By GEOFFREY YORK
 |
| Widespread corruption in Nigeria is creating a “more permissive operating environment” for Boko Haram |
When the first bomb exploded at
dawn, it shook the ceiling and floor and the shabby furniture in Alice Mayaki’s
small cluttered house. Crying and trembling, she rushed outside and saw dozens
of dead bodies.
Two weeks
later, another bomb exploded in almost exactly the same spot. More than 90
people were killed in the two blasts. “Everyone is afraid,” Ms. Mayaki says. “I
don’t go into town. Should I go, or should I not go? Life is very dangerous
now.”
Abuja, the Nigerian capital, is the
city of the big men: the politicians who control the enormous oil wealth and
state resources of Africa’s biggest economy. But when the Boko Haram rebellion
came to the capital this year, the big men were safely protected by guards and
checkpoints. The explosions hit the migrant workers in the slums as they queued
for their morning buses.
“It was the
poor people who were going to work early,” said Ms. Mayaki, a nurse who
migrated here from southwestern Nigeria. “It was the people who clean and sweep
the offices for the big men. They were the ones who were killed.”
Nigeria’s
rich and powerful, its politicians and military leaders from Lagos to Abuja,
have been comfortably immune to the brutal northern insurgency – which may help
to explain why it continues to escalate. The rebellion has exposed the extreme
gulf between rich and poor in one of Africa’s most unequal countries. And this
widening gap has fuelled the anger and alienation that makes it easy for Boko
Haram to find recruits for its murderous militia.
As the
insurgency spreads across northern Nigeria and into its “Middle Belt” in the
centre, its guns and bombs are targeting Nigeria’s most vulnerable groups:
rural villagers, migrants, street vendors, small market traders, the unemployed
– and, most notoriously, the schoolgirls of Chibok, more than 200 of whom were
kidnapped by Boko Haram in April.
This was
supposed to be Nigeria’s year to celebrate its brand-new status as Africa’s
biggest economy. By the end of the century, the former “sleeping giant” of
Africa will overtake the United States as the third-biggest country in the
world by population. Its fate could be crucial to the future of the African
economy. Yet the rapidly escalating Boko Haram rebellion is exposing the deep
dysfunction in Nigeria, putting Nigeria on the path to potential “failed state”
status, and contributing to the spread of Islamist extremism across West Africa.
Nigeria’s
futile search for the kidnapped schoolgirls is now entering its third month,
despite military support from the United States, Britain, Canada and others,
while the expanding Boko Haram insurgency is killing hundreds of people in
cities and villages across the north and centre of the country. An estimated
12,000 people have died in the five-year insurgency so far.
Nigeria has
the resources to beat Boko Haram if it was determined to do so. But most of its
staggering oil wealth – up to $70-billion (U.S.) annually – is held by a small
politically connected elite, who remain insulated from Boko Haram’s terror
tactics and seem almost indifferent to the war.
Nigeria has
lost about $400-billion in oil revenue as a result of corruption since 1960,
according to former World Bank vice-president Obiageli Ezekwesili, a leader of
the protest campaign to bring back the kidnapped schoolgirls. A further
$20-billion in oil money has disappeared from Nigeria’s treasury in the past
two years, former central bank governor Lamido Sanusi has charged.
Porsches and bubbly
The economic
inequality in Nigeria is among the most extreme in the world – and growing
worse. Despite its rising oil wealth, the percentage of Nigerians living in
absolute poverty (earning less than a dollar a day) has increased to 61 per
cent over the past decade, compared with 55 per cent in 2004. Yet at the same
time, Nigeria has nearly 16,000 millionaires, and that number has jumped by 44
per cent over the past six years.
Much of the
wealth is concentrated in Nigeria’s biggest city, Lagos, where the northern
rebellion feels like a remote rumour. At the upscale Palms shopping mall in a
Lagos suburb, security is lax. The Boko Haram insurgency is far from people’s
minds. “We’re not feeling the impact,” says Edewor Alexander Iniovosa, a
25-year-old employee at the mall. “We believe we are safe here.”
Lagos is a
microcosm of the social dysfunction that plagues Nigeria and feeds the
insurgency. It is one of Africa’s biggest and most overcrowded cities, with
vast slums, bad traffic jams, daily electricity shortages and eroding
infrastructure. To escape those pressures, the richest residents are moving into
their own privatized suburbs, where they need never leave.
