The Shackled Continent

by Robert Guest

  I drove out into the countryside, where most Rwandans eke out a living growing beans and bananas, to find out what people thought of Kagame. No one wanted to talk. Asked what they thought about the way the country was being run, villagers told me they had no opinion. At one point, two policemen drew up in a car and demanded to know what was going on. My traveling companion, an American freelancer called Carter Dougherty, told them we were journalists reporting on the election. They suggested that we should redirect our enquiries to the Bureau of Elections.

  Kagame’s party, the RPF, has made sure that its people control all the institutions that matter in Rwanda: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, banks, universities, and state-owned companies. Few Rwandans believe that the party will surrender power in the foreseeable future. (Among other safeguards, the law allows for an election to be annulled if the winner campaigns on a “divisionist” platform.) Most Tutsis are grateful for this. Many see Kagame as their savior and their only protection against a repeat of the slaughter of 1994.

  Kagame’s regime has many fine qualities. It is more efficient than you would expect; its policemen almost never ask for bribes. But it is ruthless. During the war against the génocidaires in Rwanda, the RPF killed between 25,000 and 45,000 people. When the génocidaires regrouped in Congo, Kagame’s men invaded, twice, and with their local allies killed perhaps 200,000 refugees.12

  Back in Rwanda, life is now calm and orderly, but even some of Kagame’s supporters wish there was a bit more freedom. A group of well-off, RPF-voting students in Kigali grumbled to me about the censorship that made it hard for them to know what was going on in their own country.

  Those who dislike the regime, meanwhile, have no outlet for their grievances. One Hutu told me he had spent eight years in jail before being found innocent of abetting the genocide. Someone lost his case file, he said, perhaps because “those who came from abroad” – i.e., the Tutsi exiles who now rule Rwanda – wanted his plum government job. Since his release, he said he had been unable to find work, but he did not dare complain. “I’ve seen men beaten to death in prison,” he told me. “I don’t want to go back.”

  Kagame won the election, of course, with 95 percent of the vote. Twagiramungu managed 3.7 percent.

  African disunity

  Nowhere else in Africa compares with Rwanda. But politicians in most African countries play on tribal grievances to a greater or lesser extent, and the results, while never as disastrous as in Rwanda, are usually harmful. The Nigerian example is illuminating.

  Africa’s most populous country is home to some 250 ethnic groups and is also split along religious lines, with the north mainly Muslim and the south mainly Christian or animist. Tribal sniping is common. Nigerian comedians play endlessly on ethnic stereotypes: that Yorubas are noisy, Ibos are miserly, Hausas are dim, and so on. Nigeria’s many newspapers are full of columnists who complain that their own tribe has contributed more to the country than any other but never gets its fair portion of pepper soup. Ordinary Nigerians spend hours mouthing similar complaints. The only time this great nation cheers with one voice is when its football team scores.

  This matters, because ethnic solidarity is used to justify Nigeria’s great vice: corruption. Since the discovery of oil in Nigeria, politics have been largely a scramble for petrodollars. Politicians want money for themselves, of course, and they also want to grab a fistful for their supporters, to make sure they keep getting re-elected.

  Nigerians almost all say they disapprove of corruption, but they tend to forgive or even applaud the perpetrator if he is one of their own tribe. Most Nigerians feel far stronger loyalty to their tribe than to the state. Big Men are therefore expected to use their power to help their kith and kin. Eghosa Osaghae, a political historian, puts it like this: “It is a popular Nigerian saying, which took root under colonial rule, that ‘government business is no man’s business’. There was thus nothing seriously wrong with stealing state funds, especially if they were used to benefit not only the individual but also members of his community.”13

  For most of the time since independence, Nigeria has been ruled by northern Muslim military strongmen. They and their hangers-on grew fabulously wealthy, as a short wander around Kaduna, a northern town where several of the military elite hail from, reveals. I visited in 1999, not long after Nigeria reverted to civilian, democratic rule, and marveled at the palaces these fortunate officers had built for themselves. There were marble follies with mirrored gates and satellite dishes the size of ordinary people’s houses, estates with private mosques, and one unbelievably tacky mansion shaped like a ship. The cars parked outside the Kaduna polo club were impressive, too.

  The king of crooks was Sani Abacha, the northern Muslim dictator who ruled from 1993 until 1998. He used to send trucks round to the central bank with orders that they be filled with banknotes. When he died, reportedly of Viagra-fueled over-exertion with three prostitutes, the records showed that he and his associates had stolen over $2 billion – more than a million dollars for every day he was in office, including weekends. According to his successor, Olusegun Obasanjo, he also awarded $1 billion in contracts to front companies and accepted another $1 billion in bribes from foreign contractors. That kind of money bought him a lot of support while he was alive, and his surviving relatives remain influential.

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  Inevitably, one can trace Nigeria’s tribal troubles back to colonial times. The country’s borders were drawn by the British, who, in 1914, lumped the whole melange of tribes and religions into a single unit. Nigerians sometimes refer to this as “the mistake of 1914.” The British were not completely blind to the rifts within their new colony. They did seek to avert religious strife by discouraging Christian missionaries from preaching in the Muslim north, but while this seemed wise at the time, it stored up problems for the future.

