Foreign Affairs CommitteeWritten evidence from Richard Gozney British High Commissioner to Nigeria between 2004 and 2007
Before appearing before you on 25 June your Clerk suggested that I might put a few thoughts on paper to try to show my starting point when looking at Nigeria and the recent upsurge in terrorism.
Centrifugal Forces
At least three centrifugal forces have long threatened to divide Nigerians:
1.
2.
South-West Nigeria of the Yoruba and related peoples who are Protestant, Evangelical Christian and Muslim; and the
South-East Nigeria of the Ibo people, largely Catholic, and of the Niger Delta peoples; and the
Northern Nigeria of the largely Muslim, Hausa speaking, peoples.
Most Southerners and Northerners have no common language other than English (if that).
3. Parallel economic contrasts between regions which are often more important than the religious differences:
The South-West is home too much of Nigeria’s industry & commerce and to the country’s main port, Lagos. Rain is plentiful, for yams and other crops;
the South-East is home to the oil & gas of the Niger Delta. Also with plentiful rain; and
the North has fewer commercial resources and is dry. Because Nigeria’s infrastructure is poor, with bone-shaking roads and no working railways, Northerners’ products have to be high value and low volume to be worth sending to markets in the South or overseas: specialised agricultural products including certain vegetable oils and high quality leather, for example. Minerals in the North are only commercially exploitable if of very high value, such as some limited gold.
Holding Nigeria Together
Observers often ask how the country has held together for over 50 years since independence, unlike Sudan or Ethiopia. Among the reasons which struck me were:
A sense of Nigerian nationhood and natural pride which I found stronger than in some countries of Eastern and Southern Africa. Nigerians enjoy making fun of themselves and deprecating aspects of modern Nigeria but outsiders should not be misled: they can do so just because they are proud and self-confident. Nigerians have more self-confidence, I think, than most Eastern or Southern Africans;
Deep scars of the civil war of the late 1960s, when the South-East tried to break away as Biafra. The lessons seem to have imbued the two generations brought up in the 45 years since the civil war. For example the splendid ‘Half a Yellow Sun’, set in the civil war and a best-selling novel in the UK 5 or 6 years ago, was written by a young novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adeche, born years after the time of ‘Biafra’.
A genuinely federal constitution. Royalties from oil & gas, which dominate the budget and loom large in the economy as a whole, are split (roughly 50:50 I think, but I cannot remember the figure) between the Federal Government and the 36 States of the Federation. The 4 States of the Niger Delta where the oil and gas is extracted take a preferential share and the rest is divided 36 ways. The 36 State Governors and their State Assemblies have complete control of their shares and the State Governors are immune from prosecution during their tenure, to reduce the risk of central interference or intimidation.
Why is Northern Nigeria Home to More Alienation?
The three centripetal forces, of Nigerian nationhood, the lesson of ‘Biafra’ and the devolution of oil and gas royalties, seem weaker in Northern Nigeria. The lesson of ‘Biafra’ and the source of the oil and gas royalties are more remote, literally. The sense of Nigerian nationhood is weaker in the North, I suspect, because the Northerners see themselves as their own nation or nations with their own royal families. Even in colonial times the North was more a Northern Nigerian Protectorate than a colony. When the Emirs of Kano and Zaria escorted HRH The Prince of Wales around Kano and Kaduna, two principal Northern cities, in 2006, spectators lined the roads 5 or 6 deep, showing an interest and affection for their own and British royalty which I doubt they would ever have shown a Nigerian President or other civil authority from the North or South of the country.
Recent history has compounded this sense of Northern Nigerian separateness, and of the North’s deprivation. Northern industry such as the big textile factories employing thousands in Kaduna could not compete with cheap Chinese textiles smuggles into Nigeria despite protectionist measures. Almost all the factories have closed. Unemployed and disillusioned 20-something year olds were for hire for a few dollars to anyone wanting to stir trouble.
Consistently high crude oil prices magnified the larger royalties of the 4 Niger Delta States, and the shameless and public corruption in those 4 States, over which the Federal Government was powerless. Meanwhile Northern States, with smaller budgets, struggled to finance schools and clinics.
In the North-East State of Borno and its capital, Maiduguri, a history of radicalism and of ‘cleansing the temple’ has been apparent for 200 years, when a movement from Borno swept aside Emirs and Sultans across the North who were judged impious and un-Islamic. By 2007, (when I finished as British High Commissioner), the group which became Boko Haram was troublesome, targeting Police Stations and other institutions of the Federal Government deemed corrupt and unjust, but not foreigners. In 2007 Algerian Islamists had yet to take the name ‘Al Qaida in the Magreb’, and were more or less confined to the Magreb, with only tentative signs of occasionally crossing the desert to support terrorist training in the Sahel.
Nigeria has been democratic for the last 15 years, albeit with elections of variable rectitude. The first democratic President, Obasanjo, was a Southerner quite well respected in the North. His successor was a Northerner but soon died of liver disease. Many Northerners felt short changed when ‘their President’ was then substituted, constitutionally, by a Southerner: the Vice-President from the Niger Delta, President Goodluck Jonathan.
What could the UK, France, the US and Others do?
It is not for a retired diplomat to make policy recommendations. But some features seem worth highlighting:
All of Nigeria suffers poor public services but in the North there are fewer sources of private sector or community funding for schools or clinics. Girls’ education, especially, suffers and too few Northern women are literate. An educated mother generally ensures that her daughters go to school, at least for a few years. The standards of civil society are raised for all.
Sharia Courts offer an attractive alternative to Nigeria’s sclerotic secular court system, for family and civil law matters. But they cannot substitute for the Police Force which is Federal and often dysfunctional. Police corruption was illustrated in 2005 or 2006 when the excellent Head of the Anti-Corruption Commission showed the President the personal bank statement of the National Police Chief. The Police Chief resigned immediately and the press was full of the £5 million or so in his account. The Anti-Corruption Chief said privately “It wasn’t £5 million; it was £20 million, but I’ll leak that to the media in stages.” The Police Chief was convicted and had some £75 million of personal assets confiscated.
So championing the more honest State Governors and good Heads of Education, the Anti-Corruption Commission, and a Finance Minister who was brilliant and who has now returned to the job, is a strategy which brings results, albeit more slowly than the upright Nigerians and we would like to see.
In modestly educated Muslim communities, whether Northern Nigeria or Eastern Indonesia, the Islamist narrative sells better than in more widely educated communities such as among the Yoruba Muslims of Southern Nigeria or Muslim Javanese of Central Indonesia. Western countries which have their own Muslim communities and Muslim public figures, such as the UK and France, can ask those figures to help to explain their motives for engagement in Northern Nigeria, as an antidote to Wahhabist or Iranian propaganda.
21 June 2013