On Victoria
Island, one of the city’s most exclusive districts, you can buy a Porsche
sports car for $220,000 at a newly opened luxury-car dealership, or a bottle of
Bollinger champagne for $115 at a supermarket for the rich. Thanks to the
lifestyles of its elite, Nigeria’s consumption of French bubbly is soaring at
the second-fastest rate in the world, a research company recently found.
The main
beach of Victoria Island, once a popular haunt for ordinary Nigerians, is now
virtually inaccessible. It has been swallowed up by a 10-square-kilometre city,
called Eko Atlantic, currently being constructed on land reclaimed from the
ocean. Its luxury apartments and skyscrapers will house 250,000 residents and
150,000 workers, and its wide boulevards and marinas will become a playground
for luxury sedans and yachts.
Most
significantly, it will all be privately controlled: Everything from its
electricity and drinking water to its transit systems and telecommunications
will be privatized and operated independently from the decrepit public
infrastructure. It will allow the rich to abandon Lagos, retreat from the poor
and segregate themselves in their own self-contained enclave.
At its glitzy
sales office, a showroom features a huge scale map of the planned city, which
the developer calls “a new lifestyle concept” and “a masterpiece of urban
planning.” Its brochures promise “beautiful tree-lined streets and stunning
ocean views” for those who can afford it.
Construction
cranes and bulldozers are already visible across the reclaimed land, and the
first residential tower is due to open in 2016. “This is the new face of
Africa,” says Okon David Major, a former merchant-marine seafarer who makes a
living as a guide to the handful of visitors in the remaining fragments of the
beach.
Asked who can
afford to live in Eko Atlantic, he laughs. “The government functionaries who
stole our money,” he replies. “The tourists used to come here, but now the
government has confiscated everything and they use it to make money. Every head
of state will have their own building, and they’ll chase away the poor people.”
Living in
places like Victoria Island and shopping at the boutiques of the Palms mall, Nigeria’s
rich and powerful can ignore the Boko Haram bombs and the kidnapped
schoolgirls. State governors, who hold much of the power in Nigeria’s federal
system, fly to their regions in private jets.
“The
political class, with a few distinguished exceptions, has long been in a state
of smugness, complacency and collusion,” Nigerian novelist and poet Ben Okri
wrote in a recent commentary.
“In a country
rich with oil revenues, where billions of pounds disappear from the national
coffers with no one held to account, where going into politics is synonymous
with acquiring vast and sudden wealth, where slums breed in larger numbers
every day … it is not surprising that violent sects grow from such a festering
condition.”
Cost of corruption
While the
“Bring Back Our Girls” hashtag campaign has thrust Boko Haram into the global
spotlight, too many Nigerian officials have been apathetic or resentful of the
attention.
Despite a
national security budget of about $6.5-billion annually, the insurgency has
actually increased in its scope and deadliness in recent months. Boko Haram has
continued to kidnap and kill villagers within a few kilometres of the Chibok
site, while the army does little to protect them.
In response
to the global controversy over the kidnapped girls, pro-government loyalists
and security forces have blamed the local campaigners: breaking up their daily
rallies in Abuja, trying to ban their protests and confiscating truckloads of
the newspapers that have embarrassed the government with their coverage of the
issue.
Some
influential leaders, including the wife of President Goodluck Jonathan, have
even claimed that the kidnapping was a fabricated ruse to discredit the
government.
Nigeria’s
attempts to tackle the Boko Haram crisis has been hampered by its corrupt
military, weakened by internal feuding, mutinies, defections and a lack of
basic weaponry. Nigeria spent millions of dollars to buy Israeli surveillance
drones for its army in 2006, but it didn’t bother to maintain them, so they
could not be used to search for the kidnapped schoolgirls. Even the money for
basic military salaries is often stolen by commanders and politicians.
“The soldiers
have exceedingly low morale,” said Clement Nwankwo, a political analyst who
directs the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre in Abuja.
“The military
budget rises, but a lot of it is creamed off by political leaders. Soldiers are
forced to go to war without adequate preparation and a lot of them are killed.
