Let's Talk Afro-Geopolitics II: The Future of the Nigerian State
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The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
I think that Lagos should be folded into the former Western region (Yorubaland) so that it's GDP will help spur the development and economic viability of Yorubaland (much like how NYC subsidizes the rest of New York state).
Well then...
The one thing that got me in that article was only 219 Nigerians pay over 50,000 dollars in taxes a year
Something isn't adding up
The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
People don't pay tax in Nigeria. When my parents were youths, only civil servants paid taxes. Now, I think very few people do. More people probably pay tithes to their churches or give zakat during Ramadan.
Dangote probably hasn't paid tax in decades.
Nigerian pastors are balling
I went by scoan and Christ assembly when I was there that dude tb Joshua and pastor Chris
The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
Then how does the government get money?
Mostly from oil export revenue.
Economy of Nigeria - Wikipedia
Meaning other sectors (services, agriculture) remain very under-taxed and outside of the formal economy.
The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
No wonder their roads are atrocious
Road management need not be a headache. There just needs to be effective use of resources and overall division of who manages what. Also, prioritizing resources. Can Nigeria afford to build a high-speed rail system from Lagos to Port Harcourt while there isn't a second bridge across the Nigeria connecting most of Igboland to Western Nigeria?
Road management need not be a headache. There just needs to be effective use of resources and overall division of who manages what. Also, prioritizing resources. Can Nigeria afford to build a high-speed rail system from Lagos to Port Harcourt while there isn't a second bridge across the Nigeria connecting most of Igboland to Western Nigeria?
I swear I remember reading somewhere that Nigeria was getting old Canadian trains eko rail or something
I know that Kenya, Ethiopia and rwanda we're able to build a network in 3 years
The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
@Diasporan Royalty @Don Drogo @The Wave @FireDwaneCasey
Nigeria: How Nigeria Got This Way
Reports of sectarian massacres have been coming out of Plateau State in central Nigeria for months now.
This is the kind of Sahel story it’s difficult to understand and easy to shrug off, with a vague feeling that those places are just messed up — it’s the way things are, nothing to be done about it.
Well, it’s true that this place, Nigeria, is messed up in many ways. But that’s not an eternal fact. It’s the result of British colonial policy. “Nigeria” itself is not a natural concept. The territory we know as Nigeria was nailed together from incompatible elements by British Colonials in 1912. And the whole point of the project called “Nigeria” was to force a collision between the northern caliphate of the Hausa and the people of the center (“Middle Belt”) and coastal south. And this collision was specifically designed to favor the Hausa caliphate of the northern deserts, because its authoritarian, sectarian rulers were the kind of people the British found very easy to deal with.
NOTE: I’m going to use “Hausa” instead of “Hausa-Fulani,” because most Nigerian sources regard Hausa-Fulani as a single ethnic group, and the hyphenated term is just too awkward.
So when you read a BBC story like this one, “Making Sense of Nigeria’s Fulani-farmer conflict,” you have to keep in mind the long, sordid history of British preference for “Northern” (Muslim, caliphate-based, herder) subalterns, and deep dislike of other Nigerians.
The first thing to settle with a story like this, covering ground most of us don’t know too well, is where exactly it’s happening and what’s the history of that area. Here we’re talking about a Nigerian province called “Plateau,” which is right in the heart of what the British called “The Middle Belt”.
The Middle Belt divides Nigeria’s three most powerful groups: the Hausa of the north from the Yoruba and Igbo of the coast. Most of the peoples of the Middle Belt don’t belong to any of those three groups. The Middle Belt peoples are smaller groups — up to a hundred different ones.
Small peoples, like these, are vulnerable to aggression from larger groups, and the pattern of Hausa aggression against other Nigerian ethnic groups is deeply rooted in British colonial policy. It was a brutally simple policy: pro-Hausa, wary of the Yoruba and hostile to the Igbo.
Like a lot of grim African stories, this one goes back to the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, when Europe carved up a map of Africa (without even dreaming of asking any Africans). Britain got the region that would later become “Nigeria.” But at this time there was no idea of making the north and and the Middle Belt and the coast into a single nation. The differences between the dry, pastoral, Muslim, hierarchical North and the more democratic, Christian coastal groups were too sharp, too obvious.
