Boko Haram (9 page)

Nigeria's colonial rulers can certainly be blamed for much of this. Britain's policies toward Nigeria often seemed to exacerbate divisions rather than bring its people together. The north's culture had to a large degree been preserved, while the south was being transformed through Western education, the spread of Christianity and trade along the coast. At first, Lugard sought to extend his version of indirect rule in the north throughout the rest of Nigeria, where it often did not fit. In the Igbo areas of the south-east, for instance, Lugard's blueprint for how indirect rule should work was completely at odds with the local, decentralised form of governance.
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At the same time, there were projects put in place to connect the country, particularly through infrastructure. Railways and roads were constructed, allowing people and goods to circulate far more easily, while waterways were dredged to make way for ships. Such infrastructural improvements were built out of self-interest, since they made it easier to ship goods in and out of the country, allowing European companies to take full advantage.
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But it would also help lead to an economic inter-dependence among various ethnic groups. As the years passed, Igbos from the
south-east set up as market-sellers in the north; northern Fulanis and Hausas raised livestock and produce sent to the south. Those are just two examples, and such links have only deepened over time. Nigeria's largest cities, particularly Lagos, are now melting pots of all of the country's ethnic groups, who flock there in search of work. Arguments on behalf of breaking up the country become far more knotty when considered from that perspective. What does a Hausa businessman born in Kano but living in Lagos do if the two cities become capitals of separate nations? The same goes for the Igbo trader from south-eastern Enugu living in Maiduguri in the north-east.

The social, political and economic patterns that would later define modern Nigeria slowly began to take shape after 1914. A lack of Western education in the north caused problems early on. Unlike in Lagos, which had long been a fully fledged colony and where an elite section of the population schooled abroad had begun to develop, or in the south-east, where missionary-established schools dotted the humid landscape, only a relatively small number of northerners had been European-educated. This led to southerners being sent north to work as civil servants, which would feed into fears among northerners that their region would be trampled upon by rival ethnic groups.
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Such fears would greatly intensify as Nigeria tumbled toward independence, and not only among northerners, though they were more apprehensive than others.

The drive toward independence was led mainly by educated elites from Lagos, including Herbert Macaulay, as early as the 1920s, followed by the Nigerian Youth Movement. It came at a time when other African colonies were also seeking to break away from their colonial masters and with global opinion turning against imperialism, pushing Britain to cooperate.
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Economic factors also played a role, among a list of other reasons, with the cost of maintaining the British Empire becoming too heavy a burden to justify.

It is impossible to understand modern-day Nigeria without considering its ethnic and regional divisions. Seeing the potential
trouble ahead, much of the debate in formulating the Nigerian state in the run-up to independence and afterwards has centred on how to divide power. In the years before independence, models were put forward that ranged from being strongly centralised to a collection of regions. Those in favour of a more centralised government argued that citizens should first consider themselves Nigerians instead of Igbos, Yorubas, Hausas or Fulanis, and the state must reflect that goal. Others said such a goal was unrealistic and the vast differences between the regions must be taken into account and accommodated.
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A form of that debate continues today, with those who believe the presidency must be rotated between regions every couple of terms and others who believe the country has moved beyond ethnic politics, that the best candidate should win, regardless of background.

In the north, trepidation over how it would fare under an independent Nigeria could be seen in its reluctant embrace of self-rule. The final version of the constitution just before Nigeria's independence locked in place a federal system with three regions: west, east and north. The east and west were more eager to break away from the British and run their own affairs, and both regions opted for self-rule in 1957. The north, however, delayed the move until 1959, a year before fully fledged independence for Nigeria.
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The British withdrawal left behind a newly independent nation in 1960 with the same federal system of government. Traditional rulers remained in place, including the emirs in the north, and though they had no formal powers, they continued to wield influence in all manner of decisions, from appointments and the distribution of public money to behind-the-scenes negotiations to settle disputes. They also served as living links to Nigeria's pre-colonial past and continue to do so today. The sultan of Sokoto remains Nigeria's highest Muslim spiritual figure, and emirs are symbols of the region's Islamic traditions, but the Sufi traditionalism and established authority they represent would put them at odds with more radical, anti-
Western clerics who would begin to emerge in the 1970s, often aligned with Wahhabi-Salafi thought, with financing from Saudi Arabia promoting its spread globally.
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For Boko Haram decades later, the emirs would come to be seen as enemies and betrayers of the extremists' version of the Islamic faith. Some would be targeted in assassination attempts.

Ahmadu Bello, the great-great grandson of Usman Dan Fodio and a vigilant protector of northern interests, was the northern region's first premier, taking office in 1954. He argued forcefully that the emirs must be maintained and given important roles in the north, contending that they would act in accordance with local government and not as overlords. ‘To remove or endanger this prestige in any way, or even to remove any of their traditional trappings, would be to set the country back for years, and indeed, were such changes to be drastic, it might well need another Lugard to pull things together again', Bello wrote in his autobiography published in 1962. ‘We must get away from the idea that they are effete, conservative, and die-hard obstructionists: nothing could be farther from the truth.'
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The north was given the most seats in the federal parliament of the three regions, thanks to both its size and population, and elections before independence in 1959 set the stage for Nigeria's post-independence politics. Ahmadu Bello's Northern People's Congress won the greatest number of seats and formed a coalition with the main eastern party, the Igbo-dominated National Council of Nigerian Citizens, which lent the new government at least some semblance of north–south unity.
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The first prime minister was Tafawa Balewa, a northerner, and he and Bello worked to improve conditions in the north through quotas in the military and government projects aimed at benefiting the region, among other moves. Such programmes added to tensions, angering southerners, who felt cheated.
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There was also a fledgling oil industry following its discovery in commercial quantities in the Niger Delta in the south in 1956, and it would soon come to dominate the country's
economy while also further exacerbating ethnic divisions as a result of disagreements over how to share the wealth.
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With those fault lines in place, the run-up to Nigeria's devastating civil war began soon after independence. In 1966, a group of military officers, mainly from the Igbo ethnic group dominant in eastern Nigeria, would attempt a coup and assassinate Prime Minister Balewa. Ahmadu Bello, as well as the premier of the Western region, Samuel Akintola, would also be killed. An army general, Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, was installed as leader, but he too was an Igbo and the entire affair came to be seen in the Hausa-Fulani north as a power play by Igbos. A counter-coup would result.

