Rb-The point being- Do not believe that the Nigerian election will mean that things will simmer down in Nigeria.....Time will tell....BTW- Both Obasanjo and Falae are Yoruba Christians. The Yoruba are the dominant ethnic group in Nigeria, the group that produces the educated elite, i.e., bankers, doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, and represent about 36% of the total population of the Country.....There are very few Yoruba Officers in the Military except the Navy and Air Force. Most were expelled or executed in a "silent purge" by Abacha in late 1995. The Army Officer Corps now is almost exclusively Hausa.
So this will take areal effort to keep this Country together and working...
The recently elcted Governor of Yoruba State Honorable Bola Tinuba, which slippe dout of the country via a crate on a ship when the Military Government was looking for him to kill him. They faieldalthoughthey did burn down his house and destroy or confiscate all of his belongings. I only note this to point out that there are hard feelings between the North and South in Nigeria.....
'The Nigerian idea' and the Nigerian nightmare
The nation 'has been hijacked'
(CNN) -- In the mangrove swamps of the Niger River Delta, families live in poverty and despair, their meager existence an irony too rich too ignore and, for some of them, too offensive to tolerate.
Beneath their region lie enormous oil reserves that provide the Nigerian government with $10 billion a year, and there are billions of barrels more beneath the country's coastal waters.
Despite the wealth in the area, however, paved roads, running water and electricity are absent. The waters are polluted, the fish are contaminated or killed off by pollution, government services are negligible and unemployment is high.
Angry young men have begun taking oil workers hostage and occupying oil company facilities to enforce their demands for improvements in the region.
With the election of a new president and the promised return to a democratic government in late May, change is in the air. But in a country where the economy is staggering and corruption and neglect are rampant, many are doubtful and even cynical.
"In the 1960s, we took a lot of pride in being Nigerian," one political scientist told the Washington Post. "We saw ourselves leading Africa. But that Nigeria has been hijacked. We have not won the benefits that this state promised. For most Nigerians, the Nigerian idea has failed."
'Looters of the Century'
Despite oil reserves that rank Nigeria sixth in the world, and abundant other resources, the country's per capita income of $1,300 a year is one of the worst in the world -- worse, even, than perennial pauper Haiti.
The estimated $280 billion in oil revenues during the last 25 years have largely been squandered as one military dictator after another has helped himself to the country's treasury.
Gen. Sani Abacha pocketed $7.5 billion during a five-year joyride that ended with his death in 1998. Abacha managed to make his predecessor, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, who was known for taking a 25 percent cut of major deals, look almost respectable. One Nigerian newspaper labeled Abacha and his wife "the Looters of the Century."
While his death has been attributed to a heart attack, it is rumored that Abacha was poisoned when others decided he had gone too far. Clearly something had to be done to pull the country out of its death spiral.
Consider:
•None of the country's four oil refineries are operational, forcing Nigeria to import petroleum and pricing it beyond the reach of most. Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, who replaced Abacha, calls the situation "a national embarrassment."
•Telephone service is chaotic, garbage trucks don't pick up the garbage, and many traffic lights don't work.
•Patients are often required to provide their own medicines at hospitals, school teachers demand bribes to pass schoolchildren to the next grade, and store clerks often refuse to give customers their change.
•Soldiers extort money from motorists, reporters accept envelopes filled with cash from sources, and credit-card fraud is so rampant that Americans are warned not to do business in the country.
Unconcealed ethnic distrust
Nigeria is $30 billion in debt to foreign investors, and where the naira used to fetch one U.S. dollar, it now returns only a penny. Adding further difficulty, oil prices are half of what they used to be, and, despite its vast farmlands, Nigeria now must import food.
Recognizing that it needs money and goodwill from the International Monetary Fund, Nigeria has agreed for the first time to allow an external audit of its national oil company, a promising sign.
But Nigeria's greatest problem may be the unconcealed ethnic distrust and even hatred that exist everywhere.
There are more than 250 different ethnic groups in Nigeria, a country patched together from principalities, kingdoms and tribal groups. British colonial rulers and Nigerian military strongmen have held the country together, but the fear is that a democratic Nigeria could fragment, Yugoslavia-style, into fractious, independence-minded states and dissolve in a blood bath of ethnic warfare.
It has happened before.
In 1967, the Igbo and other tribes in southeastern Nigeria attempted to secede and create a country called Biafra. The ensuing civil war ended only when a blockade starved the Biafrans into submission. About 100,000 were killed in the fighting and another million or more died of starvation.
The Nigerian nightmare
The Muslim Hausa of northern Nigeria dominate the military and are believed by other groups to have diverted the revenues from the oil-rich south to the north. The Hausas, in turn, fear that a Yoruba president from the Christian southwest would funnel the country's resources in that direction, leaving them with nothing.
Each group is suspicious of the next, and each is convinced it is being taken advantage of. As a Nigerian journalist told The Buffalo News, it is "the worst of sins" to steal from someone in your own tribe, but "you can steal from another tribe. Why shouldn't you steal from a man from another tribe? He is your enemy!"
Such thinking, along with a 57-percent literacy rate, poor health care -- the life expectancy of a man is 53 years; of a woman, 56 years -- decaying infrastructure, corruption and squalor have turned "the Nigerian idea" into a nightmare.
Scant wonder that the military is stepping aside. Nigeria's new president has an unenviable job before him. |
