Lagos - "Nigeria is not Animal Farm!" read one
placard brandished during days of furious fuel price protests by Nigerians,
which have combined with a violent Islamist insurgency to move Africa's top oil
producer closer to what many fear may be a breaking point.
The same political vices of corrupt leadership and abuse of
power George Orwell skewered in his 1945 novella Animal Farm have corroded
Nigeria's politics since independence from Britain in 1960. Angry popular
backlash against these is fuelling the latest violence and unrest in the
African continent's most populous state.
This anti-establishment fury brought Africa's second-largest
economy to a standstill last week. Citizens from all walks of life have taken
to the streets after President Goodluck Jonathan's government announced on
January 1 it would scrap a motor fuel subsidy, more than doubling fuel prices.
The volcano of public rage has erupted at the same time that
a spate of bombings and shootings by a shadowy Islamist sect is threatening to
fracture the country's sensitive north-south, Muslim-Christian divide. This
religious faultline has caused sectarian conflict claiming thousands of lives
in the past.
Some are now asking whether this dynamic but troubled
country of 160 million, carved by colonial rulers out of a jigsaw of ethnic and
religious groups, can still hold together or risks plunging again into all-out
conflict and even breakup.
Many still remember the divisive 1967-70 civil war over
secessionist Biafra that killed over a million people and caused mass
starvation, dislocation and suffering.
"As the ripples of incessant bombings and massacres
resonate... fear, anger and hatred have been woven into the very fabric of the
nation's life," Soni Daniel, deputy editor of Nigerian daily Leadership
wrote in an editorial on Saturday.
"Nigeria has never come as close to the brink of civil
war," he said.
The nationwide fuel protests have become an outlet for
thousands to vent their grievances against what they see as a venal ruling
political class and incompetent government, which is struggling to tackle an
insurgency by the Boko Haram Islamist sect based in the largely Muslim north.
"The bottom line is we don't trust the government to do
what they say any more," said student Remi Sonaiya, sitting on a car
blaring out Afrobeat music in the heaving Nigerian metropolis of Lagos, while
protesters thrashed an effigy of President Jonathan across the face with leafy
branches.
Unions launched strikes against the fuel subsidy removal and
these are estimated to be costing the country $600m a day. They have also
threatened to shut down Nigeria's 2 million barrels per day oil industry,
rattling global energy markets.
Talks between Jonathan and labour unions on Saturday failed
to reach a compromise, and the unions said the crippling strikes would resume
on Monday. But the main oil union said it was not joining the walkouts for the
time being.
Civil war fears
Jennifer Giroux, senior researcher for the Centre for
Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich University, said the fuel prices issue is
"a common rallying point ... A unifying issue that has had an immediate
impact on the majority of Nigerians, most of whom are making $2 a day or
less."
The crisis mood is a far cry from the cautious optimism that
greeted Jonathan last April, when he won Nigeria's cleanest ever election on a
pledge to fight graft, fix a crumbling power sector and attract investment into
its huge oil reserves.
Then, foreign analysts saw a potential take-off for the
economy if the former zoology lecturer could push through key reforms and take
steps towards healing the north-south rift.
One such recommended reform was ending the fuel subsidy but
the president's January 1 decision to remove it convulsed a country already
shaken by a wave of Christmas attacks claimed by Boko Haram, including church
bombings that killed dozens and stoked sectarian tensions.
Attacks have continued during the fuel protests. Targeting
of minority Christians triggered reprisals by Christians on Muslims in the
south, even though the majority of the two communities have shown in the past
they can live in peace.
During fuel price protests in southwestern Benin City on
Tuesday, five people were killed when a mob attacked a mosque, and 3 000
Muslims of northern origin fled.
Fears that the unrest and violence could degenerate into
something even bigger seem to be gaining some traction.
"The situation we have in our hands is even worse than the
civil war that we fought," Jonathan said in recent comments about the Boko
Haram insurgency.
"During the civil war, we knew where the enemy was
coming from. (Now) you won't even know the person who will point a gun at you
or plant a bomb behind your house," he said, warning that Boko Haram
members were in "all levels of government".
And in a recent interview with the BBC, Nobel prize-winning
Nigerian author Wole Soyinka said the comparison with the traumatic Biafra war
was "not unrealistic".
"We see the nation heading towards a civil war, we know
that the (Biafra) civil war was preceded by serious killings by both sides of
the regional divide, we've seen reprisals," he said.
"It is going that way, we no longer can pretend it's
not. When you get a situation where a bunch of people can go into a place of
worship and open fire through the windows, you've reached a certain dismal
watershed."
President - and army - under scrutiny
Some question whether civilian Jonathan, who as
vice-president first took power in May 2010 when his predecessor Umaru Yar'Adua
died, has the capacity to lead Nigeria out of its multi-headed crisis.
They worry that his miscalculation of the public mood over
the fuel subsidy removal and his slow reaction to the escalating Boko Haram
insurgency suggest he may struggle.
"There are serious questions about how in control the
president is, with some really poor decisionmaking. Is Goodluck Jonathan really
able to provide visionary leadership?" asked Alex Vines, senior fellow and
Africa specialist at London think-tank Chatham House.
"There seems to be just drift and indecisiveness."
A civil servant who works with Jonathan said privately that
his style differs from the many military rulers that have often run Nigeria in
the past. He listens, even lets people interrupt, which some in Nigeria's macho
politics may see as a weakness.