The leaders and their own officers are not providing the military hardware they
need. These soldiers are afraid of engaging with the insurgents. When you know
your opponent has far more sophisticated equipment, you don’t want to simply
line yourself up to be shot and killed.”
The
insurgency cannot be solved as long as the corruption and inequality continue,
Mr. Nwankwo said. “I don’t think we should be called a failed state, but we’re
in danger of it. Unless the government puts a halt to its levels of corruption
and incompetence, my sense is that we’re on that path.”
The Pentagon
has a similar assessment of Nigeria’s military weaknesses. In testimony to a
U.S. Senate committee last month, the Defence Department’s African Affairs
director Alice Friend said the Pentagon “has been deeply concerned for some
time by how much the government of Nigeria has struggled to keep pace with Boko
Haram’s growing capabilities.”
Widespread
corruption in Nigeria is creating a “more permissive operating environment” for
Boko Haram, she testified.
“The
long-term solution … requires Nigeria’s national political leaders to give
serious and sustained attention to the systemic problems of corruption, the
lack of effective and equitable governance and the country’s uneven social and
economic development.”
Outgunned and
losing the war, Nigeria’s military has responded to Boko Haram with horrific
abuses, including thousands of arbitrary arrests and massacres of hundreds of
unarmed civilians, according to well-documented reports by human-rights groups.
This, too, has played into Boko Haram’s hands by fomenting anger and bringing
revenge-seeking recruits into its armed gangs.
Living in fear
At the heart
of Nigerian political power, Abuja’s verdant and carefully groomed city centre
is an oasis of affluence where government ministries have their towering headquarters.
But on the city’s impoverished outskirts, in a slum called Nyanya, the
insurgents have twice exploded bombs at the same spot, audaciously exposing the
powerlessness of the authorities.
Nyanya is a
haphazard warren of alleys and small houses, with fires burning in the
courtyards and chickens running through the dusty streets. People cook and wash
outside, while hawkers sell fruit and other small goods.
“People are
still fearing the bombs,” says Rose Ayoka, 52, who runs a small micro-savings
business in the slum. “Many people have run away. My customers are escaping.
People aren’t coming here to buy or sell. Because of Boko Haram, the people in
Nyanya are suffering.”
On a recent
afternoon, units of police and soldiers were patrolling the slum and guarding
the bombing site. But their roadblocks tend to harass the poor rather than the
rich. “When you reach the checkpoint, they look at you, and if you look very
well-dressed, they tell you to go ahead,” said Mr. Nwankwo, the political
analyst. “If you’re scruffy, they pull you aside and open your boot.”
The debris
from the bombings is a poignant reminder of who pays the price for Boko Haram’s
attacks. The small pushcarts and wheelbarrows of the street hawkers and
labourers are still visible near the scene of the explosions, their tin cans
and plastic bottles and rice bags melted or burned.
Titus Emeka
Okwor, 50, has been selling cheap engine oil in soft-drink bottles to passing
motorists on Nyanya’s main road for the past 10 years. When the first bomb hit,
the explosion was so loud it damaged his hearing, and he abandoned the site for
weeks. On his first day back, he pulls out a small crumpled bill from his
pocket – worth about 60 cents. It’s his only revenue from the entire day and
not enough to support his wife and five children.
“I was afraid
to come back here,” he says. “Mostly I’m just sitting here alone and nobody is
coming here. No cars are stopping any more because of the situation.”
Hundreds of
kilometres to the south, in an affluent suburb of Lagos, the reports about the
bombings and kidnappings are largely ignored. In an upscale restaurant, a group
of Nigerian corporate executives casually watch the latest Boko Haram news on
television.
“It’s crazy,”
they say, shaking their heads idly. “It’s insane.”
Then they go
back to their chatter about business and food and their complaints about the
slow service. The brutal rebellion has been forgotten again.
Nigeria by the numbers
61:
Percentage of Nigerians who earn less than one dollar a day in 2014
55:
Percentage of Nigerians who earn less than one dollar a day in 2004
16,000:
Number of millionaires in Nigeria
44:
Percentage increase in the number of millionaires in the past six years
12,000:
Estimated number of people killed in five years of the Boko Haram insurgency
173.6
million: Estimated population of Nigeria in 2014
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