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Rumors of a Political Capture
Accusations of influence peddling in the heart of its presidency raise the ugly scepter of state capture in Nigeria. Read More
Recently Evicted White Farmer Gets His Land Back in Zimbabwe
In what may be the beginning of a major policy shift in land policy from Mugabe’s regime, the Mnangagwa administration has ordered the return of Lesbury Farm in Manicaland to the Smart family, which had occupied it for eighty years. Manicaland is 165 miles from Harare near the border of Mozambique and is the second most populous province in Zimbabwe. In June, the farm was seized by heavily armed riot police from the Smart family and turned over to Trevor Manhanga, a bishop of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Zimbabwe and supporter of then-president Robert Mugabe.
With the restitution to the Smart family, Chris Mutsvangwa—a leader of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association and an ally of Mnangagwa—said, “Land reform is over. Now we want inclusiveness. All citizens who had a claim to land by birthright, we want them to feel they belong and we want them to build new country because the economy is shattered.”
Under the Smart family, Lesbury Farm employed at least one hundred people, providing a livelihood for hundreds more extended family members of those employed. The Smart family was popular with the local people, in part because it paid its workers on time.
The wholesale destruction of the commercial agricultural sector by the expulsion of white farmers gravely damaged the Zimbabwean economy and drove up rural unemployment. If the white farmers are to return to the land, commercial agriculture might quickly recover, with reductions in rural unemployment. Further, the return of farms might reassure potential investors in Zimbabwe that the Mnangagwa government will respect property rights. Such a policy shift would be particularly welcomed by the right wing of United Kingdom Prime Minister Theresa May’s Tory party, which has long supported the white farmers as a “kith and kin” issue.
The June seizure of the farm followed a Mugabe speech in which the president called for all of the remaining white commercial farmers to be expelled from their land. Mugabe had made expropriation of white-owned land without compensation a central platform of his regime. According to Mutsvangwa however, with the economy again in tatters, economic pragmatism is apparently trumping ideology.
Nigeria Security Tracker Weekly Update: December 23 - December 29
Below is a visualization and description of some of the most significant incidents of political violence in Nigeria from December 23 to December 29, 2017. This update also represents violence related to Boko Haram in Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. These incidents will be included in the Nigeria Security Tracker.
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(Last week, December 22: Unknown gunmen killed four in Jema'a, Kaduna)
December 23: Nigerian soldiers killed two Boko Haram insurgents in Kala/Balge, Borno.
December 23: Nigerian soldiers killed one Boko Haram insurgent in Bama, Borno.
December 23: Robbers killed three and abducted four in Rafi, Niger.
December 24: Unknown gunmen killed five in Ado, Benue.
December 24: Sectarian violence led to two deaths in Oturkpo, Benue.
December 24: Sectarian violence led to six deaths in Jema'a, Kaduna.
December 25: Four civilians died in a battle between Nigerian troops and Boko Haram militants in Maiduguri, Borno.
December 25: Boko Haram killed four in Michika, Adamawa.
December 25: Gunmen kidnapped a Rivers monarch in Emuoha, Rivers.
December 26: The Joint Task Force(JTF) killed three robbers in Emuoha, Rivers.
December 27: Four prisoners were killed during a prison break in Ikot Ekpene, Akwa Ibom.
December 28: Two suicide bombers killed themselves and six others in Konduga, Borno. Boko Haram was suspected.
December 28: Sectarian violence led to two deaths in Donga, Taraba.
Lord Lugard Created Nigeria 104 Years Ago
Jack McCaslin is a research associate for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC.
On January 1, 1914, Lord Frederick Lugard, the governor of both the Northern Nigeria Protectorate and the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria, signed a document consolidating the two, thereby creating the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. Forty-six years later in 1960, Nigeria became an independent state. Anniversaries are times for reflection, and given that today, just over 104 years after amalgamation, the country is still grappling with its national identity and a reanimated separatist movement, it is worth reflecting on how exactly Nigeria became Nigeria.
Before Europeans arrived in the territory that is now Nigeria, a number of different civilizations existed whose presence is still felt today. For example, in the north, Islam was predominant. In the nineteenth century, there were two Islamic empires, the Sokoto Caliphate and the Bornu Empire. To the southwest lay numerous Yoruba city-states that generally had in common animist religion and were only sometimes united. To the southwest was an Igbo kingdom, Nri, and a collection of semi-autonomous towns and villages in the Niger River delta. Such regions were linguistically, religiously, and politically distinct.
While other colonial powers, such as the Portuguese, became involved in the region by way of the slave trade as early as the fifteenth century, the British arrived in force only in the eighteenth century. It was not until 1861 that they formally occupied their first Nigerian territory, Lagos, in a bid to protect Christian converts and trading interests, and to further their anti-slavery campaign. In 1884, the British occupied what would later become the Southern Protectorate and the Northern Protectorate piecemeal from 1900 to 1903. By 1903, the British controlled the territory that comprises modern-day Nigeria, but as three separate administrative blocks.
As early as 1898, the British considered combining the then-three protectorates to reduce the administrative burden on the British and allow the rich south to effectively subsidize the much less economically prosperous north. (The Lagos colony was later incorporated into the Southern Nigeria Protectorate for budgetary reasons). This is what Lord Lugard was referring to in his infamous description of how a marriage between the “rich wife of substance and means” (the south) and the “poor husband” (the north) would lead to a happy life for both. Some have suspected that Lugard was also referring to the political supremacy of the north over the south. The name “Nigeria” was coined by the future Lady Lugard in an 1897 London Times article.