  Because the missionaries were effectively barred from northern Nigeria, they built all their schools in the south. By 1950, there were thousands of university graduates in the south but only one in the north.14 Southerners dominated all the jobs in the civil service that required numeracy or literacy. Members of the south-eastern Ibo tribe, owing to a long tradition of trading, dominated commerce in the north as well as in their own region. The Hausas and Fulanis of the north felt left out. But they had the upper hand in the army because the British thought them good soldiers, which was to prove important later on.

  As independence approached, northern leaders realized that the better-educated southerners would dominate Nigeria unless they did something drastic. So they began a program of “northernization” within their own region. Initially, it was presented as a policy of training native Nigerians to replace British expatriates in the civil service. But the northern leaders felt less threatened by British experts than by Yorubas and Ibos. In 1957, the Public Service Commission of the Northern Region stated: “It is the policy of the Regional Government to Northernize the Public Service: if a qualified Northerner is available, he is given priority in recruitment; if no qualified Northerner is available, an Expatriate may be recruited or a non-Northerner on contract terms” (i.e., not as a permanent employee).15 The northern regional government tried to bar southerners from winning public works contracts, running shops, or owning land in the north. This bias swiftly spread to the federal government after independence, or at least to the parts controlled by northerners.

  Southerners resented being discriminated against, which was one reason why a group of mainly Ibo officers tried to mount a coup in 1966. The coup leaders promised, among other things, to establish national norms that all applicants for civil service jobs would have to meet. To northerners, this sounded like a promise that all the best jobs would go to southerners. Horrified at the prospect, a group of mainly Hausa-Fulani officers led a counter-coup and seized control of the state.

  A chain reaction of violence followed, culminating in an attempt by south-easterners to secede from Nigeria, taking most of its newly discov
ered oil with them. The northern-dominated army ferociously put down the rebellion. It took three years and cost a million lives. To many people’s surprise, the northerners then treated their vanquished enemies with restraint and even repealed some of the more extreme regulations that discriminated against southerners.

  But the government did not become tribe-blind. Instead of favoring only northerners, it decided that civil service jobs and university admissions should be decided by tribal quotas. This policy has remained ever since and has set every ethnic group in Nigeria bickering over whether they have received their rightful share.

  When the price of oil jumped in the early 1970s, the Nigerian government suddenly had billions of dollars to dole out. Politicians discovered that the most effective way to win the support of their fellow tribespeople was to promise them more roads, schools, and handouts, to be paid for with petrodollars. And the most effective way to parlay tribal support into political office was to carve out a new state in which one’s own tribe was a majority.

  Nigeria started to fragment. From three regions at independence, it has splintered into thirty-six states today. This has caused endless complexity. For example, state governments hoping to privatize state-owned firms often find that the state which originally set up the firm has split into several smaller ones, none of whose leaders can agree on how to proceed. Worse, civil service jobs have come to be seen as gifts that Big Men bestow on their grateful ethnic cousins.

  Between the early 1970s and Abacha’s heart attack, Nigeria received some $280 billion in oil revenues. Through corruption, waste, and foolish investments, successive governments squandered the lot. In fact, since they borrowed billions against future oil revenues and squandered that money too, it is fair to say that Nigeria blew more than all of its windfall. By 1998, Nigerians were poorer than when the oil boom began in 1974, and the country was saddled with debts of some $30 billion.

  The scale of Nigeria’s failure is simply staggering. Contrast the place with Indonesia, another huge, populous, ethnically diverse, and oil-rich nation. Both countries have suffered military rule and, at times, massive bloodshed. Both were, at independence, nations of subsistence farmers. Both struck oil and were deluged with petrodollars. But here the parallels cease. Indonesia has not exactly been a model of good governance, but average incomes rose nonetheless, from under $200 in 1974 to $680 in 2001, despite the Asian financial crash of 1997. Today, Nigerians are more than twice as likely as Indonesians to be illiterate or to die before the age of forty.16

  Tribalism is not the only reason why Nigeria is so dysfunctional, but it clearly doesn’t help. In Lagos, I have seen piles of rubbish, some of them twenty feet high and three blocks long, festering in the middle of the road. Electricity comes, as novelist Wole Soyinka puts it, in “periodic vengeful surges … as if the god of lightning has … taken personal charge.”17 All this is at least partly because someone has looted the rubbish collection budget, and the state electricity firm has been stuffed with various managers’ incompetent kinsfolk.

  After Abacha died, Nigeria held reasonably fair elections. The winner was Olusegun Obasanjo, a Yoruba and a born-again Christian, but also a former general and a friend of several northern Muslim leaders.

  To his credit, Obasanjo has not abused his power to pamper his own ethnic group. He has tried to divide federal funds more equally between the states, while at the same time reducing the incentives for the states to continue splitting into even smaller ones. His bloated cabinet usually contains at least one representative from each of the thirty-six states. He has promised to increase the share of oil revenues that go to the states where the oil is actually drilled from a wretched 3 percent to 13 percent. But it is impossible to please everyone.