The British started on the coast but soon pushed inland, conquered the Hausa-Fulani Sokoto caliphate, and immediately coopted Hausa soldiers as their preferred auxiliaries (for a parallel, see the Empire’s cooptation of Sikh soldiers after defeating them in the 1840s). For most British colonial planners, the Hausa seemed like natural allies: warlike yet passive, uninterested in challenging British mercantile or intellectual domination and therefore easy to manipulate. In the sultanate system, the Sultan was the sole authority; that made his cooperation easy to get, whether by bribes, flattery, or genuine affinity. And don’t underestimate thenatural affinity British colonists had for Sunni absolute-rulers around the world.
The Igbo of the south-east were the opposite of the Hausa: quick learners, born rhetoricians, democratic to the bone, even to the extent of allowing women a role in discussion. British authorities hated these traits. This might seem odd — colonizers hating the ethnic groups that absorbed European culture but admiring those who wanted no part of it — but it makes a very practical sense. Colonial officials don’t want to leave any locals with the skills needed to replace them. Keep’em illiterate and they’ll never be able to do without your Empire.
Using Hausa mercenaries, the private firm Royal Niger Company, modelled on the East India Company, squeezed money from palm-oil farms along the coast. So from the beginning, British “Nigeria” was run by Hausa soldiers dominating profitable Igbo and Yoruba farmers.
The Hausa zone was, at this point, “The Protectorate of Northern Nigeria,” and the coast was the “Oil Rivers Protectorate.” (That’s “oil” as in “palm oil,” not yet petroleum.) But “Protectorate” meant different things in the two zones. In the Hausa arid interior, British authorities made a deal with the Sultan prohibiting any Christian missionary activity, and strictly limiting any attempts at education.
Yeah. You think “Boko Haram” (“Western Education is forbidden”) came out of nowhere? It was official policy for Northern Nigeria under British rule.
(Boko Haram is a largely Kanuri rather than Hausa group, but the northern theocracy pattern is very similar). The North was valuable precisely because it was illiterate, hierarchical, and warlike. It produced perfect Imperial subalterns.
In 1906 the Niger River Company handed over authority to the British state. North and South, desert and coast, were still separate — but then came Frederick Lugard, a typically efficient, ruthless colonial official. Lugard took over the two zones in 1912, and immediately started pushing his lethal, simple plan to merge the two zones, placing the Igbo and Yoruba under the thumb of the Hausa for good.
Lugard was a monster, one of the great monsters of history. His view of Africans (by which he meant sub-Saharan Africans) was straightforward:
"In character and temperament, the typical African of this race-type is a happy, thriftless, excitable person, lacking in self-control, discipline, and foresight. Naturally courageous, and naturally courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of veracity, fond of music and loving weapons as an oriental loves jewellery. His thoughts are concentrated on the events and feelings of the moment, and he suffers little from the apprehension for the future or grief for the past. His mind is far nearer to the animal world than that of the European or Asiatic, and exhibits something of the animals' placidity and want of desire to rise beyond the state he has reached.
"Through the ages, the African appears to have evolved no organised religious creed, and though some tribes appear to believe in a deity, the religious sense seldom rises above pantheistic animalism and seems more often to take the form of a vague dread of the supernatural. He lacks the power of organisation, and is conspicuously deficient in the management and control alike of men or business."
As a characterization of any of the three largest groups of Nigeria, this is ludicrous but it does give you a clear sense of what men like Lugard wanted from their thralls, and why he would have disliked the adaptable mercantile Igbo so much.
When the tropics come into their own in a few years, you’ll hear Lugard’s name mentioned in dire company. At the moment, it’s still unusual to hear creeps like Rhodes and Lugard mentioned in the same lists as more familiar genocidal population-engineers.
And that’s what Lugard was, a classic Imperial population-engineer. Stalin gets a lot of blame for ripping populations from their old bases, but it was the Empire that really knew how to play with troublesome peoples. And they didn’t use “divide and conquer,” as the cliché has it. That was far less common that the much deadlier technique used on what we now call Nigeria: “MERGE and conquer.” Force two or more incompatible cultures into the same artificial boundary, then appoint one of them the policeman of the mix, the one with permission to work out all its old grudges on the others.
