Posted on 04 March 2010.
Written by Henry Kester Ewruje
In 1945, at the end of World War 2 when most of Europe lay in ruins, two superpowers, with conflicting ideologies emerged — the United States and the Soviet Union. No nation in the world could boast of as much natural resources as Soviet Union could. The nation was richer in oil, uranium, gold and forest than any other in the world. But in a world that increasingly valued entrepreneurship, communication and freedom, the Soviet Union got increasingly irrelevant, got poorer and poorer until it eventually broke apart. Today, the nation Soviet Union, no longer exists —- totally extinct. Today, despite the ongoing recession, the United States of America remains the world’s leading nation.
This does not have to happen to Nigeria but I think that the elite ought to stop talking about what a great country it is, and how terribly important it is to the United States. Is Nigeria, a good model for democracy? Is Nigeria a model for good governance? Nigeria’s strategic interest is not important to the United States.
During his first visit to Africa, the American President, the first black who happened to be of original African descent, snubbed Nigeria to go to Ghana. According to President Barrack Hussein Obama, “repression takes many forms, and too many nations are plagued by problems that condemn their people to poverty. No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or drug traffickers can buy off Police. No businessman wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20% off the top, or the head of the port authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, which is tyranny and now is the time for it to end”. All emphasis mine.
But Hillary Clinton came to visit Nigeria. The elite in Nigeria thought her visit was to soothe and assuage frayed nerves in the sense of the defeat with which Nigeria met the visit of the US President to Ghana. Nigeria sees itself as the giant of Africa, as a regional power, if not intercontinental power. So it was considered a serious act of insult that Obama chose Ghana instead of Nigeria. The elite concluded that the visit was part of the fence mending efforts of the Obama administration. Besides, Nigeria was a key supplier of petroleum to the US.
The Nigerian elite are men and women who are used to people fawning over them, telling them that they are the best things that ever happened to the country. Not Hillary, America’s former first Lady who would have been the world’s most powerful leader, today if not for President Obama. The US Secretary of State came all the way from America to speak truth to power in Nigeria and she did that in dramatic manner. Not one to suffer fools gladly, the iron Lady of American politics said governance has failed in Nigeria. And she was unsparing in her criticism. “The most immediate source of disconnect between Nigeria’s wealth and its poverty is a failure of governance at the federal, state and local levels ………Lack of transparency and accountability has eroded the legitimacy of the government and contributed to the rise of groups that embrace violence and reject the authority of the state” she intoned.
Few days before she visited, she had presented to the world, her proof that the country is badly governed. “Nigeria is the fifth oil producer in the world and it still imports oil. This is an example of bad governance”. She said on the Cable News Network, (CNN).
Now, the United States has listed Nigeria among 10 countries classified as “security risk states”. The US decision came after an attempted terrorist attack by a 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on a Delta Airlines Plane at Detroit International Airport, Detroit. Michigan, on Christmas day.
Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka said, “What concerns me is what led the US government to take this decision. I am sure it must be due to lack of good governance, which is a result of Nigeria being a rudderless nation. The decision is timely because of the present state of anarchy in the country. Nigeria is presently a black whole in the galaxy of nations. Unpredictability of the Nigerian nation and our battered image abroad must have also contributed”.
Nigeria is of no strategic importance to the US. I know all the arguments. The Nigeria elite says it is a major oil producer, it is the most populous country in Africa, it has made major contributions to Africa in peacekeeping and of course, negatively if Nigeria were to fall apart, the ripple effects would be tremendous.etc Nigeria’s importance creates a tendency to inflate Nigeria’s opinion of its invulnerability. Nigeria is not too big to fail, or too important to be ignored.
Let me deconstruct these elements of Nigeria’s importance, and ask whether they are as relevant as they have been. Yes, Nigeria is a major oil producer; but Brazil is now launching a 10-year programme that is going to make it one of the major oil producers in the world. And every other country in Africa is now beginning to produce oil. And Angola is rivaling Nigeria in oil production, and the US has just discovered a huge gas reserve, which is going to replace some of its dependence on imported energy. So if you look ahead 10 years, is Nigeria going to be that relevant as a major oil producer, or just another of the many oil producers, while the world moves on to alternative sources of energy and other sources of supply?
We often hear that one in five Africans is a Nigerian. What does it mean? Do we ever say one in five Asians is a Chinese? Chinese power comes not just for the fact that it has a lot of people, but it has harnessed the entrepreneurial talent and economic capacity and all the other talents of china to make her a major economic force and political force. What does it mean that one in five Africans is a Nigerian? It does not mean anything to a Namibian or a South African. It is a kind of conceit. What makes it important or what is happening to the people of Nigeria? Are their talents being tapped? Are they becoming an economic force? Is all that potential being used? And the answer is—Not really.
What about Nigeria’s contribution to the continent? There is a great history of those contributions. But that is history. Is Nigeria really playing a major role today in the crises in Niger on its border, or in Guinea, or the Darfur, or after many promises making any contributions to Somalia? The answer is no. Nigeria is today NOT making a major impact, on its region, or on the African Union or on the big problems of Africa that it was making before.
What about the economic influence? There is a de-industrialisation going on in the country. A disgraceful lack of infrastructure, a lack of power means that with imported goods, under globalisation, factories are closing and more people are being unemployed. The nation is becoming a kind of society that imports and exports and lives off the oil, which does not make it a significant economic entity.
Now of course on the negative side, the collapse of Nigeria would be enormous, but is that a point to make the country strategically important? The biggest danger in Nigeria’s relationship with the US is not its opposition but that the US will find the country irrelevant. We have already seen evidence of it. When President Obama went to Ghana, and not Nigeria, he was sending a message that Ghana symbolized more of the significant trends, issues and importance that one wants to put on Africa than Nigeria. And when secretary Clinton did go, she also went to Angola. Who would have thought years ago that Angola would be the most stable country in the Gulf of Guinea?
So the handwriting may already be on the wall, and it is a sad commentary. Because what it means is that Nigeria’s most important strategic importance in the end could be that it has failed. And that is a sad conclusion. We should now focus and talk about what it would take for Nigeria to be that important and great. And that takes an enormous amount of commitment. We don’t need saints, we don’t need leaders like Nelson Mandela in every state of the federation, because we are not going to get them. We need determined leaders who say “We could be becoming irrelevant, let us solve the fundamental economic issues of the country and turn it around”. It has to happen now.
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