Lakhasly

Nigeria: the excesses of the spigot economy
Africa's most populous state has been doubly constrained, first by an administrative structure of British design which turned its social and religious divisions into a politically deadly polarization, and then by the discovery of oil, a blessing which became a curse. Nigeria's educated elite had roots extending to the nineteenth century and a cosmopolitan outlook, from its linkages across much of West Africa and to Pan-Africanist circles in England. Its lawyers, teachers, and clerks had experience in state services for decades and familiarity with local, regional, and national deliberative councils, under limited self-administration programs. Nigerian cocoa farmers and commercial entrepreneurs, like urban lawyers, teachers, and clerks before them, constituted a politically aware class, with the means to support an active press and political organizations. The human resources which Nigeria brought to independence were thus considerable.
It also faced all the weaknesses of colonial economies and political structures. By the 1950s, the British policy of allowing African involvement in government at the regional, rather than federal, level was having divisive consequences. In each region, a single party, dominated by members of the majority ethnic group, obtained office and used it to provide services and patronage within its bailiwick. In each region oppositions developed, to some extent (notably in the north) as populist challenges to the governing elites, but most importantly among regional minorities.
This kind of politics took place both before and after independence in 1960. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, exports of cocoa from the Western Region and a variety of other agricultural products from the Eastern and Northern Regions were sufficient to allow politicians to play their patronage games, for real progress to be made in education, and for Nigeria to build the symbols of its national independence. The modest powers of the federal government, from independence, were in the hands of Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, leader of the Northern People's Congress (NPC). All regional parties worried that their rivals would intrigue with other regional groups to gain solid control of the federal government. The east and west feared the north, which was populous and tightly controlled by an Islamic elite, while the north feared that east and west would gain control by insinuating their better-educated population into the bureaucracies that actually ran the state. But Nigeria's worst luck was that it was lying atop one of the world's largest pools of high-grade oil, and by the mid-1960s it was coming into production.
Oil can turn a gatekeeper state into a caricature of itself. Unlike agriculture, which involves vast numbers of people in the production and marketing of exports, oil requires little labor, and much of it from foreigners. It also entails relationships between the few global firms capable of extracting it and the state rulers who collect the rents. It defines a spigot economy: whoever controls access to the tap collects the rent.
Nigeria plunged into civil war soon after oil exports began. Oil came from the east, and potential oil revenues threatened a shifting regional balance. The diaspora of educated Igbos to Western and Northern cities was also causing tension. In January 1966, the Balewa government was toppled in a coup and Balewa was assassinated. General Johnson Ironsi soon took over from the coup leaders. Ironsi's government was one of Africa's outbursts of military populism: a military elite, trained to get things done, perceiving a government of elected politicians as self-interested, corrupt, and incompetent, announcing its determination to restore competence and regularity to government. It was not seen that way in the north, where Ironsi was less the national reformer than the Igbo power grabber. There had been anti-Igbo riots in the north in the 1950s, but the pogroms that broke out in the Igbo ghettoes in northern cities - with the connivance of local elites - killed tens of thousands and made many more into refugees. In July northern officers instigated Ironsi's overthrow and assassination, and he was replaced by another officer, Yakubu Gowon, who was to rule for the next nine years.
In Eastern Nigeria the second coup was seen, in the context of the pogroms and the tensions over oil revenues, as an anti-Igbo move. Eastern autonomy seemed the only way to keep regional hands on the spigot. Eastern Nigeria declared itself independent and named itself Biafra. What followed was a horrific war: a small regional army convinced of its righteousness, fighting a larger one which claimed the legitimacy of a nation-state. Biafra had its outside supporters - France, most notably and as the war and blockade had a devastating impact, particularly on children, the publicity generated sympathy for Biafra and deepened the image of Africa as a land of starving children victimized by wars that seem a product of irrational tribal enmity. That it was a war of maneuvering politicians, as much to do with geographic region as with ethnicity, was more difficult to convey than the stark images.
The federal government won the war, and Gowon tried to avoid a retributive peace. Gowon had earlier divided Nigeria into twelve states, blurring the correspondence of region and ethnicity of the British three state systems. Each region would have its own governmental institutions, services, and educational system. Building twelve universities in the years after the war, for example, created numerous jobs and diffused ethnic competition. The patronage structure was pyramidal, going down to urban neighborhoods, with the head of each pyramid jockeying for access to the next level. At the heart of politics were personal, vertical relationships, as individuals sought help from local "big men" who had access to information, jobs, and construction permits, and as brokers sought state funds for roads, clinics, and meeting halls for their areas. Women turned their active role in running markets into participation in municipal politics. The possibility of using vertical ties provided alternative strategies to organizing horizontally - by the working class, for example - and while patron-client ties reinforced in some ways ethnic and regional affinities, they were not the same as dividing the population into ethnic groups. This did not prevent certain moments of mobilization on a class, ethnic, or religious basis - Nigeria witnessed general strikes from the 1960s to the 1990s and severe flashes of ethno religious conflict.
Oil revenues made this distributive logic possible, but they also entrenched Nigeria in its gatekeeper role. Instead of providing capital for the diversification and the industrialization of the Nigerian economy, oil revenues were used above all for the primary task of the political elite: patronage. Having so much to distribute provided some political stability and a model of uneconomic spending. The building boom, focused on schools and roads, sent the cost of labor so high that cocoa farmers could no longer hire, and they themselves saw little reason to invest in developing their farms, when getting their children an education and contacts in the provincial or federal capital were far more likely to bring them prosperity. Oil became the only significant export; agriculture collapsed (see figure 3); industry developed in only the narrowest of niches; port facilities choked on imports; and the dream of a balanced, integrated economy went nowhere. With the fall of oil prices in the 1980s, Nigeria had much less money to throw around so inefficiently. Nigeria could no longer maintain roads, electricity, or hospitals; it became an oil producer with gasoline shortages. Its oil-producing zones, receiving little from foreign oil companies other than disruption, pollution, and heavy-handed security interventions, became discontent, and the government's execution of the regional activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995 dramatized to Nigerians and others the politics of neglect and repression in the oil-rich region.
There was, however, no repetition of the Biafran war. Ethnic tension and violence there has been, much of it between groups within the old regions, some between Muslims and Christians. The most important tensions have been over control of the gate. There were successions of coups, tentative attempts at civilian rule in 1979-93 - no less dishonest than the military variant - and reimposition of military rule. The military's annulment of the 1993 election was a bitter disappointment to the democracy movement, and the ensuing dictatorship of Sani Abacha was particularly harsh, brought to an end only by Abacha's fortuitous early death in June 1998. The Nigerian labor movement, especially during the huge general strike of 1994, was one source of organized opposition; the efforts of lawyers, doctors, students, and others in the Campaign for Democracy to forge links between Nigerian democracy activists and overseas human rights organizations were another. The election in 1999 of Olusegun Obasanjo, under conditions that were less than ideal but better than anything in recent memory, is another of those moments that just might turn out to be a turning point.