Dysfunction in Nigeria
By Craig Murray
March 14, 2015 "ICH"
- May 07, 2014 - I have fond memories of
Borno state, camping beside my LandRover in
the cold, crisp early mornings, steam rising
from a cup of tea, then the thermometer
climbing visibly as the sun got to work.
Fulani herdsmen crossing the horizon under
conical hats with their angular cattle,
women walking behind, slim and with
beautiful posture, swaying as they walked.
The neat homesteads surrounded by fences of
beautifully woven millet stalk. Meals of
roasted corn and suya. I remember the
farmer who offered me a drink, then took a
tin cup and brought milk straight from the
cow, still very warm. The people there are
grave and hospitable.
I never one felt in the
slightest danger, thirty years ago. I am
taken aback that places I went round then
without a care for the British High
Commission (I had the agriculture brief,
which was an amazing license to roam) are
now no-go areas. The region is mostly dry
savannah: the forest area stretching into
Cameroon, incidentally, is by no means
impenetrable, though it is true the canopy
would be a barrier to aerial surveillance.
Very little of it is primary forest any
more.
The media now have a new
cartoon figure of hate in the bearded,
bobble-hatted leader of Boko Haram, and in
truth he is a very bad person. But armed
rebellions of thousands of people do not
just happen. It is not a simple and
spontaneous outbreak of evil, still less a
sign that we must wage Tony Blair’s war on
Muslims everywhere.
Nigeria is a country with
governance and corruption as bad as anywhere
in the world. A country of billionaires and
of near starving sufferers. A country of
pollution and exploitation by big oil, and a
happily complicit and deeply corrupt
political class. Nobody disagrees with
that, and very few would disagree that there
lies the root cause of Boko Haram’s ability
to gather support.
If the Nigerian government
were to have sent in the army en masse to
try to recover the kidnapped schoolgirls,
the first result would undoubtedly have
been, on all previous experience of the
Nigerian army, that hundreds more women
would have been raped, this time by
soldiers. Villages would have been looted
and people arrested, tortured and killed,
more on the basis of extorting money than of
looking for suspects.
To be fair to President
Goodluck Jonathan he knows this, and he had
made the extremely brave decision a year ago
to try to deal with Boko Haram by dialogue
and negotiation, and call off the military
campaign which was making matters far
worse. He drew much criticism for it at the
time, particularly from neo-cons, and will
be blamed now. The problem is that things
have gone too far to be easily remedied, and
to negotiate with the crazed is not simple.
Were I trying to get back
the girls, I would operate through the
agency of traditional society. Nigeria’s
indigenous institutions are much degraded,
but offer more hope than any Western style
interventions. I am not precisely sure
which is the appropriate traditional ruler,
but I suspect that it is the Lamido of
Adamawa, whose immediate predecessor I took
tea with on several occasions. Information
on the girl’s whereabouts will definitely be
obtainable through the networks of
subsidiary chiefs and elders, which still
exist, even though their political and
administrative power had passed. It is
particularly helpful that in this region
these traditional allegiances are linked to
Islamic authority. Adamawa’s territory
extends into the Cameroon, and even Chad.
The fact of the old state
of Adamawa extending into Cameroon and Chad
brings us to the heart of the problem.
Nigeria is an entirely artificial, colonial
construct created by the British Empire (and
bounded by the French Empire). Its
boundaries bear no relation to internal
national entities, and it is huge. The
strange thing is that these totally
artificial colonial constructs of states
generate a genuine and fierce patriotism
among their citizens. After just my first
year of living in Nigeria I had formed a
firm view that it would be much better for
the country to be split into at least three
states, and that Britain’s attitude in the
Biafran war, that colonial state boundaries
must be inviolable, had been wrong.
Many patriotic Nigerians
will be very angry with me for suggesting
their country should split up. It is also
worth observing that, not only in Nigeria,
many Africans who are, with justice, most
vocal in their denouncing of colonialism,
are at the same time most patriotic about
their entirely artificial nationality,
created by the colonial power.
Craig Murray is an author,
broadcaster and human rights activist. He
was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from
August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of
the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.