The son of a canoe carver in the oil-rich Niger Delta,
Jonathan studied zoology, in which he earned a doctorate, and worked as an
education inspector, lecturer and environmental protection officer before going
into politics in 1998.
He was northerner Yar'Adua's running mate in a shambolic
election in 2007, but his campaign to run himself after Yar'Adua's death was
controversial because of an informal pact within the ruling PDP party that the
presidency should rotate between the north and the south.
As a southeast Christian, by running for the leadership he
upset that rotation deal in the eyes of many northerners.
The early signs that Jonathan's first elected term as
president would not be smooth came hours after he was sworn in on May 30. A
series of bombings killed at least 14 people in a drinking spot inside a
barracks in the northern city of Bauchi.
Most observers see a political element to the recurrent
violence in the north, which analysts say is also rooted in anger - as with the
fuel price protests - against the lack of economic opportunities caused by
decades of poor governance.
Boko Haram's heartland in the remote, semi-arid northeast is
one of the country's poorest regions, where a failed education system and youth
unemployment have conspired to provide easy recruits for extremists.
Last year, Boko Haram attacks spread and even hit the
capital Abuja, yet Jonathan's reaction has often appeared low key. Some critics
have faulted him for initially treating the insurgency as a purely security
issue, rather than as something requiring a political settlement.
"He's eerily calm considering we could be weeks away
from a major confrontation," said Africa Confidential editor Patrick
Smith. "The absolute failure... to wheel on southerners and northerners at
the same time to say this is a national crisis and we have to pull together, is
striking."
The biggest fear, Smith said, is that the army - whose upper
ranks are all southern Christians, while junior officers and lower ranks are a
mix of both from many geographical locations - could fracture if a section of
it launches a mutiny.
There are already rumblings in the military, he said.
"The next big faultline is the army, and how well they
stay together... If it splits, that is this country's nightmare."
In addition, that fact that Jonathan is an Ijaw from the
southern Niger Delta means that any attempt to unseat him by force - especially
by a northerner - could trigger a backlash in the Delta by militants who have
fought the government before.
Former Niger Delta warlord Mujahid Dokubo-Asari said this
month that his people taking up arms to defend Jonathan against Boko Haram was
"minutes away".
Roots in corruption, inequality
Despite the serious strains, many point out that Nigeria has
often lurched from crisis to crisis but, at least since the Biafra war, has
managed to avoid a total breakdown.
An armed uprising in the Niger Delta last decade - similarly
driven by anger at the failure of politicians to deliver local services -
lasted years and shut down almost half of Nigeria's oil and gas output at one
stage. Nevertheless, Delta militants signed a peace deal with the government in
2009.
"The president can survive the dual crisis if he
manages to keep the support of key political actors from the parliament, the
state governors and some sectors of the civil society," Gilles Yabi, West
Africa project director of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group
think-tank, told Reuters.
"I don't think that the level of radicalisation and
polarisation that preceded the Biafra war can be easily reached today," he
said.
Others feel however the country may have come to a
crossroads. "Do things have to get either better or worse very quickly or
can it just muddle along as it always has?" said Antony Goldman, who heads
London-based PM Consulting.
Yabi said it was encouraging that the unions promoting the
strikes had agreed to go into negotiations with the president.
Goldman noted that Boko Haram's leader Abubakar Shekau did
not specifically rule out talks in an otherwise defiant online video, in which
he defended recent killings of Christians as justifiable revenge attacks and
said Jonathan had no power to stop the group's insurgency.
In his video, Shekau appeared to echo popular complaints against dysfunctional established politics when he said "injustice is unbelief, democracy is unbelief and the constitution is unbelief".
Stephen Ellis, a historian at the Africa Studies Centre at
Leiden University in the Netherlands, sees Jonathan as a wily politician who
has already shown he has the skills to operate in Nigeria's challenging
politics, which he calls "a very rough business... like a poker game... or
juggling chainsaws".
Ellis makes the point that all the country's power brokers,
including those in the restive north who may be pursuing their own agendas by
using the Boko Haram insurgency to pressure southerner Jonathan, are dependent
on the national oil income.
"If you are a member of the Nigerian elite, including
those in the north, you need the Nigerian state to be in business," he
said, a factor which could lead, as in the past since the Biafra war, to a
fresh political accommodation that restores calm.
But tackling the deeply and widely embedded corruption that
lubricates all levels of Nigeria's political system is a much tougher challenge
in the long term.
"A really determined effort to stamp out corruption
would itself be massively destabilising. It can only be done gradually," Ellis
said.
But until this happens, outbreaks of angry protests and
violence are likely to recur in an energy-rich country that pumps 2 million
barrels of oil a day with the help of oil majors like Royal Dutch Shell and
ExxonMobil, while its citizens face crumbling roads, abysmal public hospitals,
chronic power shortages and an economy rigged in favour of powerful import
oligarchs.
"Nigeria... has been ruled by the same cult of
mediocrity - a deeply corrupt cabal - for at least 40 years, recycling
themselves in different guises and incarnations," said famed Nigerian
author Chinua Achebe in a recent interview with the Christian Science Monitor.
Achebe's acclaimed 1958 novel Things Fall Apart tells of
social dislocation stemming from colonial rule and can be seen as a prescient
foretelling of Nigeria's post-independence pains.
So any political deal may only buy some time before the next
explosion of anger in a deeply fractured and unequal society.
"For ordinary people, it's become about everything
that's wrong in Nigeria... about tens of millions of people paying for the
champagne lifestyle of dozens of people," Goldman said.