The counter-coup sparked by anger from northern officers occurred about six months later and brought to power Lieutenant-Colonel Yakubu Gowon, a Christian from ethnically mixed central Nigeria. The country remained on edge, however, and the bitterness resulted in massacres of Igbos living in the north. As a result of such killings and other factors, south-eastern Nigeria decided on 30 May 1967 to secede from the country and form the new Republic of Biafra, named for the bight off the West African coast. It was led by Odumegwu Ojukwu, an Oxford-educated army officer who would become a hero to many in the south-east, his thick beard and intense eyes giving him the air of a revolutionary. The country's government led by Gowon would not accept such a move, especially considering control of vast oil reserves was at stake, and war began in 1967. The rest of the world's attention was gradually drawn to Biafra as images of starving children haunted TV screens and the pages of newspapers. Many died from starvation as a result of a blockade, prompting harsh criticism against the Nigerian side, but also of Ojukwu over his refusal to surrender even when defeat became apparent, a position he defended by saying that an attempted ‘genocide' of Igbos was underway and he had to do all he could to stop it. In 1970, with the Nigerian military charging ahead and the Biafran cause essentially lost, Ojukwu was forced
to flee to Ivory Coast. Gowon declared a policy of ‘no victor, no vanquished' and Nigeria would remain one nation, but in reality the country was deeply divided. By the end of the so-called Biafran war, an estimated 1–3 million people had died.
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In an interview 30 years after the war with journalist Peter Cunliffe-Jones, Ojukwu, who died in 2011, defended his actions, saying ‘the war was a tragedy, but it was inevitable, unavoidable'. He said that ‘the Igbos had no choice. It was a fight for the survival of the Igbo people against plans to wipe out a generation. That was the issue that we faced: genocide.'
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The tragedy of the war was poignantly depicted decades later by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her novel
Half of a Yellow Sun
, while Chinua Achebe would also write of his experience at the time in his memoir
There Was a Country
.

Gowon would lead the country into the 1970s, a period that would give rise to many of the afflictions that have kept Nigeria from realising its enormous potential. While corruption had certainly existed in Nigeria previously, an explosion in oil revenue in the early part of the decade greatly raised the stakes, caused inflation to skyrocket and led industry not linked to petroleum to be ignored.
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Gowon also dragged his feet on returning the country to civilian rule, and by 1975, some members of the military had had enough. Their response was perhaps unsurprising: another coup. General Murtala Mohammed, from Kano in the north, was installed as head of state and pledged reforms – only to be assassinated about six months later. His deputy, the civil war general and future two-term president Olusegun Obasanjo, a Yoruba from the south-west but with close links to his northern military colleagues and politicians, would take over until elections could be organised.

Obasanjo oversaw a transition to civilian government, with 1979 elections won by a former finance minister from the north named Shehu Shagari. A new constitution was put in place ahead of the elections changing Nigeria's system of governance over to a US-style democracy, with a president, vice president and national
assembly, and renewed efforts were made to develop political parties that were broad-based instead of representing only one region or ethnic group.
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But Shagari became president with the country still wallowing in severe economic troubles, and the situation was only to become worse. When the bottom fell out of the petroleum industry with the so-called oil glut of the 1980s, Nigeria was left utterly unprepared. The country had badly overextended itself in terms of spending, and Shagari's government splurged on projects that benefited cronies.
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Civilian rule under Shagari would last a mere four years. On New Year's Eve 1983, Muhammadu Buhari, a military officer with rigid ideas about how to run his country, would come to power with yet another coup. He, too, would seek to reform Nigeria, but his approach was short-sighted. He sought to instil a sense of discipline in Nigerians, as if the frantic scramble to survive in the country was a cause and not an effect of mismanagement at the top. He labelled this effort the War on Indiscipline, and it ranged from petty concerns, such as forcing Nigerians to stand in line properly, to more serious measures, including public executions for alleged criminals. The infamous tale of Umaru Dikko, transport minister under the Shagari regime before the coup, served as an illustration of the approach by the Buhari administration. Suspected of major corruption, he fled to London, where Nigeria's government tracked him with the help of Israeli agents. He was drugged and stuffed in a crate for shipment back to Nigeria to face corruption charges, but the British authorities discovered the plan and stopped it from being carried out to completion. The box was opened at the airport, and inside was an unconscious Dikko with the doctor who had drugged him.
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Patience ran thin with Buhari and his narrow-minded authoritarianism, and another power-hungry military officer would see to it that his days as Nigeria's leader were numbered. This time, however, the officer who would lead the coup and later the nation, Ibrahim Babangida, was a far more sophisticated politician, and
he would manoeuvre to remain as head of state for eight years, from 1985 to 1993. He was a civil war veteran and one of the plotters of the coup that ousted Gowon, and would oversee the final transition of the nation's capital from Lagos to Abuja, along with the lucrative contracts that went with it.
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He would gain the nickname ‘Maradona', with Nigerians comparing his shifty political and survival instincts to the great Argentine footballer's nimble play. Wole Soyinka, the Nobel prize-winning Nigerian writer who personally knew Babangida but kept him at an arm's distance, wrote of him: