Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

The many faces of crisis in Nigeria

If you're into making lists, Nigeria offers opportunities to make many lists: cleavages, geographic areas, populations, and crises.

Nigeria Finds a National Crisis in Every Direction It Turns
Militants are roaming oil-soaked creeks in the south, blowing up pipelines and decimating the nation’s oil production. Islamist extremists have killed thousands in the north. Deadly land battles are shaking the nation’s center. And a decades-old separatist movement at the heart of a devastating civil war is brewing again.

On their own, any one of these would be a national emergency. But here in Nigeria, they are all happening at the same time, tearing at the country from almost every angle…

Mr. Buhari took office a year ago, promising to stamp out terrorism in the north and to rebuild the nation’s economy…

Beyond low prices for the nation’s oil, the source of more than 70 percent of the government’s revenue, Nigerian officials have been tormented by a new band of militants claiming to be on a quest to free the oil-producing south from oppression. They call themselves the Niger Delta Avengers…

As a result, Nigeria’s oil production in the second quarter this year dropped 25 percent from the same period a year earlier…

“We are not asking for much, but to free the people of the Niger Delta from environmental pollution, slavery and oppression,” the Avengers wrote on their website

On the opposite side of the country, Boko Haram is still raging…

Another longtime battle is flaring in the middle of the country, between farmers and nomadic Fulani herdsmen looking for grazing pastures. Hundreds have been killed in battles as herdsmen roam into new territory to look for vegetation for their cattle…

And with their demands for economic equality for the south, the Avengers have been trying to stoke the aspirations of separatists elsewhere in the nation…

Now, a Biafran separatist movement is simmering again…

The south has long been a reservoir of anger and resistance, a place where countless billions in oil revenue are extracted for the benefit of distant politicians and companies abroad. Yet drinking water and electricity can be scarce, and the swamps people live around are regularly polluted…

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1 Comments:

At 8:50 AM, Blogger Ken Wedding said...

From "This Day" in Abuja

Nigeria: President Buhari Confirms Talks With Niger Delta Militants

Abuja and Warri — President Muhammadu Buhari has finally confirmed that his administration is in talks with Niger Delta militants with the help of oil companies and law-enforcement agencies to find a lasting solution to the insecurity in the region.

But as he said this, the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), the militant group that has claimed responsibility for the recent wave of attacks on oil assets in the region, issued another threat to oil workers, asking all of them to vacate the oil fields and terminals because it was ready to wage a dirty war.

A statement issued in Abuja yesterday by the president's media aide, Mr Garba Shehu, said Buhari spoke of the government's engagement with the militants in the oil-rich region when he met with the outgoing Ambassador to Germany, Mr. Michael Zinner, at the State House.

Shehu also quoted the president as saying that government was studying the instruments of the Amnesty Programme inherited from the previous administration with a view to implementing the commitments made, but remained undelivered...

 

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