A Resurgent Nigerian State?

For more than a decade, the Nigerian state has been in retreat with multiple signs of state failure or even imminent collapse. Communal, ethnic, sectarian and religious riots in Warri, Aguleri-Umuleri, Sagamu, Ife-Modakeke, Andoni, Okrika, Bauchi, Kafanchan, Kaduna, Jos, Maiduguri and other parts of Nigeria were intermittent. The almost complete take-over of the Niger-Delta by so-called “militants”-in reality illiterate or poorly-educated, unemployed, misguided youths who had resorted to criminality partly in protests at state neglect but also for pecuniary sustenance in the absence of proper jobs illustrated state weakness. Outbreaks of religious violence across the North, most recently the “Boko Haram” crisis were recurrent.

The Niger-Delta crisis started with agitations by Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Ogonis against environmental devastation by Shell and Nigeria, but was soon followed by ethnic and communal crises as Urhobos, Itsekiris, Ijaws, Nembe etc fought against each other. Soon pure gangsterism took over as politicians deployed these veterans of inter-communal wars as political thugs and enforcers. In the Niger-Delta states, especially Rivers, Delta and Bayelsa, there was a clear link between violence and victory in the 1999 elections and thereafter. Once the politicians were settled in office, the thugs became autonomous gang leaders and later “militants”. The Nigerian government eventually offered a hastily-conceived “amnesty” basically admitting a balance of power with rag-tag armies of disparate and ill-organised “militant” groups.

Eastern Nigeria became a den of robbers and kidnappers with the Igbo elite abandoning their communities to criminal coalitions of emergency traditional rulers, kidnappers and armed robbers and their informants and watchmen (and women and children) to seek refuge in Abuja, Lagos, Port-Harcourt and Calabar. The two most important commercial centres in the East-Aba and Onitsha lost their vibrancy as banks, petrol stations and even markets closed under the onslaught of criminals. As armed robbers fled Fashola’s security measures in Lagos, they moved to neighbouring Ogun and Oyo states filling the vacuum in governance and policing, raiding banks at will and occasionally perhaps acting as part-time political assassins. In Ibadan, violent road transport workers became the state!

Highways in the North, especially around Kogi, Nasarawa, Abuja and other parts were seized by armed robbers with prominent citizens falling victim. Alhaji Abubakar Rimi died as a result of one such incident. The official response was to engage non-state vigilantes and powerful “medicine men” to keep the roads safe, again demonstrating the impotence of the state. Some years back, the Ajah area of the aspiring Lagos mega-city regularly erupted in urban warfare as “Olumegbon” and contending landowners battled for supremacy with guns, cutlasses, axes and charms usually in broad day light with residents fleeing for their lives and the police keeping a safe distance. Newspaper reports suggest a recent recurrence of the Ajah violence.

There were also more fundamental challenges to the powers of the state-declaration of Sharia by then Zamfara Governor Sani Yerima which spread across eleven states in Northern Nigeria in defiance of the Nigerian Constitution; suspicions that some “militants” and regional elite in the Niger-Delta perhaps desired not just “resource control” but may have been questioning the nation’s sovereignty and territorial integrity as well; “MASSOB” whose name made its strategic intent explicit-“Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra”; the Odua Peoples Conference (OPC) and other “self-determination” groups which in the aftermath of “June 12” and Abacha’s despotism questioned the rationale for Yorubas staying within Nigeria.

In recent times, labour (and even regional irredentists desperate for power to be “rotated” back to their “zone”) regularly threaten to “make the country ungovernable”. Power sector workers are eager to confront state policy and have shut down national electricity supply twice in the last three months. However the biggest act of contempt for the Nigerian state however was the Independence Day bombing, a dangerous escalation of the slide towards anarchy and an ineffective and impotent Nigerian state. However it does appear that the Jonathan administration and the new National Security Adviser, General Andrew Owoye Azazi may have recognised that the rationale for the existence of the Nigerian state is increasingly being lost and the introduction of bombings directed against the state may, if not checked, represent the final chapter in the process of state disempowerment and failure.

The Jonathan Presidency seems to have offered a strong response-routing kidnappers in the East who seized a bus load of school children, ensuring safe release of all the children; subsequent action by the military and police against kidnappers and criminals in eastern Nigeria that has reportedly led to the arrest of over 400 persons; the meticulous manner the State Security Services has been assembling evidence relating to the independence day (and the previously unresolved Warri) bomb blasts and arresting those implicated in these actions; detection of the Iranian armaments and heroine imports and strong security and diplomatic follow-up; and most recently the very successful (so far) military onslaught by the Joint Task Force (JTF) against the revival of “militancy” in the Niger-Delta, wiping out of militant camps, freeing of hostages and the surrender of several militant leaders and their men.

The early signs are that the Jonathan/Azazi/Petinrin/Ihejirika team is surprisingly shaping out as an effective national security team. Is it too soon to hope they can keep up this momentum and restore the powers, effectiveness and credibility of the Nigerian state?