Nigeria burns as President Goodluck Jonathan fiddles

By Peter Wanyonyi

President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria has had very little good luck since he came to office. Ever since he inherited the presidency from the late Umar Yar-Adua in mid-2010, Nigeria has effectively been slowly coming apart at the seams.

The rate of disintegration is now accelerating and at the end of May, President Jonathan declared a state of emergency in several bits of the country encompassing the Muslim north and middle of Nigeria.

Perhaps more than any other African country, Nigeria embodies the astonishing hodge-podge of tribal lands masquerading as ‘countries’ that were bequeathed us by colonists. The British lumped together the Muslim north and the Christian south, where all the country’s resources lie. The result has been an unworkable country that is held together only by force of arms. Matters came to a head in 1967, when the Southeast of the country, led by the Igbo, tried to secede. British-supplied arms helped the Nigerian federal government bomb the Igbos into submission.

There followed a series of prolonged coups and counter-coups, with one common denominator: The Hausa Muslims of the north dominated the military, ensuring the Christian south always remained subjugated. Nigeria’s massive oil production kept lucrative patronage networks running, to the extent that Africa’s largest oil exporter also, paradoxically, has the worst fuel and power shortages on the continent.

Nigeria somehow stumbled on. In the late 90s, as the Americans and the British withdrew their tacit support, the dictator Sani Abacha, a northerner, took over power in 1993. Abacha was felled by a Viagra-fuelled heart attack in 1998, and his successor, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, allowed free elections that saw former coup leader General Olusegun Obasanjo win the presidency.

Step down

But Nigeria is Nigeria. The country’s warring north-south divides agreed on an informal rotational presidency: A southern president to be followed by a northerner, and so on. This neat little arrangement fell apart when President Yar’Adua died, and Goodluck Jonathan took over. The northern Muslims wanted Jonathan to be an interim president, to step down for a Muslim, but Jonathan — a southerner — has decided to kaa ngumu. The northern military generals and their accomplices, therefore, decided to unleash hell on Nigeria, in the form of the terror group Boko Haram.

Elections

In just three days in April this year, nearly 200 people were massacred by the terrorist group. Thousands of farmers have fled their lands in the north, and Christians have been told to leave the north or be killed. Churches are a particularly favoured target of Boko Haram and Nigerian churchgoers have now got used to the sight of policemen holding AK-47 rifles to guard churchgoers — in the middle of Lagos.

Nigeria is at war, but President Jonathan is not in the least bit concerned. He is gleefully preparing to run in upcoming elections, oblivious to the violence and terror that blights his country.

Perhaps the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi was right. Nigeria needs to split into two or three independent countries  — a Yoruba-led State, a Hausa-led one, and an Igbo-led one.