Abstract
How close is Nigeria, a country of 137 million, to civil war? And what, if anything, can the United States do to prevent chaos in this poor but oil-rich nation?
Having lived in Nigeria from 1964 to 1967, when the Biafra region seceded and civil war erupted, I remember vividly the welter of rumors, arrests, back-corridor deals, and local and ethnic skirmishes that escalated into massacres, coups, and finally, secession. Although most Nigerians today would find another Biafra unthinkable, volatile conflict persists, with oil the new accelerant.
At first glance, however, Nigerian oil and the government that oversees its exploitation would seem to be in good shape. Nigeria's oil reserves are huge, both under its soil and in the waters off its coast, estimated at 25 to 35 billion barrels. The country produces Bonny Light Sweet crude, which is particularly suitable for U.S. refineries and is also attracting other important customers, like India. Since 2003, Nigeria's oil-extracting capacity has increased from 2.2 million barrels a day to between 2.4 and 2.8 million barrels a day. Nigeria and neighboring Cameroon control approximately equal shares of the contiguous offshore oil reserves that first opened in 1990.
Nigeria held federal and state elections in April and May 2003, and local elections in March 2004–the first relatively peaceful succession of civilian regimes since independence from Britain in 1960. Olusegun Obasanjo, a former general, was re-elected president with 62 percent of the vote. Obasanjo's People's Democratic Party (PDP) strengthened its control at all levels of government and left its principal rivals, the Alliance for Democracy and the All Nigerian People's Party, in disarray. Although the elections were marred by incidents of violence in some of Nigeria's 36 states, the U.S. government and other outside observers endorsed the results.
Since his reelection, Obasanjo has struggled to rid Nigeria of corruption, has brought the military under control, and has been highly visible on the international scene. He brokered the withdrawal from power of Liberian warlord Charles Taylor (resulting in Taylor's asylum in Nigeria) in 2003 and attended the Group of Eight (G-8) summit in June 2004. Nigeria also seems poised to contend for a seat on a reconfigured U.N. Security Council. In 2003, Obasanjo won praise from many for his proposal to make Nigeria's oil revenue figures public and for calling on the oil companies to make public all payments to producing countries.
Below the surface, however, the situation is not so rosy. The discovery of oil in the 1970s turned the various Nigerian governments of that era into dens of thieves. Despite having subsequently generated more than $250 billion in revenues, Nigeria remains one of the world's 20 poorest countries and perennially ranks among the top two or three most corrupt nations, according to watchdog group Transparency International.
Some of Nigeria's problems stem from resistance from the U.S. government and from many energy companies to Obasanjo's transparency initiative. In March 2004, a major scandal erupted over Shell's procedures for estimating its proven oil and gas reserves in Nigeria. The estimates, which Shell had overstated, were subsequently downsized by about two-thirds, which could have jeopardized Nigeria's application with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for increased production quotas. Nevertheless, in June 2004, OPEC upped Nigeria's crude oil production quota to 2.14 million barrels a day. Shell, which overstated its total reserve estimates in other countries as well, may have been motivated to inflate the numbers in Nigeria to improve its troubled relationship with the Obasanjo regime. Shell likely hoped that the favor would be repaid with an increase in the government's contribution to the considerable costs of developing new oil and gas fields, several of which lie in the deep waters of the Gulf of Guinea off the Nigerian coast.
“It's a very challenging environment for Shell in Nigeria,” according to Alex Vines, head of the Africa program at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs. The situation is challenging for Nigerian citizens, too.
Nigeria's federal government and the oil companies have serious problems with the 7-8 million people who inhabit the six Niger Delta states, where most of the oil and gas resources are located. Neither gunboat diplomacy, the appointment of locals to high posts in the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), nor special subsidies for oil-producing states have quelled the violence. For decades now, there have been brokered and broken truces between tribal factions and the oil companies and federal government. Shell estimates that every year 1,000 people are killed in interethnic or political violence.
September 29, 2004: Members of the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force, a day before a truce was reached. Ongoing rebellions in Nigeria are often cited as the cause of higher oil prices.
A principal cause of the violence is a 1996 redistricting that skewed the relative power of the region's ethnic nationalities. In the 2003 and 2004 elections, the PDP's candidates in the Delta met with such strong protest that in some districts voting could not take place.