Merging the illiterate, theocratic jihadi culture of the Hausa with the anarchic traditions of the coast was like chaining two born opposites together. Give your champion a weapon, leave the other one unarmed, and you ensure the result you want.
So under Lugard, the Middle Belt, like the rest of Nigeria, was garrisoned by Hausa officers and troops, under loose, friendly supervision by the few British officials on the ground. Justifying this, as we know from the work of recent African scholars like Moses Ochonu, meant pushing the myth of Hausa superiority and Middle-Belt/Coast inferiority.
“[Hausa dominance] needed an invented narrative of Hausa-Fulani supremacy and Middle-Belt inferiority….In this ideological enterprise, pre-existing British and [Hausa] caliphate theories about the precolonial sociology and politics of Northern Nigeria and about prior indicators of Middle Belt submission and resistance to caliphate ‘civilization’ proved particularly useful.”
With Lugard’s approval, the myth of Hausa dominance stretching into the distant past became orthodox British doctrine. Lugard wrote endless praise of Hausa culture while denigrating Middle-Belt peoples as uncivilized, inferior genetic material. And so a new myth, blending Hausa and British chauvinism, developed:
“British colonization in much of the Nigerian Middle Belt pivoted on Hausa-Fulani subcolonial initiatives and ideas… [T]he colonial everyday in the Middle Belt had an unmistakable imprimatur of Anglo-Caliphate colonialism.”
This was the toxic stew in which Nigeria steeped for a half century: British/Hausa dominance over both Middle Belt and coast.
But why is Hausa violence against Middle Belt people still going on, almost 60 years after the British left? To understand that, you have to look at one of the most explosive, tightly-censored stories of the last century: British interference in Nigeria’s first national election.
The Empire finished WWII worn out, impoverished. It was clear that Africa would soon be independent. And in their traditional fashion, the British elite that ran Nigeria started working on ways to ensure that (a) Hausa/Northern dominance would continue after independence; and (b) Nigeria would never function effectively.
Once again, Nigeria divided on North/South lines: The Yoruba and Igbo of the South both wanted independence, but the Hausa of the north did not. They feared losing their favored-client status, especially because literacy and business skills, from which they’d quarantined their people for decades, would give the southern groups a huge advantage.
Nigeria was scheduled to become independent in 1960, with the first general election — to determine who would run the new country — set for 1959. As the country got ready to vote, the North-South gap was huge: 20% of Igbo could speak, read, and write English, the lingua Franca, vs. about 1% of Northerners. This wasn’t underdevelopment, but the chosen policy of both the British and their Hausa clients. Now, suddenly, it looked like a bad choice.
Worse yet (from the Hausa perspective), huge oil reserves had been found in the southeast in 1956, strengthening the south against the north.
But the last British Governor General, James Robertson, was working very hard rig the election in favor of the Hausa party, the Northern People’s Congress (NPC). We only know this because one brave Englishman, Harold Smith, broke the colonial Omerta code. Most of the records are still sealed under British law, two of them with the very unusual stamp “Closed for 100 years. Without Smith’s whistle-blowing, we would probably still not know what really happened.
Smith loved Nigeria and was outraged at his boss Robertson’s scheme. The plan had two stages: first rig the pre-election census by overcounting the North and undercounting the coast. And then make a deal with the Igbo politician, “Zik,” (Nnamdi Azikiwe) who had a long history of collusion with the Hausa NPC,
to serve as a figure head for the NPC.
When Smith objected, Robertson threatened him:
“You know why you’re here, Smith. And I want you to know that all your worst fears and suspicions are absolutely correct … I am telling you this because I want you to know how much trouble you are in … Smith, I want you to know that I personally gave the orders regarding the elections to which you objected … If you will keep your mouth shut, I can promise rapid promotion and a most distinguished career elsewhere … but you will not be allowed to work in the UK. You must understand that you know too much for your own good. If you don’t give me your word, means will be found to shut you up. No one will believe your story and the press will not be allowed to print it.”