With Lord Lugard’s arbitrary conception of Nigeria in mind, one can begin to see the many and varied problems colonialism created in Nigeria, across West Africa, and around the world. Not least among these problems, for Nigeria in particular, was the problem of a unifying national identity. It is no wonder that diverse peoples, forcibly united into single states, sometimes turn to separatism. Contemporary examples range from Biafra (Nigeria), to Ambazonia (Cameroon), to Somaliland (Somalia), and to Azawad (Mali).
G5 Sahel: An African (and French) Solution to an African Problem
The G5 Sahel is made up of the defense forces of Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad. Its goal is to defeat jihadist militants—including affiliates of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda—that take advantage of the porous borders that characterize the region. It launched its first, “symbolic” operation in early November involving troops from Bukina Faso, Mali, and Niger.
The coalition may be an example of that elusive goal: an African solution to an African problem. It was created by five different governments that appear committed to meeting the challenges of military cooperation and coordination. However, the godfather of G5 Sahel is President Emmanuel Macron of France and, at least for the time being, the chief financial angels are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
President Macron is personally committed to G5 Sahel. On December 13, he hosted a summit of the five African heads of state, the prime ministers of Italy and Belgium, and the German chancellor, all of whom were supportive. He successively appealed for funding to the Saudi Arabian crown prince, who has agreed to contribute 100 million euros, and the United Arab Emirates, which has agreed to contribute 30 million euros. The G5 Sahel receives no UN funding because of the Trump administration’s reluctance to channel money through the UN, but the administration has nevertheless pledged $60 million. A donor conference is scheduled for February.
France has a counterterrorism force of about four thousand in the region, while the UN has twelve thousand peacekeepers in Mali. Despite these troop numbers, the jihadist threat to the region is growing. The G5 Sahel governments have pledged to add five thousand of their own troops over the next few months to the fight.
Is this an African or a French initiative, or a bit of both? It appears to be a genuine initiative of the five African governments but with the strong political encouragement and support of the French presidency and strong financial support from the Gulf. France is deeply involved in the Sahel; all five countries were once part of France’s African empire and later of the French Union. For successive French governments, West Africa and the Sahel has been the “near abroad” of France, a region close to Europe with deep political, cultural, and economic ties. For Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, the G5 provides a means of countering jihadi movements that pose a direct threat to their ruling families.
The United States has military ties with the G5 states, but has declined to take a leadership role with respect to standing up the G5 force. It would be in the U.S. national interest to be supportive of the G5 initiative; if the jihadists pose no security threat to the United States, they do threaten U.S. interests in the region. In the absence of U.S. leadership, we should be grateful to the French.
Nigeria Is Not Corrupt, Nigerians Are Corrupt
Ayobami Egunyomi is a Franklin Williams intern for Africa Policy Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC. She received her BA in International Relations from Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. She is a native of Nigeria.
Earlier this month, the governor of Imo state, Rochas Okorocha, appointed his sister as the “Commissioner for Happiness,” a portfolio he just created, presumably to ensure his sister is able to partake in eating “the national cake” (have access to the country’s oil wealth). This move brings that vast oil wealth, as well as the country’s endemic corruption and nepotism to the obvious glare of Nigerians. More recently, the citizens also witnessed the profligacy and waste common in the Nigerian government when the vice presidential quarters allocated seventeen million naira (about forty-seven thousand dollars) to cutlery in the proposed 2018 national budget. This is one of the many inflated and outrageous items in the proposed budget. Amidst all these, about 112 million Nigerians (67 percent of the population) live below the poverty line. Elite profligacy in the face of impoverished citizens underscores the core problem facing Nigeria—corruption.
Like wildfire, corruption has spread through every sector of the country and most Nigerians would unflinchingly agree that corruption begets the plethora of problems the country faces today. The menace of corruption in Nigeria is one that different government administrations have publicly recognized and tried to tackle against. The past military regimes of Nigeria claimed to overthrow the civilian government in order to curb corruption, though these governments were seen as more corrupt than the civilian governments that succeeded it. In fact, the last military head of state, General Sani Abacha, was so corrupt that even nineteen years after his death, Nigeria is still recovering millions of dollars of his loot from Swiss banks. The anti-corruption rhetoric continues to this day under the current democratic system of government in Nigeria. Under his administration, President Olusegun Obasanjo established the Economic Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to crackdown on corrupt politicians. Most recently, Nigeria elected its current president, Muhammadu Buhari, largely based on his promise to tackle corruption.
Unfortunately, these administrations were unable to eradicate, or even significantly curb, corruption. Consequently, the average Nigerian has come to expect that bribery and nepotism will trump meritocracy, and so they participate in it to preserve their own self-interest. Yet, when it comes to who is to blame for corruption, they still believe that they are blameless and that the only corrupt ones are the people in charge. To alleviate the high level of corruption in the country, the first step is for Nigerians to realize that no political elite, government institution, or president can effectively curb corruption alone unless the average Nigerian participates. In the words of a Nigerian friend of mine: "Nigeria is not corrupt, Nigerians are corrupt." This means that dislodging corruption’s hold over Nigeria starts with dislodging its hold on the Nigerian mentality, forcing people to revolt against the status quo and to demand better of themselves first and others second. Changes to law and institutions will come later, but it starts with people. Unless Nigerians choose to stop participating in and enabling corruption, the country will not move forward.
