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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The Comparative Government and Politics Review Checklist.
Two pages summarizing the course requirements to help you review and study for the final and for the big exam in May. . It contains a description of comparative methods, a list of commonly used theories
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Labels: economics, environment, leadership, Nigeria, politics, pollution
Is visible air a sign of the state's limitations?
It seems that the limits on the state's capacity is becoming visible in China.
Mapping the invisible scourge
THE capital’s “airpocalypse”, the choking smog that descended on Beijing in the winter of 2012-13, galvanised public opinion and spooked the government. The strange thing is, though, that information about air pollution—how extensive it is, how much damage it does—has long been sketchy…
Responding to the outcry, the government set up a national air-reporting system which now has almost 1,000 monitoring stations… Scientists from Berkeley Earth, a not-for-profit foundation in America, have trawled through this recent cloud of data for the four months… and emerged with the most detailed and up-to-date picture of Chinese air pollution so far.
Pollution is sky-high everywhere in China. Some 83% of Chinese are exposed to air that, in America, would be deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency either to be unhealthy or unhealthy for sensitive groups. Almost half the population of China experiences levels of PM2.5 that are above America’s highest threshold…
Berkeley Earth’s scientific director, Richard Muller, says breathing Beijing’s air is the equivalent of smoking almost 40 cigarettes a day…
The sliver of good news is that pollution levels are better in some places than in others. They are… least bad in the south… probably because that area was washed by monsoon rains during the period of the study. More importantly, levels of PM2.5 in large western cities such as Chongqing and Chengdu are about half the national average. Figuring out what they are doing right would be a first step towards reducing the smog elsewhere.
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Labels: capacity, China, environment, politics, pollution
Competing goals
Sometimes the limits of a state's capacity are not set by skills, wealth, knowledge, or good luck. What are the political and economic costs of cleaning (or not cleaning) the air in China?
The cost of clean air: Measures to combat air pollution are biting hard in industrial areas already hit by an economic slowdown
Last year on a typically smoggy day in Beijing, Li Keqiang, the prime minister, declared “war” on air pollution—a problem that has become a national fixation. Smog remains a grave danger in most Chinese cities, but environmental measures are beginning to show teeth. Regulators in the most polluted provinces are ordering mass closures of offending enterprises. In some areas officials are being punished for failing to control pollution…
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| Xingtai |
The transformation will be painful. China’s new toughness on polluting quarries, mills and factories coincides with an economic slowdown that will make it harder to create new jobs for those laid off…
Mr Li’s war is especially bloody in Hebei, which is blamed for much of the smog in Beijing. Keeping the air of the capital clean is a political priority. Chinese leaders have been embarrassed by the damage caused to China’s international image by the city’s relentlessly grey skies. They worry that the smog could fuel dissatisfaction with the government and undermine stability in the capital, as well as affect their own and their families’ health…
On February 2nd the Ministry of Environmental Protection named China’s ten most-polluted cities in 2014. Seven of them were in Hebei province (a perennial winner of this grim contest)…
Farther from Beijing, in places where the anxieties of leaders in the capital are felt less keenly, some officials have been trying to shift attention away from the polluting industries that keep people in work. In Dazhou, in the south-western province of Sichuan, officials last month blamed their city’s smog on the smoking of bacon (a popular practice in local cuisine), provoking mockery online…
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Labels: China, economics, politics, pollution, state capacity
It's not just the water in China
It's not just the water that's threatened by China's breakneck economic growth. The air is threatened too. And it's much harder to buy bottled air than bottled water.
Dangerous atmosphere is also a real drag on economic growth. What's a government and a party, whose authority depends on continued economic growth, to do?
hoking smog paralyzes cities in northeast China, closing schools, airports
Thick, choking smog enveloped cities in northeast China on Tuesday, closing schools and airports, snarling traffic and reducing visibility to a few yards, in a dramatic sign of the country’s worsening air quality.
China’s breakneck dash for economic growth has badly damaged the environment, and the rapid deterioration in the country’s air and water quality has increasingly become a source of public unrest. As a result, improving environmental standards has become a priority for the government. But the acrid clouds enveloping several cities this week showed how tough that task has become.
In the industrial city of Harbin, home to more than 10 million people, vehicles crawled through the smog with fog lights on or emergency lights flashing. Bus service was canceled, a major highway was closed and hospital admissions soared by 30 percent, local media reported…
On Monday, visibility was so low in Harbin, about 780 miles northeast of Beijing, that two city buses got lost while plying their regular routes…
Previous efforts to improve air quality have foundered because of poor implementation by local governments, which continue to protect heavy industries and tolerate widespread violation of environmental norms, according to Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing.
“The central government has recognized the fundamental cause — which is its overuse of coal — and what sort of solution should be taken,” said Huang Wei, a campaigner with the environmental group Greenpeace in Beijing…
A survey by the Pew Research Center published last month showed that the Chinese are increasingly worried about air and water quality, with air pollution nearly as big a concern as rising prices, corrupt officials and the gap between rich and poor. The Communist Party clearly worries that the issue is undermining its legitimacy in the eyes of many…
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Labels: China, economics, politics, pollution
Just The Facts! 2nd edition is a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