  Since federal money is, at least in theory, allocated to the states in amounts proportional to their populations, Nigerian censuses are usually marred by fraud and mayhem, as each tribe seeks to inflate its numbers. As a result, no one really knows how many Nigerians there are. A census in 1991 put the number at 88.5 million. In 1998, the government’s estimate was 108.5 million, and the United Nations’ was 121.8 million. Most tribes claim to have been undercounted and underpaid. Obasanjo has discovered that using federal money to bribe the tribes to behave only whets their appetite for more.

  Ethnic bloodletting has actually increased since democracy was restored, perhaps because the police no longer suppress it so brutally. Yoruba youths hurl “magic bombs” – eggshells filled with sulphuric acid – at members of other tribes in Lagos. And in the Niger delta, where most of Nigeria’s oil is pumped, a feud has arisen between the Ijaws and the Itsekiris.

  I went to investigate this feud in April 2003, at the height of an election campaign when the spoils of office were up for grabs and tempers were accordingly hot. The trouble centered on Warri, a busy, smoggy town surrounded by swampy forest. When I arrived, Warri was under curfew. Soldiers manned road blocks at every major intersection, stopping cars and searching them for arms.

  The soldiers were in a bad mood and made a point of humiliating motorists who spoke disrespectfully to them. At one road block, I saw them force a young man to hop down the street in a squatting position, with his hands behind his head: a petty punishment known as the “frog jump.”

  The town was tense because Ijaw youths had been burning Itsekiri villages. Eric Igban, a local Itsekiri activist, told me of a recent attack.

  “They wore red bandannas,” he said, “and they arrived in speedboats, with mounted machine-guns. They opened fire indiscriminately, at men, women, and children. Then they burned the village down. More than a hundred bodies were found, and there must be more lost in the bush.”

  Why was this happening?

  Igban told me that the Ijaws and the Itsekiris used to live in peace. But when the new democratic regime promised the people of the delta a greater share of oil revenues, top jobs in local government suddenly became more lucrative and worth fighting for.

  Ijaw leaders realized that they would win more governorships, and more seats in state parliaments and local councils, if electoral boundaries were re-drawn in such a way that there were more constituencies where Ijaws were in a majority. Before long, Ijaw youth militias were conducting a terror campaign to force the government to re-draw the electoral map in their favor.

  “They think that with guns they can get anything they want,” said Igban. “They want to control all the wealth of the Niger delta. And they want to wipe us out.”

  An Ijaw leader gave me a different perspective. He did not want to be named as he was a local government official and did not want to be quoted expressing support for the Ijaw militias. “The Ijawman is peaceful,” he said, “but it is better to be dead than to live with injustice.”

  The injustice that upset him most was that Ijaws were 63 percent of the population of the Warri electoral district but were a majority in only four out of ten wards. Ijaw youths, he said, were determined to prevent any elections taking place until this anomaly was corrected. “The person in power controls the economy of the area,” he said, “and we just want our fair share.” He then told me that the best thing would be “separate local government areas for each ethnic group – homogenous districts with no minorities.”

  As I left Warri, I noticed, near the burnt-out husks of Itsekiri shops, a campaign poster urging voters to re-elect the governor, one James Ibori. Beneath a smiling picture were the words: “Ibori’s healing hands have brought peace to Delta state.”

  The call of Islam

  In northern Nigeria, meanwhile, relations between Christians and Muslims have been fraught. After the Christian Obasanjo became president, a dozen northern states asserted their independence by adopting sharia (Islamic law) for criminal cases. In other words, a third of the country’s state legislatures decided to start whipping those who drank alcohol, cutting off thieves’ hands, and stoning adulterers. Some of the governors who introduced these laws may have done so for reasons other than simple piety. Some w
ere on bad terms with the new president and may have figured that if they posed as the champions of Islam, no Christian president could attack them without appearing to attack the faith.

  Whatever the truth of this, sharia was initially very popular among Nigerian Muslims. Nigeria’s courts are slow and corrupt, and many Muslims hoped that sharia courts would be swift and fair. But Christians who lived in the north were not so happy; many feared that the new religious laws would be used to persecute them. Since sharia was introduced, northern states have seen a wave of street battles between Christians and Muslims in which thousands have been killed.

  President Obasanjo has used considerable tact to try to defuse the situation. He has quietly tried to persuade northern governors not to let sharia be used to persecute Christians, and he has resisted southern calls to seek a court ruling as to whether sharia is constitutional (which it probably is not), reasoning that any decision is likely to spark more riots. (His hand may be forced on this issue, however, as lawyers for one woman who was condemned to be stoned to death are seeking to have the sentence overturned on constitutional grounds.)

  Some observers predict that Nigeria will break up. It is hardly reassuring that, at a presidential election in 2003, more than four decades after independence, the three main candidates were all retired generals. Two were former military heads of state (Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari), and one was the officer who led Biafra’s catastrophic attempt at secession, Emeka Ojukwu. Lurking behind the scenes was yet another former military ruler, Ibrahim Babangida, reputedly the richest man in Nigeria, whose support was keenly courted by almost everyone. A general election, indeed.