Then, on September 24, 2004, a separatist rebel militia group called the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force advised all oil companies in Nigeria to halt production or face a planned offensive, dubbed “Operation Locust Feast,” which the rebels said would begin on October 1, the anniversary of Nigeria's independence. The People's Volunteer Force, and other rebel groups, have well-documented ties to the sitting governor of Rivers state. The rebels want autonomy for the Niger Delta. On September 30, they negotiated a truce with the federal government, but the threat to oil operations in Nigeria was cited as a major cause of world oil prices skyrocketing above $50 a barrel.
The oil companies deserve substantial blame for the Delta's intractable problems. Instead of sponsoring meaningful local development and practicing responsible environmental policy, the companies have often bought off local leaders and thugs. One highly touted development project, Niger Delta University, funded by oil company grants channeled through the Bayelsa state government, remains an unfinished shell in a swamp. Meanwhile, Bayelsa's information commissioner points to luxurious housing for officials as evidence of successful community development. The companies have also been embarrassed by sit-ins at their facilities. In summer 2002, several Chevron pumping stations in the Delta were occupied by hundreds of women who demanded the company give more jobs to locals.
A more common and dangerous problem is “bunkering,” the puncturing of pipelines by bandits to siphon off oil, a practice that sometimes sparks lethal explosions. In September 2004, more than 30 people were killed in a village outside Lagos, the coastal metropolis; in 1998, more than 1,000 died in a similar incident in the Delta (Associated Press, September 17, 2004). Nigeria's Office of Public Communications estimates that 300,000 barrels of crude oil are lost every day to illegal activities along the pipeline.
Beyond the Delta
After Nigeria's independence from Britain, control of and revenues from natural resources remained with the federal government, an arrangement that perpetuated the large disparity between production and profit. Today, eight peanut-producing states in the north generate 2 percent of Nigeria's revenues; the oil-producing states of the Delta generate close to 90 percent. Yet all the states receive equal shares of 13 percent of net revenues, an inequity exacerbated by corruption and pork barreling.
Since independence, politicians in Nigeria have failed to create a strong sense of a united country with a government that serves the people. As Chief Anthony Enahoro, longtime pro-democracy activist and senior statesman, told me in a 1999 interview, “When you go down to the villages, you don't hear of money being stolen, because if it happens the thief's family is in disgrace forever. But the government is something else. If you can rob people and come home to build a church or a school, it's like going to war and getting booty! Heavens, you're a hero.”
The conflict in Nigeria extends beyond inequities in oil revenue sharing. There is also a broader division between northern Muslims and southern Christians. Although Obasanjo has declared it unconstitutional, 12 of Nigeria's northern states practice Islamic sharia law, resulting in judicial conflicts between local officials and federal courts.
Muslim-Christian violence has flared repeatedly. In 2000, religious riots claimed hundreds of lives in the northern city of Kaduna. The reelection of Obasanjo, a Christian supported by moderate northern politicians, brought a pause to these conflicts, but they have now resumed. Obasanjo declared a state of emergency in Plateau state in Nigeria's Middle Belt on May 18, 2004, after hundreds were killed in renewed religious violence that Obasanjo called “a near mutual genocide” that “constitutes a grave threat to the security and unity of Nigeria” (Jane's International Security, June 29, 2004). In October 2004, Nigeria estimated the number of people killed in sectarian violence in its Plateau state from September 2001 to May 2004 to be nearly 54,000 (New York Times, October 8). Previous estimates had been far lower.
In December 2003 and January 2004, self-styled “Taliban” fighters, radical students of the Al Sunna wal Jamma (“Followers of the Prophet”) movement, destroyed churches, police stations, and government buildings in northeastern Yobe state, displacing 10,000 local villagers before being suppressed by the army. In September 2004, the insurgents, who hail from across Nigeria and from neighboring nations, again attacked police stations, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
A democratic future?
U.S. policy on Nigeria combines inattention with business as usual. Glomming on to superficially stable regimes, often led by an apparent strongman, has been the common U.S. security response to political problems in sub-Saharan Africa.
