Nigeria: Disaster Foretold; More Disaster Inevitable!

 By Tony Eluemunor

What Nigeria is going through now, be it religious, ethnic, social, political and economic, national insecurity, uncontrolled militancy and banditry, all our national ills, were disasters that were clearly foretold in a major publication.

*Tinubu

Next month will mark the 30th anniversary of Robert D. Kaplan’s “THE COMING ANARCHY – How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet”.

Published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in February 1994, it pretended to scrutinize the entire planet Earth, though it actually focused on West Africa – with Nigeria receiving a special attention which detailed out our problems and warned that things were about to get worse.

As is usual when such unflattering things are said about Nigeria, our intellectuals and the bus stop man and woman join in  xcoriating the writers. Robert D. Kaplan was not the only writer to have been denounced for saying the unsweetened and un-deodorized truth about Nigeria as Chinua Achebe was viciously castigated when he published The Trouble With Nigeria booklet in 1983. Achebe’s opening paragraph was emphatic that “The trouble with Nigeria is squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership”.

If government and governance matters, then Nigerian governments, since at least 1994, failed woefully. In 1994, Kaplan wrote in the “A Premonition of the Future” sub-section; “West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real “strategic” danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization”.

Specifically on Nigeria, Kaplan wrote: “The repressive apparatus of the state security service . . . will be difficult for any future civilian government to control. . . . The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable. . . . Ethnic and regional splits are deepening, a situation made worse by an increase in the number of states from 19 to 30 and a doubling in the number of local governing authorities; religious cleavages are more serious; Muslim fundamentalism and evangelical Christian militancy are on the rise; and northern Muslim anxiety over southern (Christian) control of the economy is intense . . . the will to keep Nigeria together is now very weak.”

Part of West Africa’s quandary is that although its population belts are horizontal, with habitation densities increasing as one travels south away from the Sahara and toward the tropical abundance of the Atlantic littoral, the borders erected by European colonialists are vertical, and therefore at cross-purposes with demography and topography.

Kaplan even warned about Boko Haram and Cattle herders’ banditry: “Stevens Coon wrote in 1951 that Islam “has made possible the optimum survival and happiness of millions of human beings in an increasingly impoverished environment over a fourteen-hundred-year period.” Beyond its stark, clearly articulated message, Islam’s very militancy makes it attractive to the downtrodden. It is the one religion that is prepared to fight. A political era driven by environmental stress, increased cultural sensitivity, unregulated urbanization, and refugee migrations is an era divinely created for the spread and intensification of Islam, already the world’s fastest-growing religion. (Though Islam is spreading in West Africa, it is being hobbled by syncretization with animism: this makes new converts less apt to become anti-Western extremists, but it also makes for a weakened version of the faith, which is less effective as an antidote to crime.) 

Also, war-making entities will no longer be restricted to a specific territory. Loose and shadowy organisms such as Islamic terrorist organizations suggest why borders will mean increasingly little and sedimentary layers of tribalistic identity and control will mean more.

“From the vantage point of the present, there appears every prospect that religious . . . fanaticism will play a larger role in the motivation of armed conflict” in the West than at any time “for the last 300 years. “Armed conflict will be waged by men on earth, not robots in space. It will have more in common with the struggles of primitive tribes than with large-scale conventional war.” While another military historian, John Keegan, in his new book A History of Warfare, draws a more benign portrait of primitive man, it is important to point out that what Van Creveld really means is re-primitivized man: warrior societies operating at a time of unprecedented resource scarcity and planetary overcrowding.

Now you may wonder if Nigeria is a nation-state. Kaplan quoted Van Crevid in 1994: “Once the legal monopoly of armed force, long claimed by the state, is wrested out of its hands, existing distinctions between war and crime will break down much as is already the case today in . . . Lebanon, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Peru, or Colombia.”

If crime and war become indistinguishable, then “national defense” may in the future be viewed as a local concept. As crime continues to grow in our cities and the ability of state governments and criminal-justice systems to protect their citizens diminishes, urban crime may, according to Van Creveld, “develop into low-intensity conflict by coalescing along racial, religious, social, and political lines.” 

As small-scale violence multiplies at home and abroad, state armies will continue to shrink, being gradually replaced by a booming private security business, as in West Africa, and by urban mafias, who may be better equipped than municipal police forces to grant physical protection to local inhabitants.

This is happening in Nigeria as some communities pay taxes to terrorists!  We were warned 30 years ago but we paid no heed!

*Eluemunor is a commentator on public issues