulted farmers to gain grazing lands for their cattle without successful roundups by security forces.
Relatively nearby, along the railway from Abuja to Kaduna, this year brigands have used smoke bombs to halt trains, rob and kidnap passengers, and kill randomly and without provocation hapless passengers. Following last week’s Abuja-Kaduna train tragedy, another assault on a Nigerian military base in Birnin Gwari (sixty-two miles from Kaduna, the state capital) by bandits reportedly “carrying heavy weapons including a rocket-propelled grenade” left eleven soldiers dead. According to reports in the Nigerian media, no fewer than 714 soldiers have been killed in Kaduna State by terrorists in the past eighteen months.
Nigeria has always been relatively lawless and wildly corrupt, but the federal and state governments’ inability to keep its citizens and taxpayers safe is a new and dangerous phenomenon. According to an official security report, 1,192 people were murdered in Kaduna State by bandits in 2021 alone. A new report by the Abuja-based Center for Democracy and Development estimates that in this century violent crime across the Nigerian northwest has claimed more than 12,000 lives and displaced more than 1 million people.
In the Niger Delta and at Sea
Attacks on pipelines and petroleum companies in the Niger Delta have occurred off and on for decades. Now, much of what is bedeviling that part of Nigeria stems from long held grievances against oil revenue (mis-)allocations by the Federal government, and promises made and never fulfilled. Militant protestors in the oilfield areas are increasingly active, hobbling the production of petroleum.
Offshore there has been a rise of piracy. Nigerian sea-going pirates have commandeered oil tankers in order to siphon their contents and sell the results locally or elsewhere in Africa. Container ships have been targeted. Indeed, nowadays the Gulf of Guinea is the globe’s piracy hotspot. Unlike the more numerous Somali pirates who operated in the first decades of this century, the Nigerians seek ransoms less than they do cash from pilfering exports or cargoes.
A Free Biafra
Finally, if this list was not long enough, elite Igbo from eastern Nigeria seek to resurrect the rise of a new Biafra, the better to further the secessionist aims of the Igbo people. Backers of Biafra are determined, but few politicians from the rest of the country share that desire or goal. Key leaders of the Free Biafra movement have been jailed, following agitation for such a homeland. But the anti-Nigerian autonomy agitation persists.
A Failed State
For all of these reasons, Nigeria is failed state. What that designation means is that Africa’s most populous nation cannot keep its citizens safe – the prime role of every political entity. As big and as modern and achieving as Nigeria can be, it still delivers hardly any quantity and quality of political goods (security, education, health, respect for human rights, and good economic performance) to its citizens. It underperforms, manages miserably, and experiences little ability to curtail those who favor their self-interest exclusively.
Nigeria was once a beacon of shining light for an Africa emerging from decades of squalor, and proliferated corruption. No longer. Corruption, costing Nigeria $117 billion a year, according to the World Bank, has permeated the existential core of Nigeria, sapped the army’s morale, hindered victories over Boko Haram, and helped the country to start falling apart. Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index rates Nigeria as among the world’s most extraordinarily corrupt, 158th of 180 world’s nations. (Nordic states and New Zealand are the globe’s least corrupt.)
To turn this important African bellwether back toward good governance, the Nigerians themselves must do so, with outside support and inspiration. Fortunately, in this case Russians are not involved, and will not be allowed to interfere.
More on Monday, with a discussion of the Russian assault in eastern Ukraine, and the ICBM threat.