But the situation in Nigeria is urgent. In 2003, the International Monetary Fund demanded that Nigeria “resolve regional disputes over the distribution of earnings from the oil industry.” In June 2003, the Pentagon announced substantial redeployment of troops from Germany to Africa and to the Caucasus. Jane's Ed Blanche quoted the Pentagon as saying the decision was “driven by the increasing importance that the United States is placing on protecting key oil reserves … as well as addressing concerns about combating terrorism” (June 29, 2004). Troops have been deployed to neighboring Niger, Chad, and nearby Mauritania, Blanche reported. In 2003 Equatorial Guinea offered land on its Bioko Island for a U.S. naval base, which is still under negotiation. A very small contingent of Navy SEALs is also training the Nigerian Navy in anti-piracy operations. Blanche, an Islamic affairs analyst, reported that sectarian violence in West Africa shows signs of turning into religious war. “There has been mounting Islamic militancy and growing anti-Western hostility in Nigeria that makes it fertile ground for extremist recruiters,” Blanche wrote. “The unrest is apparently being stoked by radical Arab Islamic preachers and agents of Al Qaeda.”
Obasanjo's record does not augur well for democratic reform in Nigeria. Although the election he won in 1999, succeeding military dictator and kleptocrat Sani Abacha, was fairly honest, and although he is anticorruption and a “champion of African democracy,” Obasanjo, a former general, has demonstrated a markedly autocratic temper. The 1995 military tribunal execution of environmental activist Ken Sara Wiwo earned Abacha harsh scrutiny from human rights groups and the international media. Obasanjo's often draconian responses to resistance in the Delta, along with other repressive measures, have kept him under similar scrutiny.
The lead-up to the 2003 and 2004 elections was fraught with manipulation, abuses of power, and court challenges, all of which caused delays. The elections themselves were seriously flawed. “We have serious concerns about the legitimacy of the results in certain constituencies,” Kenneth Wollack of the Washington-based National Democratic Institute said soon after the first round of the 2003 elections (Thomas Crosbie Media, April 22, 2003). Eyewitness accounts make Wollack's observation an understatement. “Violence became such an accepted part of political competition in some areas during the 2003 elections that politicians did not even attempt to conceal it,” Human Rights Watch reported in June 2004. “For example, a PDP ward chairman in the southern city of Port Harcourt [the capital of Rivers] told a human rights activist directly how the PDP had distributed guns in the area.”
Pro-democracy reformers such as activist Enahoro have two main proposals to strengthen Nigeria. The first is to convene a widely representative national constitutional conference to consider loosening federal ties. The second is to let each state collect the revenues it generates and pay the federal government 87 percent tax on those revenues, instead of receiving an equal share of 13 percent of federal revenues. Obasanjo is resisting the first of these suggestions, remarking that those who promote the constitutional conference have ulterior motives. The reallocation of revenues, however, is said to be part of Obasanjo's ongoing negotiations with the People's Volunteer Force and other Delta groups.
In September 2004, Peter Lewis, professor of African politics at American University, who has interviewed Obasanjo several times, told me via e-mail that he was “a bit less hopeful of assertive change” in Nigeria than he had been a year earlier. “Momentum is flagging,” he wrote.
“The states and local governments need greater autonomy in making laws and policies, keeping revenues, taxing within their domains, and otherwise deciding their affairs. Some type of national conference could work these issues through,” Lewis said. As of this writing, despite pleas from the press, former leaders, and other luminaries, and despite talks prompted by the September 2004 uprising in the Delta, no constitutional conference is in sight.
Should Obasanjo listen to the democrats? There is good reason to. “If the 2007 elections are as deeply flawed as the 1999 and 2003 exercises, I believe parts of the Delta could become virtually ungovernable,” Lewis said.
Today, violence in the Delta is due as much to extortion by criminals associated with the government as it is to protests against injustice. During the last decade, civil war has ripped though West Africa so virulently that it may seem reckless to suggest a country loosen its federal ties, albeit in the name of greater stability. And it is unlikely that the North would tolerate decentralization, which would mean a loss of revenues and power.
What about the Americans? If the United States is thinking of preaching democracy to Nigeria, it should anticipate a chilly response. But the prospect of Nigeria as a failed state should, at the very least, prompt cautious, collegial nudging, possibly through a U.S.-led U.N. initiative. The specter of Islamic radicals gaining a stronger foothold in Africa's most populous nation should force the United States to pay attention and to promote democratic reform in Nigeria.
Reform need not be all or nothing. Both pro-democratic proposals leave room for compromise. Revenues could be allocated in a way that would balance acknowledgment of their origin with equal sharing, and decentralization could leave some important powers to the federal government. Ironically, if the problems that dog Nigeria reach a critical point, which may already be happening, the influential oil companies could turn out to be the catalyst for change. If the energy giants are pushed toward crisis, Nigeria may be pushed toward reform.